On Reinventing Yourself

Sound familiar?

• You’re desperately unhappy with your current career/role, it no longer fits with your core values, and you know you have to shift but you’re uncertain of what your first move is. Instead of moving in any direction you cry, ‘But what if I get it wrong?’

• You’re realising that you have to make big changes in your business (or any area of your life) because what worked once is no longer relevant to who you are today and where you’re going next (or the market and customer needs). You need another strategy or model but haven’t got a clear vision or picture of what that would look like. You say, ‘I better leave things is they are, it might not work out’.

• You want to grow personally and professionally. You’ve known for a while that something is adrift, you’re excited about the thought of the reinvention and at the same time anxious and frustrated because you can’t get started. So you sit, and sit, and sit, and stall, you gather information, more information, then a little more, and some, then you sit again. You’ve done so much thinking, you are too exhausted to take action.

• You have a clearer picture of who you are, and what you really care about in life. In order to develop that further, you have to let go of what was and embrace more of what is coming. But you have a load of self-doubt swirling around your thinking.

I don’t have the definitive guide to relaunching or reinventing yourself, so why this post?

Well, I wanted to give you what I’ve learnt these past months as a human being. See, Living Moxie is in the midst of a mini-reinvention. I’ve not been in a major rush, I’ve been sitting with the questions. That sounds awfully navel-gazey. It’s not. Between you and me it’s been exhausting.

The knowing that something isn’t right and not clear on how to rectify it, ugh, frustrating, yes? Loads of ideas, overwhelmed by them and doing none, annoying. Or tentatively starting on a couple without really having the good enough reason why. Not able to make decisive decisions. That sucks. And doubt. The big, ‘What if I’m wrong, what if I do this and it all goes haywire?’ Unbearable.

Even if you only read this far, take this. If you know you’re on course for a relaunch or reinvent and you’re doing nothing about it or avoiding it. Eventually, life will move you anyway.

Here we go:

Be all in (& make lots and lots of decisions)

Not just a little bit. Not three days at the turn of the new year. Not Sunday teatime when the black fog of Monday morning is looming. All in.

Make decisions and trust yourself that regardless of the outcomes you will not turn back. Look, we both know the phrases ‘don’t put all your eggs in the one basket’ or ‘better keep my options open’, as humans we prefer to have a get out clause in case the choices we make don’t work out.

Being all in is you committing to your decisions whether or not they work out the way you planned. 

But what if you make a mistake, get it wrong, fall, fail, trip or stumble.

You might. You might not.

Making no decisions is a decision.

Consistently putting your feet up on the Planets of Will I, Won’t I, Should I, Shouldn’t I, Maybe, Maybe Not is torturous. Think about the last time you visited there. What did it feel like? How did it work out for you?

Indecision is horrible, it’s worse than making a bad decision. Why? Because when you don’t decide you could end up having your decisions made for you, or nothing ever appears to change – tomorrow looks like today which was the same as yesterday. Where’s the living in that?

If you find decision-making a challenge you might start with the practice of making smaller scale decisions and sticking with your choice.

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” – Denis Waitley

Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a theory called the Paradox of Choice (watch his TED talk here), he claims that after a certain threshold is reached, an increased number of choices will cause major psychological distress. His theory was written for buyers and purchasers, but I have noticed the same distress in my own life when it comes to making decisions and being faced with so many choices. It causes more angst than peace. Tea-time in my house is a perfect example.

Schwartz’s advice for making good decisions:

1. Begin with the question, ‘What do I want?’ or figure out the goal or goals first.
2. Evaluate how important each goal really is. If it’s not important you won’t stick to the decision or goal.
3. Look at all the options available to meet the goal.
4. Evaluate the options available to help you meet the goal.
5. Pick the winning (most valuable, important, meaningful) course of action.
6. Modify the goal(s).

When I was all wibbly-wobbly about Living Moxie a friend asked me to do the following exercise over a cuppa in my kitchen. She’s a filmmaker, but really telling stories is her thing.

Before she films anyone she asks them to get a piece of A3 and write down all the words that are meaningful to them. Then she asks them to circle the five most important words/phrases.

She then asks them about this (you could write it out). She wants to know what is behind their meaning: what is their story, what is it they are really wanting to say, why those words/phrases? She says people talk about the reasons before completing the exercise, but it’s after this exercise she says people get to the honest reasons of what they want to convey.

What I learned from this exercise was the word ripples was very important to me. It had never been there before, but after going deeper I could see how I was dizzy with Living Moxie. Living Moxie is about helping the individual, but not solely for them, it’s also about what ripples out from helping one person.

Try the exercise, don’t stop until you have exhausted all ideas (words and phrases), circle the 5 most important words and ask yourself what you really mean, what is it that matters, what’s important, are you living those phrases/words now? After this exercise, you may have more clarity about the choices you have. If you have been humming and hawing with choices that don’t align with your core they can easily be put aside. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t need your attention. 

