Most of us grew up with either a family structure or a culture that expected us to make good decisions and stick with them.

Noble intention, but can be death to the spirit, especially for Reinventers.

If we expect ourselves to make nearly perfect decisions as we set off on our reinvention, we will most likely hold ourselves back from the choices that will give us the most feedback as to who we are and what we want. And we will probably miss the adventure, too.

Example: I had a friend with whom I grew up in California. She had always longed to live in a big city. We had grown up semi-rural. After I moved to downtown Chicago, she decided that it was time to make her big move. She got a job in Chicago and moved to there. While this was a huge change for her, I was there and she was ready for a big adventure.

After about 10 months, she realized something really important. While she loved her job, and actually adored living in the city, she missed her family and friends in California, desperately.

She was a pretty self-aware person, and she had known before she pulled up roots that family, connection, and community were all really important to her. But she had no idea how important they really were until she was away from them. Life was giving her great feedback.

There are obviously lots of lessons here, but I think the most important one for reinventers is that sometimes you do know what’s important, but you don’t know what’s essential, in a reinvention, until you actually get out there and try some things.

That took guts. Big time. If she had held herself accountable for making perfect decisions, even ‘good’ ones, by some outside standards, she might not have ever taken the risk. Or, if she had, she might now be spending a lot of time and energy beating up on herself for making that decision.

In my mind, she absolutely made the right decision, because she learned a lot about herself and what she wants, and she exercised the ‘adventure muscle’, which feeds the spirit.

So, she moved back to California, settled in San Francisco, and pretty much lived happily ever after. Her family, while not in immediate vicinity, are close, and she moved to a city neighborhood with a real sense of community. She gets together with her friends that she grew up with on weekends.

Does this mean she was ‘going back’? No, she was definitely moving forward, more in alignment with her true self and what she wanted than she ever would have been if she had never made the move to Chicago.

When I work with a life coaching client who is reinventing, this is the work. We identify core values and create an authentic life and work vision. Then it’s time to get out and test it. There is some feedback that you can only get by getting into action. There’s no failure, only feedback.

The road for a reinventer is a feedback loop of insight and action. Deeper insight, from reflection, gives you the information you need to set the course. Taking action gives you further insight, from which to tweak the plan.

Sometimes you can build a bridge, and it’s good when you can. I’ve have many colleagues who are coaches who have taken this approach in changing their careers. One example is my friend Tim, who was an accountant. He wanted to be a life coach. So he kept his ‘day job’ while he got trained and certified as a coach. Then he continued to work at his job while he started with a few clients. He built his coaching practice to the point where the income allowed him to resign from his job and become a full-time coach.

This approach also gives you quality, real-time feedback, versus just thinking it through in your head. But it isn’t always practical or possible to build a bridge. Sometimes it’s just time to take the leap.

I saw something recently in More Magazine about a way you can actually try out a career you have always dreamed of, such as Architect, or Dude Rancher, or Song Writer, or Real Estate Broker. Vocation Vacations “enables you to test-drive your dream job,” in a vacation where you pitch in and do the work. I don’t know anything about it personally, but it sounds like a good idea to me. You get feedback and adventure, together in one neat package, at low risk. The article reference is Trading Places, More Magazine, February 2007.

This all brings me to a really important point: Reinventions take time.

Finding our authentic selves, and discovering the ways to best express our true selves in life and work is a process.

I know I am stating the obvious here, but many of us launch a reinvention with a particular time frame in mind and find that it takes much longer than we thought it would. And there are usually many surprising twists and turns along the way as we discover ourselves. It’s usually a circuitous route.

So it’s good to expect it to take longer than you imagine it possibly could, and plan accordingly, with resources such as money and patience.

Don’t hold yourself accountable to make all the ‘right’ decisions in your reinvention. They are all right decisions when you are moving closer to knowing and expressing your authentic self.

When you step out there, you find yourself, and that’s the whole point anyway, isn’t it?

START HERE:

Action: Test out this approach with smaller, less risky decisions. Make a choice on something you are wavering on, just to get the feedback that action will give you. Celebrate the movement forward and assess the feedback, letting it inform your next move. Don’t hold yourself accountable to have the whole plan in place ahead of time.

Insight: What did you learn about yourself when you took a bold, no-guarantee move?

Filed under: Your Map, Being a Reinventer on May 11th, 2007