Your Path to Joy: Embracing Purpose and Delight in Your Encore Years (Part 1)

(1 of 9 in the Path of Joy Series) As you navigate through the various stages of your life, reaching your encore years prompts you to reflect deeply on what brings you joy and fulfillment. The quest for a life rich in happiness and purpose becomes more poignant as you consider the legacy you want to leave and the personal satisfaction you seek. This exploration is about reminiscing over past…

Read More ...

Encore! Encore! Celebrating a New Beginning After Retirement …

After 59+ years, you find yourself at a crossroads. It’s a time brimming with potential, usually called “retirement.” I invite you to see this not as a retirement but as your “encore years.” The term is rich with promise and vitality and offers a perspective shift that can redefine how you approach this extraordinary chapter of your life.   Why Encore and Not Retirement? Your encore years are not a…

Read More ...

45 Life Lessons

This post is a little detour from my usual, but it’s fun and thought provoking, so I wanted to share … As women in our encore years, we’ve done a lot and seen a lot. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot. The following list, written by Regina Brett, a 67-year-old bestselling author and newspaper columnist, is insightful and full of good advice. She wrote this list when she was…

Read More ...

Finding Your Path to Joy and Happiness: A Personal Journey

Stepping into your encore years, you’re at a remarkable life stage. You have experiences, wisdom, and maybe a few unanswered questions about what’s next and what brings true fulfillment. Understanding the difference between joy and happiness can be crucial to your journey and help answer those questions. Let’s explore these concepts and see how they fit into your life.   Understanding Happiness – Your External Compass: Happiness, in its essence,…

Read More ...

Life And Happiness: Embrace The Present

There’s almost nobody alive who doesn’t regret something they’ve done. That’s simply a fact of life. Even if the regret stems from something that happened years ago, we tend to hold onto those feelings and wish we could change the past. You can’t travel back in time to change mistakes, but you can learn from mistakes and move forward. One of the best ways to let go of the past…

Read More ...

Attitude Is Everything – You Get To Choose

Let me introduce you to Carl Sandburg’s Kansas Sodbuster: He leaned at the gatepost and studied the horizon and figured what corn might do next year and tried to calculate why God ever made the grasshopper and why two days of hot winds smother the life out of a stand of wheat and why there was such a spread between what he got for grain and the price quoted in…

Read More ...

Happiness Is A Choice

When most people think about happiness, they assume it’s something that happens to them. They don’t believe they can choose happiness. But it’s a choice you make every single day and moment. You control your thoughts and emotions and choose to be happy. Here’s how:   Decide Where to Focus Your Energy: What you focus on has a significant impact on your happiness. For example, if you focus on the…

Read More ...

Finding Joy In Simplicity

Since when did life get so complicated? What happened to the days of running wild and not worrying about anything? Even as we’ve gotten older, it’s still fun to remember the good old days and the simplicity of life (the one-phone household, no cell phones or answering machines, cars with roll-up windows). You can still have that feeling with just a little effort. You can find the balance between joy…

Read More ...