Reinventing Yourself Part IV: Questioning Your Beliefs

If you have been following the thread of my blog about Reinventing yourself, you are ready for the fourth part: Questioning your beliefs. When we get stuck there are usually conflicting beliefs behind it. For instance we may feel that we should be good citizens of the planet and limit our carbon footprint. Therefore we should be conscious about how much fossil fuel we consume, yet we mat also believe that we should be free to go anywhere we please. These two beliefs are sometimes in conflict and we may chose one belief over another or we may drive where ever we like and feel guilty about it. In April I wrote a post about how our beliefs work so I won't repeat myself. By reading my post you will have enough information to begin to question some of the beliefs you may hold that are keeping you stuck. You can read the post if you click here. Have a look at my previous post which is a link to a short video called Get Service that I thought was brilliant. Take care, have a good month and if you get invited to a Halloween party, pick a costume that shows another side of you that people may not see.

Get service video

This is a great short video that helps me remember to be compassionate toward others when I am engrossed in my own agenda. Get Service I post videos and links like this on my Giant Steps Coaching Facebook page which you might want to subscribe to.

Reinventing Yourself: Part III

What Do You Want? 

Creating a Vision for yourself Now that you have become aware of your need for change and you have taken an inventory, the next step is to become really clear about where you want to go. In speaking to hundreds of people who really desire change, this can be the most difficult step. When asked what they want, most people immediately launch into what they don’t want. Well there are millions of things I don’t want. I don’t want cancer, malaria or a budgie. There are however a small number of things I do want. Focusing on those things is what helps me achieve them. 

Creating a vision for yourself isn’t so hard: just ask  yourself the right questions and write down the answers. Imagine where you want to be in five years. Based on your inventory, you already have a starting point of the things in your life that are already good, assuming you don’t have to start from scratch.  Consider how you would answer the following questions… Think of what you deeply desire in your life to be a year from now, three years from now, five years from now. What has to change about you for that to happen? What transformations need to take place in you?

What do you need to know or learn? What do you already know?

What do you want to share?

Where do you want to live?

Where do you want to go?

What would make your life more amazing and fun?

How much money makes you feel secure?

Who would you share your life with?

How do you want your relationships to look?

What spiritual, emotional, personal, financial, social or physical aspects need to be addressed for these things to happen?

What do you want your day to look like? How will you spend your time?

What are your habits?

What does exercise look like for you?

What does your body look like?

What do you enjoy eating?

What does your home and surroundings look like?

What are your activities?

How do you have fun?

How playful are you?

How is your health?

How is your attention to self-care different?

How do you manage your growth?

How open-minded are you?

How much structure do you want? How much variety?

What is your anxiety level like?

How do you want to feel?

This is not a complete list, just a starting point to get you going. Consider what is important to you whether it is surrounding yourself with beauty, helping others, sitting at home with a good book or being out in the world experiencing new things. Once you focus on a long-term vision, you can work back three years, two years, one year and get clear about what you need to do today to start the ball rolling.

Imagining the future you want makes it easier to take action, right now. Consider what action steps you need to take. Write them down and do one of them right away. It might be something small like buying flowers, doing some research, reading a book or calling up a long lost friend.

Stay focused on your vision. It’s like driving a car. If you don’t keep your eye on the road, you may not reach your destination safely. Notice when you stray from your vision and get back on the path. Keep your vision where you can see it every day and consider what action you can take each day. It doesn’t have to be a big step. Just taking that step is the important part. Good luck and stay tuned for part 4.

Productivity Playhouse Workshops

My partner Katleen and I in Productivity Playhouse are offering a suite of workshops starting this fall. So far we are booked at the Rotman School of Business at the university of Toronto and with Toastmasters! We are looking forward to bringing our talents to a wider audience.

