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.

If You Hear the Message Three Times, LISTEN - Book Review

If You Hear the Message Three Times, LISTEN

by Patricia Heller

Hampton Roads Publishing Company

283 pages

Reviewed by Bradley Foster

If You Hear the Message is a highly readable and inspiring account of Patricia Heller’s transformation from living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) to becoming a spiritual and self aware healer. She takes us on her journey from curing her ‘incurable’ illness to investigating healing hands, past life regression, shamanism, manifesting greatness, automatic writing, heart centred transformation, her inner gypsy woman and many more. The book is actually an excellent survey of the healing modalities in America over the past fifteen years. 

The title refers to what she calls “listening to the universe”. When you hear the same message three times, it is time to pay attention.  She gives several examples of when she heard messages three times before she got it. In a heart centred transformation centre in the Arizona desert she heard the teacher tell someone to move her energy to her heart and ‘let it go’. This didn’t make any sense to her at all. The second time she was in awe standing over the Grand Canyon.  She turned to her teacher and told her how it was so beautiful it hurt her heart. She was told to ‘let it go.’ She looked at him as if he was an alien. Let go of what, she thought? During a full blown attack of CFS at the centre she was again told to ‘let it go’ when the penny finally dropped. She realized that holding onto her anger was making her physically sick. She had to hear it three times before she was able to really hear it and ‘get it’. That was her last attack of CFS.

In case you are thinking there isn’t a modality Patricia doesn't like, rest assured that she approaches them intelligently and with a healthy scepticism that is often absent in books of this type. The road she is on is long and winding, full of insights, pot holes, blind alleys and magnificent vistas. Patricia takes us on the tour with excitement, passion and humility, without trying to make us into converts or convince us that she has found ‘the path’ to enlightenment. In a graceful and humble way, she describes what she found on her own quest for enlightenment and if there is a piece you can take away from it then she has done her job.

Readers are rewarded by Patricia’s insights and warmth; she does an excellent job of writing clearly and extracting the meaning out her experiences. I marveled at her curiosity and capacity to absorb and integrate so many different teachings and to draw important lessons from them that have relevance for a general audience. This book is especially exciting for those who are or who are thinking of going on a similar journey of self discovery. 

As a coach I am constantly reminded that it is not the events that shape our lives so much as how we respond to them that is what makes us who we are. This book demonstrates how a woman with spunk, determination, courage, curiosity, a great sense of humour overcame a seemingly hopeless situation and the death of her husband to arrive in a place of wisdom, compassion and happiness. (originally published in 2007)

Hitting the Mark!

Announcing the publication of my new goal setting workbook: Hitting the Mark: A Workbook For Setting and Achieving Successful Goals. 

The workbook guides you through steps of visualizing your future life, distilling your goals, committing to them, knowing why you want them and holding yourself accountable to achieving them. The workbook grew out of goal setting workshops I have run as well as working with clients over the past six years. You stand an excellent chance of identifying appropriate goals and achieving them with this methodology.

Contact me for more details. $12.99 paper, $7.99 eBook format. Watch for the Kindle version.

Hold Me Tight: 7 Conversations for a Lifetime of Love - Book Review

Hold Me Tight is the best book I have ever read on couples therapy because unlike a lot of other books, it makes sense and it works. Sue Johnson is an Ottawa-based professor and relationship therapist who noticed that traditional therapies often didn’t work. Instead of persevering with the old ways or blaming herself, she went back to the drawing board and came up with a new model.

When I was studying therapy I remember my teachers telling me that couples therapy was by far the most challenging kind of therapy—not for the faint of heart. Of course it’ll never be a cakewalk, but I think Sue Johnson has revolutionized the field by articulating clear and definite steps to healing broken relationships.


Johnson went back to the books and revisited Attachment Theory, pioneered by John Bowlby in the 1940’s. Most therapists assumed his theory was peculiar to parents and children since that’s what his studies were based on. Johnson’s stroke of genius was to realize that Bowlby’s theory underpins all relationships. Understanding relationships from a new angle gave Johnson a valuable and useful way of understanding how they function and how they break down.

Being on the clinical side gave Johnson the tools to articulate a theory and a way to test it. Also being a therapist she took her theory into the field and tested it on real couples having real attachment problems. Before long Johnson understood the hidden language behind disputes and began to teach couples how to have conversations with one another.

The result is this fine book that is part theory, part teaching tool and part self help book. Anyone can read it and get a very good idea of how to improve their relationship or teach couples how to talk to one another in a way that heals instead of inflames. Hold Me Tight is nicely organized around seven types of conversations that couples can have that will build trust and attachment between them. Couples can use this book as a guide to learn how to talk to one another and by mastering the steps. Beyond couples, parents and children and friends will find knowing how to have these conversations useful to maintaining the health of their relationships.

