Tag: goals

Epic Pursuits Before and During Retirement

In a previous post I explored happiness and fulfillment in retirement drawing on the work of Bec Wilson, creator of the Epic Retirement Flagship Course and the author of the book, How to have an Epic Retirement.  In that post, I shared some of Bec’s suggestions concerning “Epic Pursuits” that could enable us to achieve an “engaged, curious and happy life”.  In her Workbook accompanying the course, she suggests that epic pursuits are “things you really enjoy doing, and that you want to deepen your knowledge of and get better at”- a source of joy, learning and contentment.  The Workbook helps us explore our achievements, passions, purpose, interests, and values as a basis for deciding what epic activities to pursue in retirement.

I retired as a Professor of Management in 2017 and ceased management consulting work in 2024, following the serious illness of my consulting colleague who was my co-facilitator for the previous 16 years – we had run hundreds of workshops together.  In reflecting on my own life story to date, I began to identify what epic pursuits I have undertaken both before and during my retirement:

  1. Research and writing
  2. Tennis and pickleball
  3. Social networking
  4. Travel overseas

Research and Writing

I have developed the art of writing over many years and followed the exhortation of one of my professors: “if you want to learn to write – write, write, write”.  So my writing has included theses, articles, book chapters, conference papers, blogs, e-books and training courses.   Hence my non-fiction writing has included the following:

  • Master’s research project and doctoral thesis (100,000 words) – doctorate awarded in 1996
  • Multiple published book chapters and articles on action earning and action research published in academic journals (one of my co-authored academic articles won an Award for Excellence from The Learning Organisation: An International Journal)
  • Co-author/editor of two books on action learning and action research
  • Chief editor and occasional author for a journal on action learning and action research
  • 4 blogs covering internet/social media marketing
  • Current blog, grow mindfulness.com, which has 791 posts, 977 moderated comments and a total word count in excess of 550,000 words
  • Created 15 poems incorporated in my mindfulness blog
  • Broad based articles published on Squidoo (over 100 before it was terminated), HubPages, ArticleDirectory.com and Wizzley.com, a writer’s community (also co-creator of this social media site with colleagues in Germany and the US)
  • Creator of a 6-month, online course on Social Media Marketing (comprising 24 PDFs)
  • Supervisor of Master’s and Doctoral students including recommended content and format edits; examiner of Doctoral thesis for 12 Universities, including 3 overseas (Britain, South Africa and New Zealand)
  • Developed short e-books on Affiliate Marketing and The Inner Game of Tennis.

Recently I also published an Amazon Kindle e-book, Writing for Wellness: A Pathway for Chronic Illness. 

My research and writing goals for my retirement are:
  • Complete 5 more Kindle e-books drawing on my Grow Mindfulness blog and my other publications
  • Research and write 2 X 1,000+ word articles per month for my Grow Mindfulness blog which covers topics such as mindfulness practices, chronic illness, leadership, management, health and happiness

Tennis and Pickleball

I have played tennis for more than 65 years but owing to a number of chronic conditions I have not participated in my weekly social tennis since February 2025.  Tennis was very much a part of my life since I was 9 years old.  I played at primary and secondary school, in the seminary in Melbourne, competitively at A grade and Pennant levels and socially after this.  Tennis gave me a sense of competence, motivation for maintaining my fitness and a source of relaxation.  I have written a poem about my gratitude for experiencing the joy of tennis.

However, I am currently experiencing the following chronic illnesses that impact my ability to play tennis (even socially at night):

  • arthritis in the middle finger of my right hand (I am right-handed)
  • osteopathy affecting my hips and other parts of my body
  • multi-level spinal degeneration (likely impacted by my MCAS chronic condition)
  • exercise asthma.

I decided to explore pickleball as an alternative to tennis and found that I am able to play this sport to an intermediate level.  I recently wrote about my joy in playing this game in a blog post and a poem titled, For the Love of Pickleball.  I have avoided competitive pickleball sessions and focused on social games to protect my fragile body. 

I am thoroughly enjoying the social aspects of pickleball and experimenting with new shots and ways to improve each time I play – a great source of learning! One clear advantage is that I can build on the skills and court craft I acquired through my many years of playing tennis – more than 10,000 sets of tennis.  I have played tennis on multiple surfaces – grass, concrete, bitumen, artificial grass, ant bed, clay and flexipave.  I have enjoyed playing social tennis locally as well as overseas in Auckland, Boroughbridge (Yorkshire, UK), Port Moresby and Lake Annecy (France).

