In the blog post, Four Principles of Reinvention, I introduced the following principles:
1. Reinvention is the focus, but it’s not the main event.
2. There’s no map.
3. Your first priority work in any reinvention is to stay tuned into your true self.
4. Your emotions are your personalized, customized, internal navigation system.

This blog post explores Principle #2 in more detail.

Reinvention is a coming home to your true self, a process of coming more into alignment with who you really are. It’s a process of discovery, coming into a deeper understanding of your authentic self.

The authentic you is always evolving, ever changing.

There can’t be a map, because your reinvention is the process of achieving more alignment with your evolving, true self. You, and consequently your reinvention, are moving and changing all the time.

As we explored in Principle #1, as you reinvent, you are expressing aspects of yourself that haven’t had full expression before. And it is a journey that is unique to you. So, again, there isn’t a roadmap in which you can clearly see the route and the destination.

Joseph Campbell said: “If there is a path, it is someone else’s path, and you are not on the adventure.”

The path emerges step by step as you stay in tune with your authentic self.

There may or may not be a clear destination when you embark on your reinvention.

Some reinventers have a relatively clear vision of a destination. For example, stay-at-home moms who want to re-enter a specific career in the corporate world. Or someone who wants to move out of a corporate career and move to the country to write that book that has been calling them.

Often a reinventing client who comes to me has no idea whether she wants to be an attorney or a bee keeper in her ‘next life’. But she does know that she has been living out of integrity with her true self.

I previously mentioned the article in O, The Oprah Magazine (September, 2007): What do you really want to do with your life? In that article, reinventer Chandra Greer says “I was an executive at an ad firm, and I felt as if the space between who I was and who I had to be for my career was huge. In 1997 I quit with no idea what to do next.” Chandra eventually opened a stationary and paper store, Greer, in Chicago, and she has found her true self and her true place. She says, “I should never have been in business anywhere else.”

Whether you know your destination or not, the process is always the same: discover who you are at a deep level and feel your way, trusting that the answers you need are within you. (More about the ‘how’ of this in Reinvention Principles 3 and 4, to come.)

If you expect to follow a ‘cookie cutter’ formula or a prescribed path, you will just be setting yourself up for frustration. And more than that, you will be depriving yourself of the best part of a reinvention: engaging with the creative energy of life, coming more into your true self, and feeling more alive and vital every day.

What if you accept, even embrace, that there isn’t a map? How would that change you and your reinvention?

When you move step-by-step, feeling your way by checking in with your inner guidance, you allow room for unexpected twists and turns that turn out to be brilliant thresholds. Often, in a reinvention, the moves that may seem like detours turn out to be magnificent synchronicities.

Filed under: Four Principles of Reinvention on October 25th, 2007