More on reinventing

In this episode, we explore more of the practical details about reinventing ourselves to adapt within a changing world

After the last episode, on ‘Reinventing ourselves’, several people asked me to go into more depth about the whole process.

You know, how to actually do it.

And preferably come out at least somewhat sane at the other end of it…

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Yes, I know: it can be hard. Usually is, actually. And yes, part of that’s because of the old metaphoric ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ thing, and also because it’s hard to trust that the path you’ve just started to follow won’t fizzle out just around the next corner and leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere with some great big King Brown Snake getting angry at you just beneath your feet. (Yeah, that last bit does tend to happen for real around here, if we’re not careful. Not a fun experience.)

So how do we avoid that? How do we get this ‘reinventing ourselves’ thing to actually work?

What most people would do at this point is to go looking for some kind of roadmap. And yes, there are a few of those out there.

For example, there’s the Japanese concept of ikigai, or literally ‘a reason for being’, that’s supposed to guide us to ‘a long and happy life’ - or so says the blurb of the book beside me right now. The ikigai frame is usually described in the form of a four-way Venn-diagram, with its four overlapping circles representing what we’re good at, what we love, what the world needs from us, and what we can get paid for. The overlaps between each pair of circles respectively represent our passion, our mission, our vocation and our profession; and the point where all of these meet up in the middle and balance out with each other is our ikigai. Which is nice and all, but most current descriptions don’t seem go into any more detail beyond the usual ‘Just Do It’. Hmm. So yes, it could be a good visual-checklist for some, but that’s probably about it. Oh well.

Personally, I’ve had more success with the approach used in Richard Nelson Bolles’ now-classic book What Color Is Your Parachute? It’s built around another flower-like visual-checklist, with a ring of six petals around the outside, and another single petal in the middle. The main emphasis there is about choosing the type of organisation you’d want to work in, so the petals are where you’d list what you’d want that organisation to be doing, who the people would be, what working-conditions, what pay and responsibility you’d want, where it would be, and for what purpose in a human sense. The middle petal is where you’d list the skills that you could bring to the table, and you then try to match those up with what you’ve described on the outer ring. So far, so ikigai-ish, on the surface: but he does go into much more detail, with many sets of step-by-step instructions all the way through, which does make it a lot more useful and usable.

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Those frameworks can help in this process, yes, though there’s a real danger in relying too much on those alone to do the work that’s needed here. I remember a colleague who came to me one day, a few years ago now, wanting to rebuild his own business-model - in essence, reinventing both himself and the way that he worked. He waved a couple of well-known ikigai-like frameworks at me: “these just don’t help”, he wailed, “it’s like looking in a mirror, they don’t show me anything that I don’t already know!” So instead we just sat down and had a conversation, about events in his past, his aims for the future, and above all, the things that mattered to him.

And that’s what worked, most of all. His main work was as a concept-designer, building computer-based graphic models of houses and cities and machines and other things like that. But the problem was that he didn’t really enjoy doing that work any more, and he couldn’t work out what to do about that. As the conversation went on, it became clear that whilst he did like the technical challenge of building those visual-models, what he enjoyed even more was something else that he did within that work, but hadn’t really noticed as part of that work: the process of research and sensemaking that would underpin those models. Neither of those two themes was enough on its own: the technical work alone had become boring; and he know that no-one would pay him just to do the research. But combining the two themes together brought it all alive for him again, and was also what completed his ikigai: he was good at the technical work; he loved that element of research; the world did indeed want the results of that work; and yes, they were willing to pay for it, too.

There’s another whole story about what happened next, but we don’t need to dive into that detail here. The main point is just that, within a week, he’d rebuilt his business model and his whole approach to the work; and it’s been going really well for him ever since. He’d reinvented himself, in a very real, tangible way.

And to be honest, I didn’t do all that much there to make that happen: all I really did was a bit of guiding-of-the-conversation, that’s all. The insights that created that reinvention did sort-of come out of that conversation, yes: but the insights themselves all came from him, not me. And that’s actually a really important point here: frameworks and other people can help to trigger those insights, and the knowledge of how to use those insights, yet for the most part all of that only comes from us. The trick is in how to bring out, from within ourselves, whatever it is that we didn’t know that we already knew, to make that change happen.

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So yes, that part worked, and worked well. Yet never forget that this process of reinventing ourselves is less about changing what we do, but far more about changing who we are. There is an interweaving between those two themes here, yet ultimately the ‘what we do’ bit comes after the work on reframing ‘who we are’. As I mentioned in the previous episode, in essence it’s a spiritual process, first and foremost, right down to the roots:

“a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self, and of relationship with that which is greater than self”

In that sense, sure, we do need to think about this, and do things about it, too; yet we also need to take care not to get lost in overthinking about it all. That’s not how this works: it’s much quieter, much more subtle - and if we try to solve it all by thinking, all that we’d be doing is getting in our own way. As in my colleague’s story above, it was that kind of overthinking that had got him stuck in the first place - and that’s what we’d had to help him loosen off and let go of, in the first part of that conversation. There was nothing wrong as such with the frameworks that he’d used: it was the tendency to overthink it all that had led him astray into stuckness.

That kind of mistake does tend to happen a lot when we’re reinventing ourselves.

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Ah, right. There’s a lot more to cover on this, about story and storyworlds; about how to find the right storyworld for our own and others’ needs, and to share with others as well; and about how to find our own place where we fit best within that storyworld, and where the storyworld supports us too. But I’ve rather run out of time and space for that this week, so we’ll stop here for now, and continue onward in next week’s episode.

In the meantime, though, I hope you’ve found this useful so far, to support your own path in reinventing ourselves for the world ahead.

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