Embrace uncertainty

I know. I know. How many times have you heard that? If we could all just say and accept, ‘I have no idea what the hell is going to happen next! Forward!’ and be happy with that we would leave it there. But we don’t, so let’s talk about it.

We all want to have a little certainty that things are going to be okay before we embark on a relaunch or reinvent. We aren’t too keen to get our knees bruised or end up in a ditch along the way.

The brain loves certainty so when it doesn’t know the outcome it goes on alert causing emotional and physical responses. At first, it may want to regulate you back to what it knows. You may find yourself unable to focus clearly and self-doubt starts to seep in because you feel a little out of control, or there’s a period of time when you feel you haven’t got a clue what’s happening.

Okay, how do you embrace uncertainty?

For me, it’s preparing for its arrival. Know it may happen. Before you begin any relaunch ask yourself, ‘When I feel uncertain, what will I do?’  We are very good at predicting our lives, but that’s all it is, just predictions. A forecast. Might rain, might not. Could be sunny, maybe not.

Does this negate goals then? Goals are still predictions, we have no idea if they are going to work out. Even with goals you still don’t have control over the how or the final outcome. That’s the uncertainty.

You’re always going to be somewhere, and if you’re making decisions that consistently align with who you are and you core values, wherever you’re at you will always be in the right place.

I’ve learnt recently that uncertainty stops me from moving in any direction. I’m static. Yes, and sometimes doubting. Nobody wants to deliberately screw up, but if I make did make a terrible choice there are no rules to say that I can’t go back a few steps and repair it, or start again. No. Rules.

I’ve also had times in my life where the decision I wanted to make wouldn’t just affect my life but it would have an impact on others (financial risk). Like you, I have responsibilities and commitments from choices and decisions I have made in the past. At these times, I have embraced the uncertainty, but I’ve also made a decision or accepted that the goal had to be amended to accommodate and fulfil those commitments. My decision.

Lead yourself

There are a few quotes along the lines of, ‘Before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself’ or ‘mastering yourself is your strongest leadership skill’.

The hardest, cantankerous, difficult, challenging, annoying person I have ever had the pleasure to lead is myself. I would not have me on my team at times. I can be too hard on myself, a recovering perfectionist, I’ve made terrible decisions that could’ve brought down Wall Street and at other times been so indecisive I drove myself potty. I go too easy on myself at times, too hard at other periods. I’ve made numerous mistakes, some I’ve even repeated. I’ve forgotten to praise good work, rehashed the awful. Given half the chance I would’ve fired me 100 times over in the past.

So, how do you lead yourself? Try answering these:

• What advice would you give to someone who is about to lead you? And take it.
• What skills, characteristics, gifts, talents, and strengths do you look for in a leader? And use them.
• What behaviours would you find most difficult to lead? And don’t do them.

As a child, I used to get myself in some scary situations because I followed all the death wish ideas of my peers. I was more a follower, but then I suppose it depended on the group dynamics of the day if that is actually true.

Most of us go through life being led by others (in the home, school, high school, university, workplace, social groups, the nursing home) we are well conditioned to assume there will ‘Always going to be an adult in the room!’, that one person who has more maturity, worldly knowledge, able to step in and take control of situations when they go horribly wrong.

We freak a little when we notice we have become the adult. That nobody else is coming in, we have the reigns. We have no idea when they were passed to us, but there we are, in control of our own galloping lives. Gulp!

Leading yourself is taking 100% responsibility for your actions, decisions, and choices. No blame. Its full accountability and ownership.

To lead yourself you have to become very intimate with the person staring back at you in the mirror. You need to have the courage to look at their strengths, weaknesses, and be capable of managing both.

You need, to be honest with them, show compassion, to be directive at times and give them freedom during other moments. You need to be able to have ‘support and supervision’ with them, sit them down and ask candidly how things are going, how things can be better, how they are getting on, what they need help with. It’s about backing them up. Not being too hard on them when they make mistakes and screw.

It’s about backing them up. Not being too hard on them when they make mistakes. Encouraging and empowering them to make decisions and choices. Offering advice and solutions. Accepting they aren’t perfect. Not letting them off the hook when they try and get out of their responsibilities and commitments.

Try this: write 5 pages of A4 on the topic, ‘A practical guide to understanding and leading [insert your name]’. That’s a lot of writing! Yep, get to it. You will probably get to the good stuff on page 5! Do it in one sitting, no distractions.

Understand there may be risks

Sorry, there will probably be risks. Accept that, and then do what you can do to minimise the impact.

Nothing in life is without its risk (except perhaps doing Paint by Numbers). Everything else, riskeeeee. Can we not focus on the risk part, but the understanding? You know you best, you may be someone who likes to risk, or you may be someone who avoids it at all costs. You know your value and meaning of risk. To me, it’s part and parcel of living.

In a previous role carrying out Risk Assessments was a daily task for me. You take the big idea/goal/relaunch/plan and basically identify what could happen (or more honestly what could go wrong), score each on a scale of 1 – 10 of the likelihood of it happening (10 will happen, 0 very unlikely), and then, the best part ‘how can the risk be minimised’? How can something that is scored an 8 be managed, what would the new score be after the management of the risk?