My pickleball and exercise goals:
  • Continue to play social pickleball weekly
  • Undertake daily exercises provided by an exercise physiologist for my chronic conditions
  • Resume regular Tai Chi activity (both as a mindfulness practice and source of health benefits).

Social networking

I joined a social network for writers-with chronic-illness about two years ago.  The group, Creative Meetups, has a Zoom meeting each month which is currently facilitated by Jennifer Crystal, author of One Tick Stopped the Clock and a writing-to-heal coach.  The online sessions involve a stimulus piece provided by Jennifer along with time to write to the relevant theme and an opportunity to share our writing whatever form that takes.  I have been very inspired by this social connection and the creative writing of others, some of whom have very serious chronic illnesses.

The inspiration I have received from this group sharing has enabled me to write a series of poems about the stimulus topics and incorporate them in a relevant blog post.  This has proven to be an excellent stimulus to my own creative writing.  On a health front, I find that I really enjoy writing and that my pulse rate drops when I am in the process of creating a post or poem – I tend to “be-in-the-zone”.

My social networking goals are:
  • Continue to participate in the monthly, online meetings of the writers-with-chronic-illness
  • Use these meetings as a continuous source of inspiration
  • Continue to create poems stimulated by the shared stories and writing of the Creative Meetup group
  • Explore volunteering particularly visiting hospital-bound war veterans.

Travel Overseas

When I reflect on my achievements in this area, both domestically and internationally, I can feel a strong sense of gratitude for the opportunities I have had and also for the health and fitness that enabled me to undertake the relevant travel.  I have focused on my overseas travel in this post.

The best way to recall and record this travel is to categorise the travel by year:

  • 1994 – my wife and I and our two boys (aged 3 and 6) travelled to England for the World Congress on Action learning and Action Research (I was President, at the time, of the ALARA Association that sponsored and organised the Congress).  We were able to stay in Yorkshire and Bath (the location of the Congress).  We also spent a week at Lake Annecy in Northern France  with our Yorkshire-based in-laws.
  • 1995 – I travelled to England by myself to undertake research as part of a validation process for my doctoral thesis.  This research trip enabled me to visit action learning/action research experts in London, Lancaster, Nottingham, Bristol, and Brighton.  At the time, my adult son was on a working holiday at a restaurant in the Lakes District and one of my daughters was working as a child carer in a castle in Lockerbie, Scotland.  We were then able to travel together by train to Edinburgh, through snow-covered terrain.
  • 1997 – I travelled to Cartagena, Colombia, via Singapore, Los Angelos, Miami, and Bogota (a 36 hour trip).  I was attending a World Congress on action learning and action research as President of the ALARA Association (joint sponsor).  I had participated as a member of the international Planning Committee and attended the Congress as Convenor of the Organisational Development Stream and a member of the Expert Panel session.  We were overwhelmed by the 1,800 participants from 61 countries who turned up for the event (despite only 500 people registering in advance).
  • 1998 – three trips to Singapore to run workshops on action learning in Port Moresby for the International Management Centers (UK).
  • 2014 – my wife and I travelled in November/December via Hong Kong to Frankfurt, Bingen (Germany,  where we spent a week in a friend’s unit), Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome.   We were able to spend 7 nights in each location and spent New Year’s Day in Rome (-4 Degrees Centigrade, turning a fountain to ice). 
  • 2017/2018 – my wife and I travelled in December/January via Hong Kong to Milan, Lake Como, Turin, Santa Margherita, Bologna, and Venice (New Year’s Day there).

My wife and I had planned to travel to Paris and Northern Italy again for my 80th birthday (2026).  However, I have reluctantly acknowledged that I have reached a fragile stage in relation to overseas travel, given my osteoporosis and multi-level spinal degeneration.  I can no longer sit or lie down for extended periods, even in business class plane travel. This means that I will have to travel “closer to home”.  This does not preclude my wife from travelling overseas, either by herself or with a companion.  I will have to concentrate on domestic travel and use virtual travel to enable me to gratuitously experience travelling overseas.

My travel goals are:
  • Expand my digital photo album to incorporate photos and videos of my previous overseas travel (to enable virtual travel)
  • Visit overseas sites virtually via the drone photography that is readily available on the Internet
  • Write a blog post recording domestic travel undertaken before and during retirement
  • Develop domestic travel goals for the next five years.

