The February Blues

February is the month of change. Spring cleaning, planning summer holidays, and getting sick and tired of winter. It is also the month of taking classes and trying to live up to those new year’s resolutions.

I am coincidentally in the middle of teaching my Is It Time To Downsize? class at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre, and I thought it might be a place here to reflect on that experience.

I love it and have found it so rewarding! I have been lucky enough to utilize some processes that I found valuable in my practice as a social worker in the coursework. I was leery at first, thinking it might be “hokey” or not what people were looking for, but it turned out the be just the opposite. I introduced topics such as taking at look at our values and our current quality of life as a reflection before we decide to move anywhere. We discussed how these considerations flavour the choices we make down the road. The participants really enjoyed it.

Additionally, we discussed the importance of a proper planning process, with timelines, dates, who does what, who we need to enlist, and strategies we will employ. There are many different ways to plan and I talked about one visual planning process that I am trained in called the PATH process (aptly named, don’t you think?) that starts with a visual representation of the future, and then works backwards to the present moment in steps on how to get there.

We had presentations from a retirement living agency (Sharon Unsworth), as well as a lawyer (Nima Rohani), a Realtor (April Prinz) and a financial advisor (John Davies). They provided a lot of information for the participants that was informative and interesting on a large range of topics related to downsizing.

I have loved working with each of these ten participants, really enjoying the conversations and input that they provided to me as well as positive feedback!

I look forward to my next course, being run at the Wellesley in April. See the attached photo for the flyer.

Perhaps I will see you there.

In the meantime, email or call if you have any questions, 250-891-5969.