Workshop offerings 

Leadership

Cooperative Leadership

Authentic Leadership

Personal Branding for Leaders

Writing skills

Public Speaking For Leaders

Presentation Skills

Team Building Skills

Focusing Skills

Polarity Management

Playful Productivity

Challenging Beliefs

Brainstorming Skills

Goal Setting for Leaders

Performance Enhancement

Stress Management for Executives

Coaching Skills

Communication Skills

Personal Skills

Self-Management

Personal Branding

Writing Skills

Public Speaking Skills

Presentation Skills

Focusing Skills

Communication Skills

Polarity Management

Challenging Beliefs

Brainstorming Skills

Time Management

Stress Management Techniques

Goal Setting

Recalibrating your life

Performance Enhancement

Life Coaching Workshop

Reinventing Yourself

Creativity

Polarity Management

Creatively Challenging Beliefs

Igniting Creativity

Brainstorming Skills

Reinventing Yourself

Fostering Open Mindedness and Curiosity

Health and Wellness

Work Life Balance

Meridian Tapping

Emotional Freedom

Recalibrating your life

Stress Management

Discovering your Mission/Purpose in Life

Reinventing Yourself -- Part II: Take an INVENTory

In part one of Reinventing Yourself the first step I discussed was having awareness that you are ready for reinvention. The second step is to get clarity on what isn’t working anymore. This step helps you avoid the pitfall of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Chances are, most of the things in your life are going pretty well. Consider reinvention when some things in your life need to change. 

I see this time after time in my practice: a client tells me the joy had gone out of his life, even when he has a decent job, good family and supportive friends. In the mad rush to become established, he left behind many of the things that gave him joy. We often have to go back 20 to 30 years to salvage memories of things he used to enjoy. At some point this client reinvented himself as an employee, a husband, a father and left behind the things that gave him joy and meaning. To avoid running into the same problem, take an inventory. It’s interesting to note that the word contains the word “invent”.

Creating an inventory is simple. Just take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. At the top of one column write down “Working” and “Not Working” at the top of the next. This process will help you understand what areas you need to focus on and it will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed. Often when change is vague, we make it big and unwieldy when it can actually be discrete and manageable. If you have a few areas of your life that need to be inventoried, use separate sheets. For instance, if you are breaking up with your partner, you want to change your job and you might want to relocate, use three separate lists.

For most of us, change is scary and often stressful because we fear the unknown. Paring down the scope of change and being certain what doesn’t have to change makes change knowable. It also keeps us from the inevitable swing from one end of the spectrum to the other. How many people do you know who, in crisis, swung from one extreme to another? That’s because when we are unaware of the good we have, we are tempted to discard it and seek the opposite. The cliché of the mild mannered middle aged guy who, feeling like time is running out, buys a hot red sports car and acts like a twenty year old, is all too familiar.

A common response to fear of change is often paralysis, which is how we get stuck. We can’t move forward and we can’t go back. Knowing the small, often subtle, shifts we want to make and knowing what is working for us makes change knowable and doable. It also keeps us grounded and not tempted to over react.

Once you have come up with your list of lists of what’s working and not working, you can start to move forward. Take a close, hard look at what’s not working and ask yourself, how were you not being authentic. I believe that if we are being authentic, we create the life we want and avoid digging these deep holes that feel impossible to climb out of. For every item on your list, write a corresponding point that comes from your authentic self. For instance, if you are leaving a relationship where you were belittled and disrespected, how did you tolerate and allow that to happen? What will you do in the future to stand up for yourself? If you merely change partners without becoming aware of your need to change, you are simply shuffling the same cards and will get similar results.

What you are now doing is creating a list of authentic change. which becomes a list of personal change goals. This is your key to reinventing yourself. Rewrite the list as a set of personal change goals. For instance if you tolerated being disrespected, your goal might be to act more assertively when you feel slighted. So rather than changing the people or things in your life, you are changing yourself. Focusing on personal growth is the essence of reinvention. Change may not be easy and it may not happen quickly. Focusing on your goals is the best way I know how to realize the changes you want.

