Change Leads to Re-evaluation and Growth
So you've made a big life change OR you want to change your life one one way or another... Now what do you do?
That's the question I was faced with after I left my job and the corporate environment, following a 30 year career. Even though I knew it was the right decision and I knew what I wanted to do next, questions came at me fast and furious. Who am I? Who do I need to be for this next stage of my life? What do I do now? Where do I start? I realized that my job was a very big part of my identity and without that to hang my hat on, I felt a bit lost. Who was I going to be if not the first to turn the lights on in the office? And at the same time, I suffered from "Imposter Syndrome". Who am I to make such a big decision? Why would anyone want to hear my story? Why would anyone listen to what I have to say? I have been pondering these questions and many more for the last couple of weeks and here is what I learned:
Life change = re-evaluation
Whenever you enter a new stage in life, you have to reevaluate yourself and take inventory of your skills. What worked for you in the past may not work for you for what you want to do now. Spending all this time in corporate made me who I am today. I made a lot of mistakes. I engaged with and learned from a lot of people and it served me well.
I needed to take stock and determine what skills I wanted to keep because they would serve me moving forward, like Interpersonal and Organizational Skills, and what I could set aside because I would not need it for the next phase, such as describing top, middle and bottom notes of fragrances.
You CAN teach an old dog new tricks
Our past does not define our future. We, as humans, are malleable. We must be on a continuous growth path. William S. Burroughs is credited with the quote, “When you stop growing, you start dying” and Lou Holtz said: “In this world, you’re either growing or you’re dying, so get in motion and grow.” When you think about nature, it either grows and dies. It also grows through death, as we can witness every fall with the changing of the leaves. Therefore, the question becomes "who do I need to be now in order to succeed in this new challenge?"
To help me with this, I decided to take a fresh look at myself and my new career and determine who I needed to be from here on to give myself the greatest chance of success and write my Personal Manifesto.
You can do this anytime!
The beauty of this re-evaluation is that you do not need to wait for a major life event. You can decide that who you are today no longer serves you and deliberately draw a path for change.
You want to quit smoking, but have been struggling with quitting your whole life? That's because being a smoker is part of your identity. The first step in making the change is deciding you are no longer a smoker and affirming that to yourself. Start identifying as a non-smoker. You have had bad health habits for as long as you remember? Start identifying as a healthy person.
It may feel weird in the beginning, but the more you do it, the more you will find yourself living up to your new identity. Of course, that is not enough, you have to put other actions behind it that reinforce and support this new vision for yourself. However, step by step you can forge a NEW you! I hope this short guide can help you on your journey, the same way it helped me: https://coachalex.mykajabi.com/personal-manifesto.
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