TM4T Lifestyle 2.3 - Life Planning
This section was previously called 'Planning for your Pension'
This tongue-in-cheek heading describes a valuable technique: imagine that your teaching career is over, and that you are ready to start the next phase of your life. Looking back, what is it that you want to have achieved in school? What is it that you need to have completed in your teaching life? What do you want to be remembered for?
This line of thought should help you to identify your longer-term career goals. The achievement of these goals will be determined not just by life-altering switches in direction - even the smallest action and decision in our daily grind can also have long-term consequences. It's therefore important to incorporate this bigger perspective into our everyday life; here are some ways in which you can do this:
Don't be too quick to pursue short-term benefits from your efforts. We all tend to prefer quick results, but sometimes we might achieve far more if we decided to dedicate years, instead of months, to something. Projects like this - projects which might sustain our interest for a decade or a lifetime - are by definition worth searching out.
Be prepared to expand your ideas of success and achievement. These are often inherited unbidden and unrecognised from our cultural background and family, and they can limit our options. If we reassess what success really means to us, and include all the things which make us feel fulfilled, inspired and alive, we gain greater adaptability, greater freedom in how we think and act, and make it that more likely that we realise our goals.
Be prepared to contemplate that retirement speech, and be prepared to contemplate the reality of physical death. If you knew that you only had months to live, what would you do? What would you seek to achieve? And what's stopping you doing those things now? How do your existing priorities compare with those things?
When good teachers reach the end of their career, they invariably leave a legacy behind. At the risk of stating the obvious: you cannot decide what legacy you leave when you reach the end of your career - it will be based on the decision and actions you take today - now - and on a thousand other todays. So: the time is now; build that legacy.
(adapted from, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware, 2012)
Regardless of what you achieve in life, regardless how fulfilling your teaching career turns out to be, you may have regrets. It may help, though, to know what to avoid. There is no indication that teachers' regrets differ from those of other professions, so here is a sneak preview of what to avoid: a glimpse inside the envelope of likely regrets. These observations are based on the experiences of Bonnie Ware.
The most common regret is that one's life has been lived to meet the expectations of others, instead of being lived for oneself. This, of course, takes us to the core of time management - how you decide to spend your time. To avoid regret, you should choose to spend your time in a way that pursues your own dreams. It is, of course, very easy to let the 4Ps - parents, peers, partners, professionals - dictate your agenda. To avoid this, you should periodically review exactly what you want from your teaching career, and indeed whether teaching - and the obligations it imposes - will enable you to achieve what you want in life. Remember that many people feel, as they near the end of their lives, that they had not achieved what they had hoped, and that this was due to the choices they had made, and how they had spent their time.
Considering that the most common regret implied lack of achievement, you might expect that the next most common regret might be 'I wish I had worked harder'. In fact, the opposite is true. It is extremely common to regret spending too much time on work which yields too little personal (this means non-financial) reward. In planning your time, you should be prepared to sacrifice some work aspirations in order to enjoy other aspects of your life. This of course, marries perfectly with the advice given elsewhere on this website to broaden your definition of success and achievement.
The other common regrets involve not expressing emotions, not staying in touch with friends, and simply allowing happiness. This final insight - which appears to come to many people late in life - strikes a wonderful chord with TM4T principles. Happiness does not always come by good fortune: happiness is a choice. In teaching, as in life, there are choices in everything, and there are always decisions to be made. Happiness is one of those options.