"How do you plan for retirement, beyond making sure you have enough money" someone asked me the other day. "All kinds of ways" was my initial response. Results from Statistics Canada surveys have shown that whatever your approach to retirement (like me considering 'non-retirement'; like some of my clients engaging 'un-retirement'; like many others considering traditional 'life is now one long weekend') you will be more likely to feel satisfied with your experience if you have done some advance planning.

So as I was on my recent short vacation at my beloved Oceanstone Inn near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia (www.oceanstone.ns.ca for those of you looking for Paradise on the North Atlantic) I found myself reflecting a lot on this notion of planning.

And I realized that for most people, planning only occurs at very low levels of thinking: where will I live? where will I travel to? what will I do with myself? how will I fill my days? how will I make ends meet? Few of us actively and mindfully cast our thinking higher to explore our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. And yet, in my experience of my own life and that of hundreds upon hundreds of clients over the years, I know that life only really starts to becoming interesting and exciting when we begin to consider those higher levels of thinking. Who am I in this world? What makes me tick? What brings me joy? If I were to think of my life as a fairy tale, which character am I being? In what ways do my beliefs about myself and the world limit what I hold as possible? What are my beliefs anyhow ...and what are the ones that I cling to because they were my parent's or my teacher's and they feel like burden to me?

And to go even higher ...who, even at this late stage of my life, could I become if I decided to let go of my hold on 'reality' being a certain way? who can I get to be if give myself permission to consider things that are totally new to me and I don't allow my fear of the unknown to keep me small and apparently safe?

And then even higher ...what brings meaning to my life such that if it weren't present I might just choose to check out? is there a sense of greater purpose about me and why I'm on this earth that I've been ignoring for some time that perhaps I need to begin to pay attention to and flesh out? what constitutes, deep inside of me, a feeling of being deeply connected to something outside myself (for many that will outside oneself will be thought of God, the Creator, humanity, etc.).

It is not unusual for people to feel a little foolish and vulnerable to even consider thinking about these higher levels of thinking. For most of us, they are the realm of priests, philosophers and mystics. And yet, they are the types of thinking that actually have the potential to revolutionize our life and what we hold as possible for ourselves.

So as I wandered the beaches of Oceanstone it became clearer to me that there is lots of evidence that planning your retirement at low levels of thinking will absolutely make a difference for you in terms of the quality of your experience of retirement. But if you are one of those people who is holding out for the second half of your life being way better, way more exciting and gratifying than the first half has been, it also became clear to me that raising your thinking to those higher levels is where the real planning must go on.

Easy for me to say, right. Absolutely. And only easy for me to say because I have chosen to invest myself in discovering how to raise my thinking to those higher levels. You can too, easily and inexpensively if you choose to move beyond the habituated way that you now live, if you choose to invest in books, CDs and workshops that focus on the inner landscape instead of continuing to spend your money on the latest fashions, new hairdo's, trips to exotic destinations that don't satisfy or gratify. In this the AA folks got it absolutely right ...if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you've always got!

So in planning your retirement you have choice like you have in everything else. Keep your thinking low level and you'll be guaranteed to have a retirement pretty much that is an extension of the life you've lived to date. Invest in getting outside the box of your own thinking and create a future that you quite possibly can't even anticipate at this stage but that some niggling little part of you senses is there. One good place to start getting outside the box of your own thinking is to visit my website www.ouicoach.com and read some of the free articles or go to my extensive Links section and check out some of the great service providers gathered there. I especially encourage you to explore those folks who have learned to work with a WEL-Systems perspective in the services they offer. As someone who has done a lot of personal growth and development work, for me, this is the easiest, most elegant, supportive and most expansive approach to becoming more that I've ever found. I wonder what you'll choose for yourself ????