How do you feel about these values and how does your partner. How can you help each other?

Learning something new
Staying in touch with your health challenges and successes
Financial security, savings and retirement
Family needs and time together
Having your home the way you like it as far as decorating inside and outside
Community service
Feeling productive each day
Friendships
Spiritual practices
Travel
Entertainment weekly
Children
Stretching yourself to learn more about who you are and who you aren\’t. Who you might become?
Desire to change bad habits
Happiness
Having fun
Developing practices to feel peaceful
Having things like clothes, cars, tv, cameras, shoes, ipod,
blackberry, cell phones, gym membership, country club, golf, yearly
vacations, having friends over for dinner
Being creative
Sex
Romance
Being organized
Putting yourself first
Time with just you
Having celebrations as a part of enjoying life
Rituals
Brainstorming and having weekly family meetings

Print this list and have a copy for you and your partner. If you don\’t
have a partner, do this for yourself as a “check in”about your values.

As you read each one, write down the first thought that comes to you.
Your partner is doing the same thing. You might prefer doing it at
separate times and not together.

Choose how to share it with each other. It could be when you are
sitting outside, out to lunch, dinner or after dinner. Ask each other
when it would be fun to explore these values.

Reviewing these core issues, helps you know you and your partner. This
gives you a way to connect that is not the ordinary connection.

It is fun to check in with yourself and your partner in new ways. This
is not about what you should do or who is right. This connection is
about getting to know yourself and your partner in an updated way.
It can give a new road map in this empty nest journey of how do
we want to live our life. What will be fulfilling for us now?

This is the intention of this way of talking with each other.

Have fun seeing what matters these days. Support you and your partner with open eyes and a curious mind.

What if we changed our mind about what we have been thinking really matters to us?

We are all branching out.

Natalie Caine Founder of Empty Nest Support Services

Natalie Caine is the founder of Empty Nest Support Services. When her daughter was a senior in high school, she realized that as a soon-to-be “empty nester,” she would be undergoing a major life shift. Not wanting to confront this transition alone nor have her many friends face this abyss without strong support, she created a support services group, which quickly grew into a new career and an exciting full-time business.