Learning to Live the best years of your life: Planning for the Un-Planned

Choosing to live in an Integrated Retirement Community requires a great deal of courage by the older people who make this move in the later years of their lives and will involve an immense change to their lives.

The reasons behind these moves are varied and complex, sometimes planned and others unplanned. But ultimately, residents had faith in the opportunity to embrace a new life and community in line with the Inspired Villages vision that “Life with Inspired Villages can, and should, be the best years of our residents’ lives.”

Similarly, the twists and turns outlined by the speakers on the Housing LIN Future Leaders’ programme resulted from planned and unplanned scenarios or events and, crucially, all required choices. The speakers drew from a wealth of experience in varied sectors and with hugely different career journeys, but all had encountered challenges such as redundancies or project failures. Others spoke of unexpected opportunities within their careers with promotions or new jobs they hadn’t expected or felt ‘ready’ to take on. Even within the 2022 Future Leaders’ cohort itself, more than half of our group moved jobs or were promoted between January 2022 - January 2023 (whilst the programme was taking place).

Personally, in a career as a town planner within the retirement sector, embracing change and planning for the unplanned can be difficult. Planning applications take enormous time, and changes to the policy landscape can be slow (albeit those are topics for an entirely different blog post). Taking inspiration from our residents and older people more generally can help. Challenging the stereotypes of older age, many of the residents at Inspired Villages take up new activities each day, and over 600 activities a month are run across all of our villages. In 2021, one 68-year-old resident completed a 15,000ft charity skydive which puts things into perspective.

Taking a more flexible and adaptable approach to leadership is key to changing your mindset to embrace new opportunities, challenges and changes every day. That being said, it’s important to make an active choice to accept change in all of the forms it takes. Subconsciously we are all forced to accept the smaller changes in our daily lives, but going forward - and following the lead of the speakers we heard from on the programme, and the older people who live in our villages - I will be trying to embrace those changes large and small.

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Ellen's blog is one of 7 from the 2nd cohort of the Housing LIN’s Future Leaders’ Programme that we are publishing in the lead up to our virtual Summit – A Festival of Ideas and the virtual session on Tuesday, 28 February 2023 (2.30pm-pm-4pm). Register now for Inspiring young talent: investing in our future housing and care leaders

Find out more about Housing LIN’s Future Leaders’ Programme and read the other blogs once published.