Reinvention

You don't have to be dissatisfied with your life to reinvent yourself.

You can enjoy your life and still want the next evolution. You can take the beliefs, feelings, and parts of your identity you want to keep and leave behind what no longer serves you.

A student once asked why anyone would change a satisfactory life. Shouldn't you need to be unhappy before you leave it?

No. Wanting to become the next version of yourself is enough.

I have reinvented myself in business and in my personal life. I did it when my business was making a million dollars. I did it again when my kids went to college and I got divorced.

Those experiences helped me understand how much power, imagination, and energy I had not been accessing. They also showed me why reinvention is so different from making your current life a little better.

Stop living from multiple choice

Most of us are taught a certain set of options. We choose a career from the list, pick a major, and follow a path that has already been laid out.

First grade. Second grade. A job. Marriage. Children. A house.

There is nothing wrong with choosing those things. But the list is not the limit of what you can create.

Beyond the choices you have been given is an infinite number of possibilities you can invent. Instead of answering a multiple-choice question, you can write freehand.

Reinvention isn't switching from option A to option B inside the same box. It is questioning the box and starting with a blank sheet of paper.

That can be deeply uncomfortable. We are accustomed to being told where to go. Designing something new asks us to use our brains in a different way.

Release the success that limits you

Your current identity has helped create your current level of success.

That makes it difficult to release. You have evidence that your beliefs and habits work. Why would you let them go?

Because what got you here may not take you to an exponentially different future.

You can keep improving the existing version of your life. You can make a little more money and do a little better. Or you can ask what would be required to create something much bigger and different.

Sometimes you have to give up good to create great. In my business, becoming someone who could create forty million dollars required releasing the version of me who had created a million.

I wasn't just trying to improve the symptoms or effects of my life. I was reinventing who I was from the ground up.

Expect your brain to resist

The brain is designed for survival and protection. When your current life is comfortable and working, it sees no reason to change.

That is why people so often wait for a catalytic event. Something happens that makes staying the same impossible.

But you can choose change before tragedy requires it.

Notice the urge to grow even when your life is comfortable. That desire to create and evolve is part of how humans make what once seemed impossible possible.

Resistance also comes from cognitive dissonance. You have beliefs you have confirmed for years. Thinking something that contradicts them feels uncomfortable.

You may want the new future and still feel pulled toward the old formula. Understanding that resistance is part of the work.

Question the ingredients of your reality

Reinvention requires deeper intellectual work than you might expect.

You may have to imagine something you don't yet know how to imagine or believe something you don't yet know how to believe. It is like learning a new level of algebra. You push your brain to expand.

If you already understand the Model, you know that the world is a circumstance and that your thoughts create your interpretation of it.

Now look at the ingredients of that interpretation. Have you chosen them, or simply accepted them?

Your education can go in the C line. What do you make it mean? How do you interpret it? Does that interpretation make a new possibility available or limit what you think you can do?

Ask how you would redecide your life if you were starting over at your current age. What would you choose? Who would you become?

Let a bigger future reinvent you

A concept from The Last Word on Power helped me understand that creating a much bigger future can reinvent you.

Your future is what you are compelled to become. When you consciously imagine something beyond your current possibilities, you begin becoming the person required to create it.

If I keep adding a few million dollars to my business each year, people may still see me as successful. But that doesn't require the same reinvention as a hundred-million-dollar goal.

That bigger goal requires me to become a different business leader.

The same process changed my personal life. Releasing an old identity wasn't always comfortable, but I felt more like myself, not less. I became more alive to the experiences I wanted.

This is why releasing your identity can feel like a crisis. The old version is being challenged so a new one can emerge.

Choose, believe, and become

When I worked with a group whose goal was to become millionaires, we started by looking at what needed to go.

What wasn't working? What didn't we want anymore? What couldn't grow to the level we wanted?

The first phase is having the courage to release those things, even when you have invested in them.

The next phase is choosing and believing in a new version of yourself and a new way of living in the world.

Then you execute. You become that person and watch the world around you change.

You don't change your world and then become someone new. You change yourself, and your world changes.

If you are tired of this version of yourself, you don't have to stay there because your life is good. You can appreciate what you have and still let your brain explore what else is possible.

Let yourself dream in a way that challenges you. There are parts of you that you may not know yet because you haven't put yourself in a situation that lets you discover them.