The 8 Key Elements That Makeup An Authentic Life

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There are a few times in one’s life when you have the oppor­tu­nity (either vol­un­tary or not) to sit back and re-examine your life. To look at where you have been, where you are now, and where you want your life to take you over the next decade or two.

Major lifestyle tran­si­tions, like decid­ing in your twen­ties to leave the lifestyle of being an employee behind in order to take on the more flex­i­ble lifestyle of a cre­ative nomad, is one such time. But not every­one decides to make this type of transition.

Mid-life, how­ever, is gen­er­ally a time for peo­ple to begin re-examining their life. To explore whether they are doing what they are doing because they want to — because it brings them great joy, sat­is­fac­tion and ful­fill­ment. Or if they are doing what they are doing because it’s what they have always done. Unfor­tu­nately, the recent global eco­nomic tum­bling act has put many peo­ple at mid-life into a posi­tion where they have no choice but to reeval­u­ate their lives and reori­ent their careers.

So, where do you begin this eval­u­a­tion? And how do you know you are get­ting rea­son­able infor­ma­tion? After all, at least what you have always done is famil­iar and com­fort­able, even if it’s not exciting.

Mar­cia Bench, a Career and Retire­ment Coach, has devel­oped an Authen­tic Retire­ment Model that is really more like an Authen­tic Lifestyle Model because it really does help you work through dif­fi­cult life tran­si­tion decisions.

The Authen­tic Lifestyle Model con­sists of explor­ing eight key ele­ments of one’s life that will help you tran­si­tion suc­cess­fully into an Authen­tic New Lifestyle.

These eight key ele­ments include:

• find­ing your life pur­pose — a life with­out resistance
• your val­ues
• your moti­va­tors and interests
• your tal­ents and skills
• your life and work experiences
• your desired activities
• your lifestyle and envi­ron­ment, and
• your finan­cial factors.

Over the next cou­ple of weeks, I will explore each of these key ele­ments and how they impact your life tran­si­tion deci­sions. Coach­ing ques­tions aimed at draw­ing answers from both your logic and your intu­ition will be pro­vided for each of these key elements.