With about 80 days left in 2019, most of us have started taking stock of our personal, professional, and financial lives. As you assess yourself, some of you may find that you are not entirely satisfied with where you are right now. You set goals at the beginning of the year, and you haven’t been lazy about meeting them, but you still feel like you are making slow progress. Or you may have met all the goals you set, but there’s still something missing.
You don’t feel fulfilled with where you are and what you are doing at the moment. You may have noticed that for a long time now and have been questioning yourself: your decisions, your choices, your habits, and the things you do. You know that there is more in you, that you have more to offer and to achieve, but somehow, all that potential is remaining elusive, and you don’t know how to make it evident.
If this is you, then you may need to reinvent yourself.
Reinventing Yourself – What It Means
Reinventing yourself means:
• Having a vision of who you want to be and an idea of what it takes to get there.
• Identifying all the things that are holding you back, which include responsibilities, habits, attitudes, and so on.
• Intentionally redirecting the path for your life. This requires that you change aspects of yourself, the choices you make, learn new habits, and creating new routines that lead you to the vision you have of yourself.
• Setting new goals and creating new plans to achieve them.
• Sacrificing things you have held on to and getting out of your comfort zone.
Reinventing yourself fundamentally means creating a better you and this will demand that you commit yourself to personal growth and development.
Reinventing yourself starts with you, and no one else. So, how do you go about it?
Here’s a six-step process to set you on the path to successfully reinventing yourself.
1. Take Full Responsibility for Your Life
Your life is the way it is now because of things you either did or didn’t do, and choices you made or didn’t make. You need to recognize this and take responsibility for your life the way it is at the moment. Taking responsibility also means that you learn how to value what you have at the moment, as well as those possible opportunities that you can get in the future.
2. Assess Yourself
You need to ask yourself the tough questions that get you thinking about your life, the things you do, why you do them, the people you hang around, and the career you are in. Ask yourself why you are reinventing yourself, and the reason why you are doing this should be strong enough to challenge and spur you on. Once you have solid reasons for reinventing yourself, you need to identify and clarify your desires, values, passions, and vision for your future self.
3. Learn to Let Go of Things that Are Preventing You from Moving Forward
The reason why a lot of people fail at achieving their goals is that they have so many other goals, responsibilities, and priorities that are competing for their time. To reinvent yourself, you need to be willing to let go of a lot of things that are holding you back. This includes letting go of relationships, habits, people, routines, careers, attitudes, and anything else that is stopping you from moving forward.
4. Envision Your Future Life
Once you have completed steps 1 to 3, you need to mentally reinvent yourself and your life. See yourself 3, 5, 10 years to come. What would your life be like? What spheres will you influence and how? If someone was writing your ideal citation what would it contain? What steps don’t you need to take to get there? As you imagine all this, you are also seeing what you need to change now to get to the person you imagine yourself to be.
5. Create Visual Reminders
Just as you would create a vision board for your goals, you need a vision board when you reinvent yourself. The biggest issue with reinventing oneself is sticking to the process to the end. Creating visual reminders helps to keep you focused on the picture you have of your future self. Use pictures, Sticky notes, magazine photos, and doodles of those objects you cannot get and attach them to your board and look at it.
Another idea for visual reminders is changing the environment where you live and work. It could be changing the paint, redecorating your home, or relocating to another place entirely.
Visual reminders are meant to direct and keep your focus on the future prize as you reinvent yourself.
6. Create an Action Plan
Create an action plan that lists out how you will start reinventing yourself, what aspect of the process you will focus on and when and how you will make progress in the following days and weeks and months. Having an action plan does not mean the process of reinventing yourself will be smooth sailing, however. With this in mind, figure out how you will face adversity and challenges, preparing yourself to face them head-on and succeed.
Reinventing yourself won’t be easy, and it can be a lifelong commitment, but it will certainly be worth it.
