Re-inventing yourself

by Vic A

For those of you who have or are still toiling it away in the corporate world, you know very well that you need to keep re-inventing yourself if you don’t want to be left behind by the rest.  People who are willing to change the way they see and do certain things, and even the way they present themselves outwardly are usually the ones who set out to achieve bigger and better things.  A person’s openness to re-inventing himself or herself is a strong predictor of growth.

You would have seen people who re-invent themselves for the better, beyond recognition and there are those who refuse to change at all, while others re-invent themselves for the worse, beyond redemption.

The good thing about the corporate environment is the presence of a structured system to help you re-invent yourself and a feedback mechanism that is in place to see whether you are on track.  As an example, there are training courses that you can go to if you want to improve on a specific skill, there is a secondment program where you can go to another role to expand your skill sets and still can go back to your old role, there is a mentoring program where you can learn from people within the organization who have already reached a certain level and so on.

But to some people, the word re-inventing somehow has a bad connotation.  “Why would I want to re-invent myself, I like me the way I am”, some of you are probably saying. Different people have different take on re-inventing.  Some are like sponges who just would love to keep re-inventing themselves while others think they’re already too perfect or too old, they don’t need re-inventing.

I used to work with someone who is very skilled at so many things but he doesn’t seem to be getting ahead in his professional career.  If you look at him, he’s got all the credentials and the experience to boot.  How come he can’t seem to get to where he wants to be?  And the more I learn about this person the more I realize that he’s not prepared to re-invent himself.

My personal assessment is, he’s stuck with his old successes and still living in them.  He has ‘success hang-over’.  He feels that he’s better than most people and he will never learn anything new from anyone.  Every time he goes to training courses, he fails to get any fresh perspective because he’s thinking, “I have done this before or what can I learn from this facilitator, he’s not even achieved half of what I have done”.  He’s closed his mind to learn new things and that’s what he gets.  He’s just too proud to admit that he needs to forget his past successes and learn new stuff, and sometimes, learn from people more junior than himself.  Some of us tend to get too caught up in our past successes that we fail to see the new opportunity that is staring us on the face.  We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that we can’t possibly learn from this younger person, "I have been doing this for so long".

I know people who, when we were younger, didn’t really show a lot of promise.  And if I look at them now, they are a picture of success, power and confidence.  It’s really hard to predict how a person’s life will turn out.  I am sure there are a lot of variables affecting how a person’s future pans out but I also believe that one’s openness to re-inventing himself or herself has a lot to do with it.

Conversely, how many people do you know who are really smart but can’t translate that smartness to creating something really significant?  Some of the smartest people are the worst employees for example.  They tend to talk down on their bosses because they feel they are smarter than the boss.  But the reality is, these smart people don’t grasp the concept of learning from others and being open to other people’s points of view.  If they’re really smart then they need to be more open-minded and more collaborative.

That’s the reason why many of the smart people want to be inventors, producing great inventive products because they prefer to work on their own.  The trouble is, they usually don’t know how to collaborate – another important skill that smart people need to learn.  How many inventions by smart people eventually went to the hands of the business savvy people and didn’t get much out of it?  Had they been better at collaborating and better at selling their creations, they would probably have made more money out of them.  More often than not, it’s the business savvy people who end up benefiting more from these creations.  

But then you say, maybe the inventors don’t really want more money for their creation.  Usually they would, except that they didn’t know any better.  They think that collaborating is a dirty game and it’s not for them.  Or maybe, they are just naturally good at creating things but lousy marketers.  Some months ago, I was talking to an inventor who developed a really innovative product that could be used across many industries.  However, he was very hesitant to collaborate for fear that he might lose control of his invention.  This is despite the pathways that I could open up for his invention, he decided to follow a different path.

An extreme example of re-inventing oneself is the story of a friend of mine.  I am sure she won’t mind using her as a case study here.  She was a successful lawyer working for one of the prestigious law firms in Manila and she’s achieved great things even while she was a law student.  And then one day, she just decided to quit lawyering to follow her true passion, that of creative writing.  She claims that being a lawyer is really her dad’s dream for her, not hers.  Her real dream for herself was to become a writer.  And writer she became.

She moved from being a top lawyer to a student of creative writing, re-inventing herself and not worried one bit that she’s going to learn and perfect a new skill.  But since she really loves writing, she didn’t mind going through that process of re-invention.  Maybe it is not a real re-invention for her because she loves writing – maybe it’s just a re-direction.  And what a road she took – she ended up winning prestigious national literary awards in short story writing and she’s never been more fulfilled as a creative person.

But I am not even talking about this very extreme life-altering re-invention of self.  I am talking about acquiring new skills that would bring us to another stage in our lives, or maybe moving to a new city to start a new life, or maybe start living on your own and moving out of your parents’ house, or even just as simple as deciding to be fitter (maybe that’s not too simple!).

Personally, re-inventing is more about changing what you are and not about changing who you are.  So as a person, you are still the same.  It’s more refining what you already have and using these to your advantage.