How to Balance Your Needs and Desires Post Career

Henry’s Lake – 2022

Idaho

Elements of a Balanced and Fulfilled Life

It is a common life experience that sometimes you have to forgo satisfying a desire in order to commit time, effort and perhaps financial resources to fulfill a necessity.

This is more frequent during your earlier years when life’s responsibilities required such choices. It often meant that wants or desires that you considered non-essential were put off. Perhaps they were never fulfilled, but hopefully, simply deferred and remembered in the well of your memory.

The desire to fulfill a myriad of responsibilities whether at home, work or community, springs forth from the nature of your character. Your cumulative experience and satisfaction derived from meeting your responsibilities further strengthens and develops it. Your focus on various achievements becomes a way of life.

Visions of Change

As you begin to envision life after the end of your career, your perspective about life will evolve. You may find yourself remembering desires deferred and re-evaluating your wish to fulfill them and perhaps, new ones.

At that time, it may seem unusual to shift your focus more toward those desires. After a lifetime of deferring them in order to fulfill many responsibilities, you are probably going to place them in a different perspective as you have the ability to do so.

Choices and Balance

One of the hallmarks of life after transitioning from your career is the significant decrease in what is asked of you by others. This is accompanied by your increased ability to choose what and how to use your time and energy.

In order to optimize the result of your choices, it is critical for you to recognize the importance of creating balance in your new life. To discern the difference between your needs and desires. Each contributes a measure of satisfaction on your path to renewal and fulfillment.

The pursuit of interests long deferred are really nice to experience. It is wholesome to have fun and feel the sense of rewards you have earned. Yet, they are not essential in the way that your needs are. It is also important to recognize that those types of activities are not likely to fulfill your needs the way that your career did. 

Why is That?

Your career provides you a major means to fulfill your purpose in life. When your career ends, your purpose in life does not. It has a natural, persistent way of enduring that yearns for fulfillment. It will serve you well to recognize this and discover new ways to satisfy it.

In order to experience this after the transition from your career, it is very beneficial to find a way to apply the skills, knowledge and wisdom that you developed in the course of your career. This is an important part of creating a fulfilling lifestyle.

Physicians who experience an optimal sense of renewal and fulfillment post career are usually those who have achieved a wholesome life balance between fun and nourishing their lives’ purpose.

Another important benefit of this practical perspective is that it fosters the ongoing actualization of your potential in this new season of life.

The Point of the Matter

The point of seeking clarity about what is or is not a necessity, is that it provides you a means to realize optimally the purpose of your career transition. Fundamentally, it is the path to create a new phase of your life that is characterized by renewal and fulfillment. A  critical feature of your future lifestyle is that it provides you the means to continue to feel the satisfaction you experienced throughout your career while simultaneously having lots of fun.

You are world’s expert on this matter. You can discern, choose and celebrate!

Date Updated: August 23, 2024

PS: Would you like to learn more about how to transition from your practice? I would like to assist you. I provide practice transaction services that are tailored to your specific needs. Click here to request an introductory conversation.

If you would like to learn about another way that I can guide you, check out this brief video that describes my unique online course: 

 The Practice Transition Course for Physicians. _TM