Opening quote from Grey’s Anatomy: “The surgical scalpel is made of steel, sterilized, carbonized stainless steel. This is a vast improvement over the first scalpel, which was pretty much a sharp stick. Medicine is constantly reinventing itself. That means surgeons have to keep reinventing themselves, too. There is constant pressure to adapt to changes. It can be a painful process. But without it, you’ll find yourself moving backwards instead of forwards.”
Reinventing yourself, finding a new job because you either choose or are forced too; committing to the idea of work that you truly enjoy or managing a new team or project, is hard work and yes often times painful. Hard work because it requires persistence and a lot of guts to step into the unknown. When you take the first step you don’t really know if you will make it happen or achieve the desired outcome. That said you will never know if you do not do something. It is painful because we often need to alter our self-image and the perception of our colleagues and close friends, which is usually grounded in many external labels, such as our title, the company we work for our qualifications, etc. Rather than moving backwards or getting left behind, here are 5 ideas that will hopefully encourage you to take a step towards change:
- Understand how your world has changed or start to forecast changes on the horizon. Take the time to think about how you are or will be personally affected by potential changes. Then reflect on what you need to do to prepare.
- Get to grips with the rough draft of your story: Judging by the Shark Tank, we all know the importance of a properly prepared pitch. That said when you are reinventing yourself, it is slightly different, while you should spend time articulating why you are making a change, understand this is only the first draft of your story. It will change, in fact it has to change if you are truly reinventing, as you will discover clues along the way with every lesson and failure, which will help you to revise your story so you actually start to believe it too.
- Surround yourself with others who do the things you would like to do. While the signs will be crystal clear that you need to make a change, your close friends and colleagues will not understand your rationale. So expand your circle, virtual networks are a great place to start, e.g. meetup, greenlight, twitter and facebook, are great places to follow /find people who are doing things that appeal to you. Caveat: At times you will feel that you have seriously lost the plot, so make sure you have a person you trust that you can have on speed dial.
- Balance your expert status with a learning mindset. We spend many years honing skills and becoming an expert in a particular. Choosing to veer off this path feels like you need to leave your expert status behind and start all over again. Your expert status has a value attached to it, so be confident in conveying your value. At the same time you need to learn about your new path, do you homework and learn as much as possible from the outside, that said when you make the change recognize that the learning will continue.
- Be BRAVE, don’t let fear keep you in a holding pattern: I am mesmerized by the Winter Olympics, it reminds me off my first ski trip to Whistler. I spent most off the week taking skiing lessons, the last exercise was to ski down what appeared to be a canyon, but was really a small ditch. We had to start of fast so we had enough momentum to make it up the other side. I was scared stiff but coaxed myself to let go and ski, sadly too late as I stopped abruptly at the bottom of the ditch and spent quite a bit of time crawling up the other side, while the brave ones celebrated at the other end. I knew going forward I would be much happier if I tried something and failed, rather than disappointed that I did not push through the fear and try.
What one step can you take or have you taken towards change?
Closing quote from Grey’s Anatomy: “We have to keep reinventing ourselves, almost every minute because the world can change in an instant. And there’s no time for looking back. Sometimes the changes are forced on us. Sometimes they happen by accident and we make the most of them. We have to constantly come up with new ways to fix ourselves. So we change, we adapt. We create new versions of ourselves. We just need to be sure that this one is an improvement over the last.”