Reflection

Bec identifies 5 stages of retirement planning – “fragility” being one of them.  However, this may be a stage in relation to one or more epic pursuits – it may not extend to all our activities.  For example, I am still able to play pickleball but I cannot travel overseas.  I think one of the challenges is to learn to adapt retirement planning progressively as we age and not let fragility in one area contaminate our thinking about other areas of activity or epic pursuits.

The core challenge of aging and retirement is to make the most of our “spare time” in retirement, the surplus in our life.  As Bec notes, if we do not actively plan our retirement, we can be overwhelmed by boredom and negatively impact our longevity.  It is much better to plan for happiness and fulfillment in retirement.  If we grow in mindfulness through a range of mindfulness practices we can enhance our physical and mental health, develop constructive routines and find creative ways to grow and contribute.

By recalling and recording my epic pursuits before and during retirement, I have become more aware of the opportunities I have had in my life and feel a strong sense of gratitude for what I have been able to achieve.

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Image by Ahmet Yüksek from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Being in the Zone Through Mindfulness

George Mumford, Mindfulness and Performance Expert, recently presented during the Embodiment@Work online conference coordinated by the mindful leader organisation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to encouraging and supporting mindfulness and compassion in the workplace. George works with elite sports teams and individual elite athletes, business leaders and academics to help them to achieve their very best. He is the author of The Mindful Athlete: The Secrets to Pure Performance.

Flow requires integration of body, mind and emotion

George argues that athletes, leaders and academics only achieve flow when they have achieved integration of their body, mind and emotions. What often stops people achieving their potential is what goes on in their minds which, in turn, negatively impacts their emotions. He gave the example of a young elite basketballer who can achieve a 90% success rate for three-points shots in practice, yet in a game situation her success rate drops to 33%.

We have previously discussed why it is so hard to serve out a match in tennis and how even top tennis players (men and women) often have difficulty with this feature of playing tennis. In both these examples, it is what goes on inside someone’s head that makes the difference – a difference in mindset from a positive outlook to negative anticipation.

Once people can achieve an alignment of body, mind and emotions they are open to the insight, wisdom and high performance that epitomises “being in the zone”. George argues that you can’t wish yourself there, but you can develop mindfulness so that the chances of being in the zone are increased. He maintains that it requires being present in the moment and being in control of your mind and emotions – traits that develop through mindfulness practice.

Once you are in the zone, all that is required is to let it happen. You are typically not in control – things happen spontaneously. You make the right choices, execute perfectly and achieve success. I recall being in the zone on one occasion when playing tennis against a a very good player – everything I attempted worked, stroke play was effortless and choices of shot and strategy were made without conscious intervention. At the time, I said to myself, “Just enjoy the moment while it lasts”. It lasted two sets – after which time my opponent gave up, not having won a game.

George reinforces the fact that there exists a space between stimulus and response and we can learn to use that space to make conscious choices rather than act out habituated, reactive behaviour. This form of self-regulation is achieved through sustained mindfulness practice.

Developing a mindfulness mindset

George contends that is not enough to sit, be still and maintain silence. Mindfulness must become a way of life – a sustained mindset. This can be achieved, in part, by adopting a variety of mindfulness practices in different settings as illustrated in the pausing approach described earlier or making conscious efforts to incorporate practices such as mindful walking, intention forming, open awareness or mindful eating.

George suggests that these regular practices help to develop a mindfulness mindset, but they are insufficient of themselves. He argues that we need to attempt to be fully conscious in the moment by asking ourselves a set of questions as we engage in any activity:

  • What is going on for me bodily, in my mind and with my emotions?
  • How aligned are my words and actions with my goal, my overall purpose and who I want to be?
  • Have I got the right balance of energy and effort, or am I over-exerting myself and being so energetic that it is counter-productive?
  • Do I have a firm belief in my ability to achieve the outcome I am seeking?
  • Am I distracted by negative emotions (fear, anxiety) or the inability to concentrate because of a lack of focus in the situation?

Performance growth through discomfort and mistakes

Being in the zone is more likely to occur when we are in a learning mode – open to alternative ways of doing things and to the vulnerability that comes with making mistakes. Jacob Ham argues that to overcome fear and anxiety in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, we need to develop a “learning brain” and to quiet our “survival brain”.