If you prefer to learn Hold Me Tight conversations experientially, Sue Johnson teaches her methodology to therapists and certifies them. There are now hundreds of therapists in North America who are trained to help couples learn how to talk and listen to each other. You can find a certified therapist or a training program near you at Hold Met Tight. I learned a lot from this book that I will put into practice with all my relationships. This is a book that everyone will benefit from reading.

Introducing my referral program...

I have created an incentive program for current and former clients to refer me to friends and colleagues. The deal is, I will pay you $250. if you refer me to someone you know who needs help reinventing her or himself. If you would like to embark on coaching with me, you can use this discount as long as you book ten sessions. You will get a bonus of two free sessions. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the program.

Are Your Beliefs Holding You Back?

The beliefs I hold underlie everything I do and say and how I perceive the world around us. My beliefs combine to construct a complex web of interconnected concepts that form my model of the world. It is literally how I see and experience the world around me. I have “concepts about the world and a concept is merely a belief and a belief is merely an opinion I have a particular loyalty to.* My beliefs can be very useful as a way of understanding the world around me as long as my beliefs are based on reality and I can tinker with them when they aren't.

I have beliefs about everything. I have beliefs about who I am, my place in the world, my job, about my children, the elderly, or politicians. When I meet someone for the first time, my beliefs fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about them. My beliefs create assumptions based on what I know or assume about people who resemble them. This is where it gets tricky. If I don’t want to be imprisoned by my beliefs, it’s critical to be aware of the difference between what I really know about someone and what I’m assuming about them.

So what is the point of having beliefs? They give us a way of understanding the world (our model of the world, remember). Some of them are based on hard evidence, our experiences in the world and many of them are received from our parents, our culture and our peers. Beliefs do a number of other jobs. Some are designed to keep us safe, others to make us comfortable and even some to keep us from worrying too much.

Even my most positive and noble beliefs can imprison me. The way elephants are trained illustrates that having beliefs that imprison us isn’t peculiarly a human trait. When an elephant is being broken in, the trainers take a huge chain and attach it to the elephant’s leg. They attach the other end to a spike that’s driven deep into the ground. No matter how much the elephant strains against the chain, it learns that resistance is futile.

As the elephant becomes more docile, the chain is replaced with smaller and smaller chains. The elephant comes to believe there is no point in trying to escape and never tries again. You might laugh at the elephant, and you might even think that it’s being irrational to imprison itself. This is exactly how beliefs work in humans. Everyone I’ve ever met, including you, has irrational beliefs. We are particularly good at building prisons for ourselves.

In 1955, Dr. Albert Ellis identified 12 common irrational beliefs. Most of us hold some or all of these beliefs. For example: I think I am most happy when I am inert or inactive when I am in fact happiest when I am engaged. Elephants are in very good company.

I notice that my world view is also responsible for how I get stuck. When my world-view doesn’t match reality, I stop dead in my tracks. If I stop long enough and don’t change my beliefs to align with reality, I’ll get stuck. For instance if my creative abilities are called into question, challenging many beliefs I have about myself, I might slip into inaction and self doubt. Rather than questioning the person who challenged me, I might undermine my own creativity. If I’m not aware of my beliefs, it’s difficult to change them.

Pain is what happens when your model of the world doesn’t match reality. Imagine you are in love with someone and have all kinds of belief about loyalty, love, and about that person in particular. What happens if they leave you? Pain! Where do you start to rearrange your beliefs about yourself and your concepts? These are pretty fundamental beliefs and it’s painful when you realize that they might be wrong. Suffering is what happens when you are in pain, but feel powerless to change anything.

In both cases you have a set of beliefs about how the world works. What would you do if you realized the stake binding you to your world-view became untethered? I think most of us would undergo a bit of a crisis and I’m sure it would be no different for the elephant.

It’s my belief that humans are creatures that have beliefs and always will have them but they aren’t set in stone. So how can you make the most of your beliefs, make them work for you, and not be limited by them? Rick Carson,* the author of Taming Your Gremlin has a paraphrase of the Zen Theory of Change that works for me. His version goes,

I free myself not by trying to free myself, but by simply noticing how I am imprisoning myself in the very moment I am imprisoning myself.

In other words, simply notice my beliefs and how you construct little worlds with them that often imprison you.

Consider for a moment whether your beliefs guide you toward problems or toward new solutions? Do your beliefs focus on your powerlessness or on your power of choice? If you want to feel directed, you want to choose your beliefs carefully. When you focus on solutions, your ability to make choices and the things that will take you forward, you will not only be happier but more able to help others. In order to take control of your beliefs, you must be aware of them when they pop up and be open to making new choices for yourself.

An elephant never forgets, but humans have the capacity to consider choices they are making and be aware of the consequences. By simply noticing my beliefs, I can begin to make small adjustments to my model of the world that might fit with the reality I encounter.

• I owe Rick Carson a debt of gratitude for imagining this line in his Taming Your Gremlin book. Visit my website at: http://giantstepscoaching.com