Remember there is always help available to make change happen faster. If you feel uncomfortable asking for help, then maybe that's an area worth looking at. Self reliance is held up as a virtue and we have to realize there are times when we just need to ask for help. It took having prostate cancer for me to realize this. I hope it you realize it without such extreme circumstances.

Reinvention Part One

This article is part one of a series of article on reinvention. Part One focuses on awareness of the need to change and a brief discussion of reinvention.

We reinvent ourselves many times in our lives. Most of us start off as helpless infants, somehow manage to get up, walk, learn to talk, get an education, hold down a job, have relationships, maybe having children and the lucky ones end up living a long happy life. Unless we are completely oblivious, the changes these stages require takes a lot of creative adaptation on our part.

Unless we have problems beyond our control, I believe we are constantly changing, tweaking things once in a while so we gradually adjust to the changes we need to make as they arrive. It’s not so much reinvention as a gradual evolution from infancy to childhood to adolescence. There are however, times when we must reinvent ourselves. When and why do we need to reinvent ourselves?

Typically people need to reinvent themselves when change arrives suddenly and unexpectedly and they are unprepared. Some of the huge game changers are separation and divorce, death of a loved one, having children, losing your job, or a long distance move. Abrupt changes like these cause stress, a loss of equilibrium and they are often very painful. Even when we see these coming, we often don’t make the changes we need to make. In each case, there is a sudden and dramatic need to change and respond. Denial or clinging to what we know are enough to keep us from adjusting to the new reality making the impact of change all the bigger.

Imagine what it's like being happily married then finding out your partner plans to leave you for another? All of the beliefs you have about loyalty, marriage, your partner, your goals, your imagined future and many you have about yourself are being challenged. Not to put too fine a point on it, your whole world turns upside down. You might react in a number of ways: paralysis; denial; rage; revenge; disappointment; fear; shutting down and so on. You can only do that so long. Eventually you will have to heed the call to action. If you don’t change your beliefs you remain in a quagmire until you do. That’s where reinvention comes in.

When I help clients reinvent themselves one of the first things that hit them is the realization why they are stuck and that there are ways forward. So, if there is a first step to reinvention of self, it’s simply to notice your need to reinvent and know it’s possible. Awareness that your life is lousy and that it’s time to change is always the first step.

Being stuck in a painful place sucks but you might be surprised how many people live in it. To tolerate a high degree of discomfort and get used to it is a uniquely human quality. How many lousy jobs or toxic co-workers have you tolerated? How many times you have stayed too long in dysfunctional relationships? In each of these cases, it helps to pull back and get some perspective and ask yourself, why do I tolerate this? Only when you answer that can you even begin to move forward.

I got good at reinventing myself as a child. My parents divorced when I was three and we moved a dozen times in the next seven years, including across the country. In that time, I went to five different schools. Always being the new kid gets old really fast. It wasn’t long before I figured out that each time we moved it was a new opportunity to reinvent myself. With practice, I became very good at being a chameleon, good at blending in and looking like I had been there all the time. That was my creative adaptation. Hey, it worked for me.

The first step to reinvention is to notice something is wrong. In fact noticing something isn’t right is the first stage of change. Without feeling discontent, change is impossible. Discontent is the prerequisite of progress. Noticing it is your job. Once you notice it then we can go to stage two.

Productivity Playhouse Launching

I am happy to announce that I'm taking my show on the road with my workshop partner Katleen Newton. Katleen is an experienced workshop facilitator, and a practicianer of NLP and Hypnotherapy. Together we have launched a new entity called Productivity Playhouse. We will be delivering high quality workshops and facilitation coupled with fun to many corporations and organizations in the greater Toronto area and beyond. Initially we will be offering a free lunch and learn so you can try us before you hire us. 

We are offering workshops in goal setting, finding your personal power, stress reduction and work/life balance. We will be launching a website shortly at www.productivityplayhouse.com so you can check there for more information. I'm looking forward to working with groups again and if you would like to have us come in to do a workshop for your organization, please give me a shout.