The Art of Reinvention

Reinventing Your Life… The Art of Reinvention

Sometimes, life has a way of knocking us down hard. Loss, tragedies, setbacks, and emotional trauma can derail and devastate us. Many times, we lack the resilience to pick ourselves up and move on, so we continue struggling within a cycle of aimlessness, confusion, and unhappiness. If this resonates with you, you may be ready to embrace the art of reinvention.

Life can derail you but you should never allow it to destroy your hopes and chances for happiness and success. And this can mean reinventing yourself and starting anew. It’s one of the most powerful – and surprisingly simple – decisions you can make. But the outcome brings a fresh start, a new and vastly improved you, and untapped opportunities for success and greatness.

When you feel you’ve got nowhere to turn, you turn to yourself to find all the answers you need. Reinventing yourself happens from the inside out and reshapes you – and your external world for the better. Yes, you’re that powerful, as you’ll discover by when you finish reading this guide!

Happiness means different things for each of us. Love, career success, wealth, or friendship; we strive to find our happiness in different things. Sometimes, it can seem fleeting or completely unattainable. This is because there can be roadblocks standing between you and your personal happiness.

What Does Reinventing Yourself Mean?

Starting anew involves developing a mindset that comes from within you and spills over into every area of your life. It involves changing traits and behaviors that are limiting you or are no longer serving you. In fact, they’re now impeding your progress

Starting anew could include breaking bad habits, working on personal flaws and adopting new behaviors or skills that will allow you to bounce back stronger than before and allow you to become your best possible self.

By choosing to read this book, you’ve already taken a courageous first step. You’ve acknowledged that you’re in the wrong place in your life right now and that happiness is impossible to achieve in the current situation. The bottom line is that you’re seeking change.

Being prepared to make big changes in your life is indeed courageous because for many of us, accepting change, much less initiating it is daunting and frightening. Your willingness to change your life is the biggest guarantee that you’ll achieve spectacular success. Some of these ideas may raise your skepticism but when you see how they all come together to empower you, you’ll be eager to start implementing them right away!

Creating an Alter Ego to Begin the Process of the Art of Reinvention

Your first step is to begin forming a mental picture of your future self. This is difficult to do out of thin air. Let’s say you aspire to be more purposeful and decisive. How exactly do you go about doing that? How do you act and how do you speak?

Creating an alter ego not only helps you identify the qualities and behaviors that you want to adopt but makes them more tangible. Don’t worry! This may sound a little weird and uncomfortable but it doesn’t mean unplugging from reality and living in a fantasy world. It’s a very powerful technique that enables you to create a clear image of the future you.

“Alter ego” literally means your other ‘I’ in the sense of a trusted twin or friend that you can rely on. It’s not someone totally different from you but in fact, a new and improved version of yourself with all the positive qualities that you want to attain.

The goal of creating an alter ego is to gradually ease out of your present self and into your new self, which already exists within you.

Creating Your Alter Ego to Pursue the Art of Reinvention

• Find a role model
Create your alter ego by drawing on a role model that you admire or someone who inspires you. These can be well-known people or someone in your circle of acquaintances such as a supervisor, parent, or friend. You can also draw on childhood idols such as a special teacher or an older sibling.

Drawing on a film or fictional characters film but take care to be realistic. James Bond minus the superhuman stunts and shootouts can be a good alter ego if you aspire to be calm, collected, and purposeful (with some dry wit to top it all off). I began with Oprah Winfrey on my path to the art of reinvention, and quickly switched to a mentor who was helping me to build and grow my online business.

• Analyze your role model
Take some time to get to know your role model in depth by doing some research or brainstorming. Reflect deeply on the person’s special traits that inspire you to emulate them.

List their unique traits in order of their importance to you. Reflect on specific situations where they really dazzled and stood out. Identify what it was that allowed them to be so awesome.

Next, start analyzing their characteristics further by answering the following questions:

• How would they behave in a crisis or emergency?
• What type of people would they surround themselves with?
• What would their habits be?
• How would they structure their day?
• How would they deal with difficult people?

Visualize how your role would behave and speak in various situations and take a minute to reflect on whether you’d behave in the same way.

Another fun but powerful visualization to explore is to put your role model in your shoes. How would they behave at your workplace? How would they interact with your friends and family? How would they go through your daily activities?

• Stick to one role model
Don’t confuse yourself by picking more than one role model or combining traits from different people. It might be hard to make a choice but make sure you pick just one person whose qualities resonate the most with you.

• Borrow, don’t mimic
You don’t become a copy of your chosen role model or mimic their dress, speech, or gestures. The goal isn’t to become a clone of someone else but to develop your own unique alter ego. You identify the qualities that you want to adopt as part of your future self – which is a better version of the current you and not somebody else.

For example, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you might be inspired by someone like Brendon Burchard or Richard Branson. Read about them, read their quotes and other interesting facts about them, and begin trying to think and act like them – but not to become them!

In each situation, you’d ask yourself, “What would Brendon Burchard do?” Well, he’d probably not delay making an important decision or hesitate about speaking his mind very clearly… This is what your alter ego would then need to do.

• Visualize yourself as your alter ego
Spend a week visualizing yourself as your alter ego every day. Just sit in a quiet place, close your eyes, and let your imagination guide you for at least 5 minutes.

Visualize different scenarios with you as your alter ego interacting with others, attending a meeting, speaking over the phone, or just going through a typical day. Focus on how you would bring all your new qualities to everything that you do.

• Start stepping into your alter ego
Now, it’s time to practice the real thing! Ease yourself into your alter ego with tiny steps at first. Pick one quality that you’ll bring into play and practice it for a few days before moving on to the next.

Let’s say you want to become more purposeful and proactive. Stay alert to your thought process and behavior and start acting with more purposefulness every chance you get. Continue to practice for a few days until it starts coming naturally and you don’t have to think about doing it.

Next, move on to another quality, such as becoming a more attentive listener or expressing your emotions more. Give yourself time to ease in before moving on to the next quality and so on.

Throughout this process, keep your alter ego in mind and always ask how he or she would behave and speak.

The bottom line: Your alter ego is very powerful and empowering. It’s the first step in beginning your transformation from the inside out. Continue to practice and give yourself time to adapt and embrace the qualities that will make you a new and better person.

Over time, you’ll begin to change into your alter ego and ease out of your old, less powerful self. And you’ll be nothing less than amazed at what has occurred in your life with the art of reinvention!

I’m Connie Ragen Green, reinventing myself in real time and living for each moment of my life experience, so far. Come along with me, if you will and let’s discover, together, what is destined to unfold over time.