Reinvention as a word implies a process of deconstruction, a subsequent reconstruction, and a resultant new thing or a new person who exhibits different talents and who pursues different opportunities. The intended payback for reinvention is gaining something that you currently feel is missing in your life, which could be anything from a successful career, to a better financial situation, to a happier work life balance or a complete change of life style. However, reinventing yourself as a reaction to something or a set of circumstances tends to results in a purely cosmetic change as it does not get to the root of why you want your life to be different. In order to reinvent yourself successfully and for the right reasons, you need to do it consciously and deliberately rather than as a knee jerk reaction. This doesn’t mean for a moment that spontaneity and creativity have no role in a life change – indeed, they are valuable forces in this process – but building in reality checks as you go along will do you no harm at all.
Many of us arrive at a decision points in our careers unexpectedly. For most people, the planned career path is a myth and its unusual to find people who decided what they wanted to do with their careers when they were at school and who then followed the recommended route to get there. When people talk about their jobs, it’s much more common to hear how amazed they are at what they’ve ended up doing – listen for how many times you hear the phrase “I just seemed to fall into it!”. It’s not surprising, then, that many of us eventually realize that we’re not doing what rewards us professionally, emotionally, culturally, or spiritually.
Below is a series of steps that may help you through the reinvention process.
- Conduct a personal audit
- Explore your values and beliefs
- Think about your dream scenario
- Start making changes
- Live the changes
- Reinvent your self
Conduct a ‘Personal Audit’
This is the part of the process where you appraise your life from a personal and professional perspective. You could think of it as a “force-field” analysis. Where you write your name in the center of a clean sheet of paper and itemize your life’s pressure and disappointments on the left and the pleasures and delights on the right. Write down everything you think is relevant, including the interests and aspirations that you had early in your career and all the things that have given you happiness since then. From this activity alone, you may be able to see where unacceptable pressures lie but if you cannot, highlight the break points on both sides of the analysis in a highlighter pen so you can easily identify the issues that really need to be addressed. The intention here is to find a way of swinging the balance of your life toward the pleasurable side of the diagram by drawing out the element of your life that characterize you and your preferred role.
Explore Your Values and Beliefs
If something is preventing you from tapping into your natural talents and living your life in line with them, write it down at the bottom of the sheet of paper. These are the barriers that you have to overcome in order to achieve satisfactory reinvention. They usually manifest as fears, for example: “I will lose my income/pension /benefits,” “I have a dependent family and can’t risk letting them down.” “I have hefty financial commitments and won’t be able to meet these if I change my job,” or “ I can’t afford to go back and start something from the beginning at this stage of my career.” All these are fears that you hold without question. So question them. Are they really true? Do they really matter? If you live your life according to these beliefs, how will you feel at the end of your career? Is this acceptable to you?
Think about Your Dream Scenario
Think about what you’d do if you were free from practical or financial limitations and write everything down at the top of your sheet of paper. This is a freeing exercise that may put you in touch with what it is you would prefer to be doing. Don’t reject your ideas because you don’t have enough money or security to achieve them-don’t put more barriers in your way and remember that, with a little imagination and inventiveness, there are ways around the perceived obstacle of money and security.
Start Making Changes
Now that you’ve done the thinking, you can start making changes, small or radical. Working through the process above has allowed you to see your life laid out in front of you and should help you pinpoint the areas that need the most immediate attention. If you have a strong feeling about the need to change something that doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t try to reason your way out of it”; follow your instincts and see what happens. If you curb your impulses by rationalizing them, you’ll end up behaving in the same way time and time again. To others, and indeed to yourself on some levels, your actions may not seem reasonable but see what happens anyway, many people have benefited from taking a risk at points in their life. Taking action first and reflecting later has probably been the pattern of your career to date, so try something new out, see if it works, then adopt or discard your initiative as appropriate.
Live the changes
It’s no good deciding to make changes but then not doing anything about it. Even if the changes seem alien to you to begin with, practice them until they feel normal. Act as if you’re the best artist in your field, the greatest writer, the most successful entrepreneur whatever it is you want to achieve. Once you start behaving like the person you want to be, people will start treating you as if you are that person. You cannot change your life without changing your behavior patterns, and this too hard, try starting with symbolic changes like your clothing or your car.
Reinvent Yourself
You’ll see that reinvention isn’t really what’s going on here. The effect is reinvention; the fact is that you’re bringing to the surface a latent part of your character that seeks full and happy expression. Make the decision to live the way you want to fully and without apology. What’s the worst that can happen?
