Don t take this as criticism if you choose to re-e…

Transcript

If you retired, then decided to re-enter the workforce, even though you didn't financially need to, don't take what I'm about to share as criticism. Everybody has a different experience and everybody has to do things their own way. I chose not to re-enter the workforce, but it may be the right decision for a lot of people. When I hear someone say, I re-entered the workforce after retiring and I'm happy and I love it, it reminds me of the feeling I would get right after I'd scratch poison ivy. So the poison ivy's itching, I'd give it a light scratch and I'd be like, oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's the, that's the stuff. There it is. But then it would, you know, start burning and then I would have, you know, issues from scratching. I feel like, not everyone, but if I would have gone to the workforce, I would have had a lot of issues. I would have had a lot of issues. But if I would have gone back to work in those first 18 months, it would have felt like scratching poison ivy in the short term. There would have been this itch to get back to work. I would have given it a little bit of a scratch and it would have felt great. And of course, over our lives, the itching and the relief is a much longer period than with a little bit of poison ivy. But what I chose to do instead was to not scratch the poison ivy, not enjoy that sensation. You get after scratching it. And eventually I realized the poison ivy was the problem. And that if I could just not scratch it for a little bit, the itching would go away. And I'll share just sort of a sub story on poison ivy. I learned from some books that have nothing to do with poison ivy, that you can sort of convince your mind that you're experiencing something different than what you're actually experiencing. And I tried it on poison ivy. So I get poison ivy. I get it badly. Probably like a lot of people. Most people get it badly. If I, you know, touch poison ivy or I walk near poison ivy or someone says poison ivy in the same room as I am, I'll get it. And usually all over my face because I'm working outside, I'm wiping off sweat, scratching, whatever. And my face just, it itches. Everybody who's had poison ivy knows that feeling. You know, once you scratch it, it just itches more and it itches more. And the scratching feels good, but it's also, it's also delaying the healing of the poison ivy. And I just learned to use it. So I learned this technique where you convince your brain that you're not feeling this, you're feeling that so I would convince my brain that I wasn't feeling the sensation of itching. I was feeling the sensation of pressure, just light pressure. And pretty soon, every time it would go through one of those waves of itching, if you've ever had poison ivy, you know what that's like. I would say, well, I can feel that pressure on my eyes and on my face. That's weird. And. And I wouldn't feel the compulsion to scratch it because it was pressure, not itching. And it takes a lot of practice to do this. But once you do it, it's pretty weird. And so I wouldn't scratch because I didn't feel the itch. I felt pressure. And then the wave would pass because that's how, at least for me, that's how poison ivy is. If you don't scratch it for like 5-10 minutes, it stops itching for a while. And then it'll come back and then you have to avoid scratching it again. But that's what I did with retirement. Instead of unretiring, scratching the itch, I just did things, techniques, to keep myself from succumbing to the desire to unretire. And then the wave would pass. And pretty soon, the poison ivy had healed. Or the desire to go back to work had healed. Because what was making me want to go back to work wasn't what I thought it was. It was a bunch of underlying stuff that I had to deal with. I told myself in my retirement, I'm not going back to work until I understand why I want to go back to work. And it's a series of whys. So the first why was, why do you want to go back to work? Well, I need to be busy. Okay, why do you need to be busy? Well, because I get bored. Okay, well, why are you bored? Why can't you just sit with your thoughts and enjoy this time? Well, because my thoughts start racing. I start feeling anxiety. Okay, why do your thoughts start racing? And why do you feel anxiety? Well, because I, you know, I, and then you can just why yourself all the way down to, oh, wow, I really don't want to go back to work. I'm just trying to address some other issue. So what I did was I said, I'm not going back to work until I understand what it is that's driving me to go back to work.