George suggests that there is no growth without mistakes – we have to try out innovative ways of doing things but this requires being “comfortable with discomfort” and being ready to be self-forgiving for our mistakes (which are a part of every sport or leadership role). It also entails a readiness to be vulnerable and a willingness to learn from the mistakes we make and adapt to new situations we encounter.

As we grow in mindfulness through various forms of meditation, different mindfulness practices and conscious questioning and curiosity about our mind in the present moment, we can achieve “innovative action” and approach the unique reward of being in the zone (whatever our endeavour).

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Image by Erich Westendarp from Pixabay 

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Randy Pausch on Resilience

Randy Pausch in his last lecture and in his book, The Last Lecture, had a lot to say about resilience.  His lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, designed to leave a life skills legacy for his children, focused on the realisation of childhood dreams.  Randy maintained that nothing should stop you from realising your childhood dreams and he illustrated this from his own life history.

He urged people to “never give up”.  He had wanted to go to Brown University, but they would not accept his application until he hounded them so much that they finally let him in.  His mentor, Andy van Dam, then urged Randy to do a PhD even though he himself wanted to get a job.  When Randy applied to Carnegie Mellon University to do a PhD, he was able to lodge his application with a letter of referral from his mentor.  However, he was still refused entry.

After exploring other options, he went back to his mentor who made a personal call to a colleague at Carnegie Mellon and arranged for Randy to be interviewed – which led to his admission to the PhD Program at the University.  Randy conceded that the advice to do a PhD was one of the best bits of advice he received – it enabled him to pursue his passion for “building virtual worlds”.

I had initially refused to undertake a PhD myself when I was working at Griffith University but my mentor, Professor Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, encouraged me with the comment that, “You have a PhD inside you, if you don’t get it out, you will suffer for it”.  This also proved to be sound advice.  I did not have trouble with admission, being on the staff of the University, but I had great difficulty agreeing a focal topic and obtaining a supervisor.  I persisted for 18 months, with ongoing encouragement from my mentor, and then enrolled and received my PhD six years later.  The lesson, once again, was persistence pays and resilience enables you to overcome obstacles and brick walls to achieve your goals.

Brick walls and how to deal with them

Randy prided himself in his ability to break through “brick walls” – seemingly impregnable roadblocks – in his professional and academic life:

The brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it badly enough.  They’re there to stop other people.

Randy stressed the importance of having specific dreams to pursue in life.  However, he had many obstacles along the way when pursuing his own childhood dreams:

  • He wanted to experience weightlessness but was initially refused permission by NASA to join his competition-winning students to experience this sensation.  So he talked NASA into allowing him to be a reporter to accompany his students and provide positive publicity for NASA.
  • As discussed above, his persistence got him into Brown University after an intiail knockback and resilience enabled him to pursue a PhD through Carnegie Mellon University
  • He also wanted to be a Disney Imagineer and went around the formal application process (which knocked him back), by arranging lunch with a key player in Disney who enabled him to take a sabbatical with Disney Imagineering   He had initially to bypass his Dean to obtain permission to pursue what was considered a crazy idea.
  • On entry to Disney, he found that he was not accepted at first by the designers who queried what useful skills an academic could have.  However, he worked very hard at gaining acceptance and used his academic skills to demonstrate how the process for a virtual ride could be made more efficient – this gained credibility and acceptance.  He was eventually offered a fulltime job at Disney Imagineering but negotiated a one day-a- week contract as a consultant instead, so that he could continue to teach at the University.  As Randy commented, “If you can find your footing between two cultures, sometimes you can have the best of both worlds”.
  • As a child he wanted to be Captain Kirk from Star Wars but this proved to be unrealistic.  What he did achieve through creativity, persistence and hard work, was a meeting from William Shatner (Kirk in the movie) who visited Randy’s virtual reality lab to see what technology, foreshadowed on Star Wars, had been realised in practice.  Despite scoffing from his colleagues about his passion for the movie, Randy was able to prove that this passion stood him in good stead during his career.

Throughout his life and career, Randy demonstrated time and again the true nature of resilience – the ability to bounce back quickly from setbacks and the willingness to persist over time with a goal despite roadblocks and “brick walls”.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, we can strengthen our resilience and persistence in pursuit of our goals.  We will find ways around, over or through “brick walls” to enable us to achieve our meaningful life and career goals.  Mindfulness helps us to find creative ways to achieve our goals despite setbacks and blockages.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of dimitrisvetsikas1969 on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.