Self-awareness is the key to igniting the how in reinvention.
Many tools, strategies, and questionnaires out there are designed to help you better understand yourself.
Which ones are the best?
Which ones should you use?
How do you use them? Are they a once off?
Why should you better understand yourself for reinvention?
There is no right answer. The science is trial and error, however, the formula for success is to keep going until you find what works for you.
Modern cognitive psychology explains how human behaviour is driven by internal emotional factors such as preferences, beliefs, values, and past experiences. These factors, often unconscious, dictate 90% of our choices and decisions, as characterised by concepts like the iceberg theory.
If most of us are so unaware of ourselves, how can we reinvent? If you’ve felt the itch of why you should reinvent you’ve already taken the first step.
When asked, “What is your purpose?” or “What is your passion?” More often that not, we end up with a frog lodged in our throats.
Purpose, like reinvention is fluid. Your purpose today, may not have been your purpose in the past, and may be different in the future.
As James Altucher said in ‘Choose Yourself’, “Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives“.
If you know your purpose great, but if you don’t then don’t worry.
It’s about discovering your whys in life and starting as a means to understanding how.
Here are some things I’ve begun doing that have helped me on my reinvention journey:
Increase your self awareness by asking three (3) or five (5) whys. My favourite to start with is :
“Why do you want to reinvent?”
From there you can expand further.
‘Pivot’ author and entrepreneur Jenny Blake challenges the notion that reinvention is about taking a 180° from you current situation. Reinvention is closer than you think.
Three questions she asks are:
- What do find exciting or enjoy doing/learning?
- What skills or talents do you have? (These may be unrelated to your work)
- What impact do you want to make/ what do people need?
Another way, is to identify your ‘Ikigai‘. Ikigai (生き甲斐) is Japanese for ‘reason for being’ or ‘why you get up the morning’. Dan Buettner’s Ted Talk goes into this further.
Whitney Johnson in ‘Disrupt Yourself’ focuses on playing to your distinctive strengths as a roadmap to your why.
- What skills have helped you survive?
- What makes you feel strong?
- What exasperates you about others? Why?
- What made you different, even oddball as a child?
- What compliments do you shrug off?
- What are your hard-won skills?
In the ‘4 Hour Work Week’ Tim Ferriss focuses a section on ‘Definition’ where you can define your life whys with questions such as:
- How has being realistic or responsible kept you from the life you want?
- What are you putting off out of fear?
- What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?
Up till this point, it’s been positive. But if you are a suffering reinventor purpose or passion may be muddied waters. Admittedly, I had been burdened by the notion of purpose for a long time. In some ways, I still am.
If like me, what can you do?
Angela Maiers examines a concept known as ‘Heartbreak Mapping‘. Heartbreak mapping moves through your suffering as the driver to taking action.
Might sound counter intuitive, but often it’s harder for us to explain what we do like/love/feel passion for, and easier for us to articulate what we don’t like.
- What breaks your heart is something you find compelling
- It may uncover your cause or what you stand for
- It reveals skills you need to move closer to solving that heartbreak
- It’s a strong motivator to make change
Whether professionally or personally, heartbreak and pain are our lowest points. We learn and grow most from that suffering. It shapes us. The choice of using heartbreak as a catapult for reinvention gives remarkable potential.
“Don’t get ready, get started”
What are my whys?
For some, understanding what you stand for is crystal clear, for others it’s an overwhelming mess. I'm more inclined to be close to the latter. It’s okay to feel that way and to not know exactly. What I've uncovered through self-discovery is that:
- I want to live a life of impact and fulfilment
- I want to help others and contribute to something greater
- Helping others is when I feel the biggest sense of achievement
- I want to enjoy what I do
- I want to continuously learn and be challenged
- I want to feel connected and have extraordinary human experiences
These whys are currently in a broad ‘vision’. They will evolve as I continue to reinvent. Again, the key is to start somewhere.
What have I done?
- I've brainstormed the my desired impact (problem to be solved), where and how
- For the last 1½–2 years, I’ve consumed knowledge on personal disruption, entrepreneurship, and psychology. Follow your interests!
- I've focused on narrowing down fears, and actionable steps to alleviate them
- I've created an ongoing plan — I’ve slowly learnt more on digital marketing, content management (CMS), and web-design (still so much to learn!)
- I've prepared goals for 2017, and incorporated Pareto’s 80–20 through the Start-Stop-More-Less model
- I've made steps to review my actions and wider strategy and change were necessary
- I've got mentors/trusted advisers who give me regular feedback/ highlight blindspots
- I've keep logs of my progress, what I’ve done and what I have to do.
- I got off my butt and started this site.
Truth is creating is positively uplifting and rewarding. With the daily hustle, societal norms, and expectations I believe many of us have always innately known our whys or believed we could create something we forgot we could. I know I had.
Stories by Trinh has been a gradual process with still much further to go. I’ve really enjoyed the ride. It’s frustratingly challenging and exhilarating at the same time. It’s energy giving which comes from within me and not from anyone else. There’s power in that. You can find that power too.
Understanding yourself is the first step of starting. With that momentum the aim is to keep at it.
If you’ve developed a stronger sense of yourself, the next question you’re probably asking is: how do I use what I know to reinvent/ create value? What do you do with these answers? How do I know they’re right?
You begin testing them.
In a future How to Reinvent post, let's explore how to test what you’ve learnt about yourself to reinvent.
