How to Apply the Power of Courage in Your Journey to a Better Retirement Life

Let’s begin by looking at what courage is? It is the quality of mental and moral strength to resist opposition, danger, or hardship. It gives you the momentum to chase after things that are most important and essential to you. Recognising and starting to build the courage towards a better retirement life may be a fundamental decision that may change your life forever. Courage strengthens you to start to take some bigger risks and goals. This is because, you begin to put some fears away and bravery starts to set in. This allows you to learn to self-direct your energy and to accept rewards and punishment graciously. A courageous individual will frequently feel motivated to accept blame and responsibility while critiquing his or her actions and utilising what was learnt from the situation to move forward.

That kind of individual will remain composed even when plans fail. For example, if such individual loses his or her savings, the next day the individual will be focused on taking corrective action or finding something else to occupy his or her time and feel just as happy about joining a new adventure to better his or her future.

To be courageous requires that you to learn how to trust yourself. When you trust yourself, you are able to attract the trust of others as well. Regrettably, we live in a world where trust is difficult to find, yet when you trust yourself, you can’t blame other people when anything goes wrong.

Bettering your life includes trusting your goals, decisions and expectations. There are many options you can consider for your retirement preparedness, nobody else understands better than you, the kind of life style you would like to live and why. There is power within you that can keep you focused towards the aspects that matter to yourself if you have a strong and consistent reason to achieve your retirement goals. You can be empowered, refocused or guided to look at your retirement goals and actions better.  You may not meet you goals sometimes but are you willing to accept such changes to divert you from your goals?

Maybe you set a goal to be saving Shs.100,000 or US$ 30 per month, but because your child fell sick, you could not sustain the saving for 12 months. Courage impresses upon you to look at the situation more positively, reflecting that the ability to save consistently empowered you to have the discipline to only use what you had saved for retirement to treat your child instead of borrowing. This kind of view enables you to easily bounce back with more energy either to double the saving or to supplement your saving with any other sources to remain focused on your retirement goal.

It is the ability to hang on and remain committed to your goal that most times minimises comments like these “If I had maintained the courage to save and invest for retirement earlier in my work life, I would be better than I am today” or “I wish I had sustained the plan of what I would be doing in retirement.” Courage to this kind of individual(s) means to learn to accept the good within the bad (there are many things you enjoyed and that you are grateful for) and to learn how to use the knowledge and experience to better your life or to help others to avoid such a situation. To the energetic and still working individual(s), the best time to have the courage to save and invest for retirement was when you received your first salary, the next best time is now.

In conclusion, Tony Robbins avers that “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”  You need the courage to change your saving and investing practices and to do it with vigour, determination and consistency. You may read the following articles to be inspired further.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/retirement/how-to-save-for-retirement/

Charles Barugahare

Co-Founder Retirement Life Hub