There’s no way you identify all the risks, but just getting what you do know today out on paper does help.

Understand the risks is not the same as planning for all risks, sometimes it’s as simple as the acknowledgement that risk is present and you have thought about all the different ways that can be minimised.

To Do: Take what you want to reinvent or relaunch and write down all the risks. Score them on the likelihood of it happening (how I mentioned above). Beside each, ask yourself how the risk be minimised. What number does the risk become after the minimalising? Is the risk worth it then?

Know yourself

I’ll make this one quick. If what you do isn’t aligned with your core, what the hell are you doing it for? And if you have no idea what’s important to you and why it matters, then start here.

Most of us worry about screwing up and stumbling, not noticing that by doing nothing we are fumbling along anyway.

Here’s the big news: you are who you are. Whoever that is, you’ve decided based on your beliefs you have about you. I’ll bet that most days you’re more filled with questions than answers.

Who you are has nothing to do with labels, postcode areas, job title, what you own or earn. Most of us come to reinventing or relaunching because we are so detached and distant from our core (read: we haven’t got a bloody clue who we are anymore). Things just don’t make sense. We can’t understand when we have made choices and decisions that we thought were right, have actually taken us further away.

I’m not being helpful, am I? It’s because I believe knowing yourself has to be a lifelong exploration. It’s never ending. The person sitting here writing this (me) will not be the same person tomorrow. So, my advice, know who you are today and make your decisions based on that knowledge. Amend as you go.

Emotional strength

I believe we are a lot more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Go ahead and Google Emotional Strength, you will read plenty posts and information on the ‘Characteristics of Emotional Strong People’ or ‘100 Things Emotional Strong People Know That You Don’t!’ Scary title, huh?

Why not write your own list?

I mean, there have been times in your life where you had to dig deeper than you thought was possible and you coped, yes? What did you do? What strengths and characteristics did you call upon that perhaps you didn’t know where there before?

Have you ever heard someone say about someone else ‘their emotions were all over the place’ or ‘they were too emotional.’

Emotions are your reactions.

You don’t just start crying for no reason, you don’t get angry unless you feel there is something to be angry about. They are signs on how you feel at the moment. Tears aren’t a sign of defeat, they are usually born out of frustration.

I remember when I was in the hospital with my friend. One of the nurses said to the visitor of another patient, ‘Today, can you try not be so loud and over emotional. We have other patients and visitors on the ward and you upset them yesterday’. I was there the day before. I remember her emotions. I thought they were valid given the situation, her mum was dying.

The nurse – in my opinion – made the girls emotional reaction a sign of weakness, and although she didn’t perhaps say it, the girl was told to not feel what she was actually feeling, to pull herself together for the sake of others opinions and comments (who were in the same position as her anyway). Very strange.

It’s all about context.

So,

Say you did go down the path of reinvention and relaunch and it didn’t work out the way you planned, that you were faced with setback and disappointments, hurdles, made mistakes and people criticised you at every turn, that you were to find yourself more stressed and experienced a lot of rejection. How are you going to handle it?

Emotional strength is about being able to cope with life’s challenges, to not become overwhelmed by what’s happening.

Some news:

You are already emotional strong because you are expressing your own needs to change, you’re welcoming it, you’re going for it, considering it. That takes a certain amount of emotional strength.

Emotional strength is about being adaptable, not collapsible. 

Support

Get it. Ask people for help. It’s perfectly okay to say out loud, ‘I seriously haven’t got a clue what I’m doing!’ or ‘My brain is mashed, there is so much in there and I need someone to help me go in an extract what’s important and what isn’t.

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It’s a smart move. But we aren’t great at asking for it. Why? Well, it’s the uncertainty. We may get a no, a yes, or somewhere in-between. When you offer support, do you mean it? When you say to people, ‘What can I do to help?’, do you mean it? How many people actually take you up on your offer?

I think there has to be authenticity and sincerity when asking for support. And making sure there is clarity of the request. Pure reasons why. People always have the right to say no to any request made of them, but they don’t know if you need help if you don’t tell them.

The easiest way to see if someone is able to support and help you is this: ask.

Do it for a good reason (the honest one)

• Stated reason, ‘I tried to relaunch my career before and it didn’t work’, the real reason, ‘I read a bit of a career book’.
• Stated reason, ‘I would like to relaunch my business, but it’s not the right time’, the real reason, ‘I am terrified to lose what money I do have coming in’.
• Stated reason, ‘I would love to ditch this project and start this instead’, the real reason, ‘I’ve worked so darned hard on this, and if I stop now I will look like a failure’.

I’m not saying the above are you. All I am saying is whatever you are changing or relaunching make sure you are doing it for the real reason. The honest one. There’s usually the reason we give others, and then the real reason is the one we keep to ourselves. Embrace the real reason.

Over to you:

I’d love to hear what you’ve learned during a reinvention or relaunch. Do you have a story? A piece of learning or insight you would like to share. Leave it in the comments.