By Emily Soccorsy

A couple of weeks after the official start of spring, I got the first cold I’ve had in at least a year. 

I cannot remember the last time I was sick. 

As I tend to do, my instinct was to ignore the cold and continue carrying on. But it came with a fair amount of fatigue, which made ignorance a flawed strategy. 

My body was signaling for me to slow down. 

I didn’t want to slow down. I wanted to keep up the brisk pace I had planned for the coming week, which included a holiday, visits from family and friends.

I’m not proud to say I did keep up the pace. Until I couldn’t. And I had to slow down and be in the discomfort. 

Rule 1: I believe 99% of reinvention begins with discomfort.

It’s exceedingly rare for a satisfied person with all the good things happening in their lives, smooth sailing, mis en place in life, to decide they want to reinvent.

Reinvention comes from dissatisfaction, pain, dis-ease, or a sudden or not-so-sudden change. 

In brands, it comes from:

• a better-branded competitor cropping up
• a slump in sales
• an increase in hires
• a big moment on the business’s horizon
• an expansion of the C-suite
• the opportunity to prepare to sell your business and map your next adventure. 

In many cases, we don’t explicitly ask for this discomfort, but this is life, so, lucky us, it finds us. 

Rule 2: Most often, denial is the first instinct.

Like me with my cold, it’s instinctual to ignore those first symptoms of reinvention creeping in. 

I’d rather not, no thank you. Double down on zinc and vitamin C and Zicam and go to bed early and return that cold to sender. 

But the option to reinvent is patient and abiding. 

Rule 3: Reinvention really is an opt-in. 

What you do when the reinvention siren song finally manages to get your attention dictates a lot of the road ahead.

Plenty of people look it in the face and say, “No thanks, I’m happy with this haircut from 1994.” Or they say, “We know our website is dated and no longer reflects what we do, but it’s too big of a job to change it.” 

Or they say, “I’m not really sure of what I want to say, or that I’m worthy of investing in myself to write that book, build that platform, or define my brand. Maybe when [insert some nebulous timeframe here] happens.”

That’s normal. Average. Kind of uninteresting in its commonness. 

To reinvent is to take a bold step. 

Reinvention is to agree to sit in the discomfort, to accept the harder thing.

It’s to dig deepy into what lives within your heart of hearts and make something new with it. 

Rule 4: Reinvention means being a beginner.

Reinvention is learning and falling down, it’s being a beginner again. The beginner thing sounds alright, maybe a little exciting at first, then rapidly feels like the worst idea you ever had.

Whenever I do a new workout, I wait for this specific moment.

Not the post-workout high, no. 

Not the thrill of hitting a PR with the weight. 

Or the euphoria of holding the pose.

Or the badassedness of enduring the infrared heat. 

It’s the moment when I think to myself, “I have made a grievous error in coming to this class/attempting this workout. This was a big mistake.”

That’s when I know something deeper and better is happening. 

Rule 5: If you feel like you’re crushing reinvention, you’re doing it wrong.

And that’s when I congratulate myself on meeting the challenge and being bad at it, or minimally adequate. 

I throw a little internal party for showing up, the outcome be damned.

Rule 6: Reinvention starts as an internal whisper.

As often as there are plentiful outside factors for reinvention, I believe they show up internally first. 

Something intuitively feels off. A prayer or reflection or an objective look at what you’ve been doing just does not capture your attention the way it did before. It might be as small as a sniffle in your heart, a tickle in the back of your throat about your direction. 

It’s our first job to pay attention to that.

To note it. 

To push the fear aside and ask one deeper question about what it might want to be.

That’s actually the first step of reinvention. 

Rule 7: Stop and notice.

Just notice. 

Once you’re done with that, here are a few first steps to consider:

• Tell someone you trust about this sniffle or siren song.
• Take one small step toward the reinvention. It can be as small as researching authorship or personal brand. 
• Rest with the idea that you might be at the start of a reinvention. Accept it. See how it settles for you. What ideas come your way in the breath of acceptance?
• Make some notes about what’s possible. Do not judge what comes out. When you’re done, set it aside for a few days and then revisit it. 

What holds your attention?

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