What do you do if you're retired and seeking purpose through volunteering?

When choosing a volunteer activity apart from passions it is important to determine if you are aligned with the company culture in the first place and secondly if you are aligned with the purpose for which the volunteering process is oriented. If there is no such alignment it is better not to start the activity at all, as our performance will decline over time as well as the possibility of conflicts in the development of the activity, mood decline, etc. There are times when we can find our skills and passions in these activities because it is not possible to apply them at work. In these cases it is an escape route. In the best of cases there is also a perfect alignment between skills, purpose, culture and values.

That's a very good question. Well retiring is a must and that should be almost immediately when time is up. Will I really be idle? The answer is no. Even when I am on my lowest People will always look for me to Volunteer,Whether it's through Capacity building out of good will. For retiring I will, but that will not Take away my inner me of Volunteering. But given a chance and freedom. I enjoy farm life travelling and just having some me time. I would work out in my garden. I have never been alone. Anywhere I go people would come. Talking to people gives many hope. So even through my retirement I would be impacting lives in my Own small way.

We must not forget that parallel to the volunteer activity there is a daily professional occupation of 8-10 hours. At the same time there are personal obligations and the need for rest and leisure. It is necessary to make an initial assessment of the time available for volunteering. The time consumed will obviously depend on the role we play and its complexity, which in turn will be determined by the problem of the human group and the social context to which it is directed. Depending on the time we will have to select or not the volunteering activity taking into account that we have to give the same performance or more than at work, as we are working with particularly sensitive environments.

When we make the decision to volunteer to satisfy a vital purpose linked to human or social issues, it is important to take into account that many times it is a different context from the one in which we have developed our professional activity and that we will need to carry out a previous learning process that will be more or less intense depending on the complexity of the problem, the social and human context in which it is developed and the hard skills that are needed and that we probably do not have. Volunteering, like the work environment, is a life-long learning because the people with whom we interact are not always the same, the roles are different and the social and human context varies easily nowadays.