Teaching Others About Firearms – Retirement and Sticking to the Range

It has been awhile since I’ve posted anything. Did you miss me? I was dealing with a “big” event. The big event was hitting full retirement age and deciding to walking away from an eight to way past give job. After a few months of not working full time (I still have a couple of part-time gigs) I’ve decided that retiring is a full time job – at least for the first year or so. The professionals say it can take up to three years to down shift. Someone once said it was like driving on asphalt and then transitioning to a gravel road – the task is the gradually slow down while retaining control.

Teaching Others About Firearms on AllOutdoor

I was bothered by the insurance and financial decisions to make that require me to make prognostications about the future. I hardly know what firearm and knife I’ll be carrying next week; how will I know the stock market return? I was equally bothered by people who walked up to me and said:

“Since you are retired, I thought you might want to [insert unreasonable request here] for me.”

The answer was, and still is, an emphatic “No!” I made some retirement decisions as well. The one thing I got really right was asking a lot of questions from various experts and non-experts. I talked to people who liked retirement and those who hated their retirement. I talked to good friends, old and young. People who think they know me well were especially fun to talk to. I read a couple of books on life transitions. I looked at my life expectancy (that was a morbid couple of days) and decided that my resources should sit with God and the people who will outlast me.

What does this have to do with slinging copper coated lead for fun? Just this.

It is important to talk to people with all sorts of expertise, experience, and ENJOY the conversation. It is not the content of their speech that I’m fond of; it is the people. How many times have you tried to ignore someone in a firearms or concealed carry class that was just plain annoying? If they are talking simply to reinforce what they believe, they can leave the class any time. If they have a different perspective I can learn something about that is good. A different perspective should not be annoying.

During this transition period I’ve held a couple concealed carry classes and I enjoyed them more than usual. Why? When all else was changing my love of firearms and teaching did not change. I have the privilege of teaching because I want to and not because I have to. I also found that I added enjoyment as an outcome measure for my classes. I talked to a “Got to Teach” class leader recently and he was sort of uptight about the economy, class numbers, and covering legal changes. I don’t want to be uptight. When something I like to do makes me uptight it is time to retire – I don’t think I’ll be retiring from the range any time soon.

Phil Godding

Dr. Phil Godding wears many hats and has accomplished a lot in the fields of higher education, neuropsychology and forensic psychology. His favorite hat, were he to actually wear hats, would be blaze orange with the word “teacher” on the front. Dr. Godding teaches in classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, ranges and coffeeshops. The other odd thing about Dr. Godding is that he reads eight to ten different books at any given time. This time of year you will likely find Dr. Godding in a deer stand, repairing a deer stand or thinking about preparing a deer stand.