Re-Inventing Oneself and How To Change For Good

Re-Inventing Oneself and How To Change For Good

This is the faculty of being able to see all the events and data in a meaningful relationship to each other and to you. It means being able to understand the context defining the world in which you live. It means being able to see others’ point of view. It means letting go of what you perceive to be the “truth” and simply observing “what’s so.” It means letting go of right and wrong and being fully open to maybe, possibly, or could be.

This will be discussed in three blog posts. The topic is subdivided into three categories:

1.     A vision of who you want to be

2.     how to make a change?

3.     courage to do it.

Cling on to what you believe
People who hang on to a celebrity’s coat tails in the hope of reinvention ‘rubbing off’ on them, are common in every walk of life. Even more prevalent are those who struggle to reach a certain peak. Once that plateau has been attained, they adamantly refuse to move on to a higher level. Often this is simply because they feel that the world ought to stop and pay tribute to their wonderful feats to date. This is ridiculous. It’s like a hamburger company saying, ‘Well, twenty years ago we introduced the hamburger. Despite the fact that our competitors now also offer cheeseburgers and veggie-burgers, there’s no need to modify our service in anyway. After all we are just too wonderful to worry about such trivial matters.’ Countless instances abound of those who acquire their ‘15 minutes of fame’ (as promised by Andy Warhol), then find the limelight is quickly dimmed by reality.

Your vision can be reached through many paths. Look at those things that you take pride in about yourself; contrast them with those things that embarrass you. This should start to indicate where your soul is trying to head. Next identify the ultimate form that you would take if you followed this path. Now you have your vision. But don't think this will remain constant throughout your life. As you change, grow and learn, you will want to change your vision. This is a good and normal thing, so fear not

Don’t make the classic mistake of former ‘A’ list celebrities now content to languish in the ‘C’ or even ‘D’ list category, who spend the rest of their lives vainly trying to recapture their glory days rather than moving on to face new challenges. You can spot them in any afternoon television game show still cracking the same old gags which a once famous middle-aged host still finds funny

1. Identify your significant life experiences

2. Create a list of transferable/functional skills

3. Categorize transferable/function skills into clusters

4. Identify your specific content/special knowledge

5. Prioritize them according to what you’d like to see involved in your next career

6. Identify issues about which you are passionate

It will be easier than you think because you’ve probably already done it a few times but just didn’t know it. The fact is, we reinvent ourselves every day sometimes many times in a single day. One minute you are providing sensitive guidance, coaching, and feedback to staff members; the next you are righteously, relentlessly, resolutely, and often rabidly arguing for increased government funding for a threatened public health project. It’s not a question of can you reinvent yourself you, every day. The question is, can we do it in terms of our work life and when should we? Every reinvention is not going to be a great success, but it certainly will teach you something, if you’re paying attention. I used to consider needing to move on as failure, but it’s not.

Getting people to believe in you is especially difficult if all you can see is a big block barring your progress. My advice is to visualize the fears preventing you from moving on as a vast block of ice. Now imagine that you are an ice-sculptor. You are commissioned to craft a beautiful peacock from a massive mound of ice. Rather than chipping in shapes to resemble the bird, chip out anything that doesn’t look like the bird. The more you chip at your fears, the closer you’ll get to discovering that you probably already have the core ingredients to become fulfilled– and probably always had.

These are not times for the fainthearted. They will demand more of us than we have ever been prepared to give. Being stretched in every way is becoming the new status quo. Call it the new discomfort zone. We’re all bumping into the limits of our own thinking as past paradigms crumble and new one’s morph into place. You cannot thrive through your own mediocrity or even your own excellence. Mediocrity is already a thing of the past. You’re a long way from mediocre otherwise you wouldn’t still be with me. But you may just be excellent which makes you the new mediocre. It places you at parity with all the other Excellences out there who have managed to get this far.