2019, is it time to reinvent yourself?

The beginning of another new year, and I hope you’re feeling rested, with renewed energy and focus.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I have two bets to make. The first is that you’re a thoughtful, forward thinking person and that you care deeply about your future and career. The next, is that the current trend of disruptive technology and the corresponding wild market swings will continue to grow. I think we’re in for a wild year. 

I’m also willing to bet that you’ve reflecting upon your past year and the year to come. What kind of year was 2018 for you? Did you achieve what you set out to do this year when the ball dropped on 2017? Do you see yourself as the same person as you were this time last year?

I don’t have to tell you that the world is speeding up, and again, based on your information diet, consisting of reading articles on LinkedIn, I’ll bet that you’re doing a great job of staying ahead of the pack. The challenge that presents us ahead, is that the crazy growth curve of our world, is going parabolic. Technology is now changing so fast, that the job market, and the stock market for that matter, are like increasingly nauseating rollercoasters these days. I don’t have to tell you that technological unemployment is going to change the game for all of us. Even if your job isn’t being threatened by machines, other humans, recently displaced will begin to encroach.

So, what to do? If you have a minute or two to read on, I elaborate, but in short, it might be time to re-invent yourself. I have some experience in this area, I’ve gone through some rather disruptive life changes myself, these last couple years. I feel obligated to share some of my journey if I’m going to share about how you might go about such a task for yourself. What I’ve come to, is that there’s 3 key steps, to becoming the “new you”, the person you’ve been wanting to become, the person who can carry you and your career into this uncertain future. 

Find yourself. Find your mission. Rally your team.

Even if you can't even be bothered to read beyond this point, please, do those things for your self and your life. They sound simple, but as I say a lot, simple is rarely easy. If you want to learn more about how to accomplish each, read on. If you want even more, click the picture below to visit the blog.

Feel free to skip to the good stuff, past my personal story and to the end, where I describe these steps. But, I’d like to tell you a little bit about why I’ve come to these conclusions, so you can do what you will with the information and tips I share. This article is a bit of a read, but re-invention is hardly a light topic, and I refuse to skim this subject and fail to do justice to the great undertaking that is the conscious re-shaping of your life.

My, less than smooth, personal re-invention

Three years ago, a massive change was coming for us, and it completely upended our lives. My husband and I decided it was time to start a family, and more quickly than expected, we became pregnant. This decision led us to moving to a new province, the eventual wind-down of the business I’d grown and run for over a decade, the beginning of a new business, a whole new person in our family, and a whole new me. It was hardly a smooth ride.

My husband and I were a professional couple running our own consulting business, living in a downtown Calgary executive in-fill, and left to become new parents on a fixer-upper with untreated well water on Vancouver Island, learning to share space with my in-laws as we embarked on a 2 home on 5 acres, semi-homesteading life-style. Talk about whip-lash.

Looking down the road at the change that was coming for us, the transition to becoming parents, made me see how the life I was living, was about to stop working. I needed to reinvent my life and circumstances, before that change meant I would run out of options and support. I used to treasure that executive-style home filled with high-end furnishings, but with a baby on board, my new perspective showed me a treacherous space, an environment loaded with dangers. So much glass and so many stairs… no amount of baby proofing would make it a family friendly home. My husband worked out of town, and while that allowed me to put in ridiculous hours into our company, the Consulting Cooperative, it meant I had little to no support at home, and that I would also be far too busy with a new baby to keep such a demanding business running. My office would have had to become the baby’s room, and that said it all.

With the continuing slide of the Calgary economy, it was becoming harder and harder to keep our consultants busy and it meant I had to work harder and harder to keep things going. It would be very difficult to continue to earn at a level that would justify hiring a live-in nanny, (which is what I’d need) and for what? So, I could work 80-hour weeks, now at a kitchen table, and see less and less benefit for it, AND miss the precious time with our daughter?

I had to make a change, before it was too late and life circumstances had us rooted in place.

We knew what we wanted in the long run. We wanted to live closer to our family, for support and so our family and children could grow up together. We wanted a more holistic lifestyle, my husband and I love gardening and nature. Although it seems diametrically opposed to my IT, architecture and engineering career-self, I’ve had a long-standing mission to remove the chemicals from our everyday lives, as I discovered I was having allergic reactions to these substances that lurk in the food we eat, to the skin care and home cleaning products we use. In my off-time from the technical work I did to earn income, I learned to make soap and skin cream and even makeup. It was an all-consuming task that was quickly out growing the space we had in our downtown home.

I could feel myself and our lives changing, that what I was becoming, would no longer fit in the life we’d built.

So, we gathered our closest family members and came up with a plan. My in-laws were also in a state of flux in their lives. They’d sold their property a year earlier and were renting it from the new owner, temporarily. Together we decided we’d combine forces and we found a slice of heaven to share.

My mother in law, Shari, is a natural caregiver and her happiest time is spent with her grandchildren. She was still working as an executive administrator and was tiring of the demands of the corporate world. Luckily, she and I have always gotten along well, and she’d worked for our consulting company years before. She and I used to lament when our men had to leave for their jobs for long spans of time, and it was our mutual goal to get to somehow live our lives in parallel. She’d be happy to watch her grandchildren for the days, and it meant she could retire, and I could go back to work.

When I was in Calgary, I saw this goal, and realized there was only a narrow window to make it happen. It wasn’t going to be easy, but we’d do what was necessary to get there. With sadness, I saw a looming end to my business in Calgary. A change was going to be forced on me, I wanted to use that opportunity and eventuality to make the change we wanted, in the long run, no matter what it took in the short term.

This, while it was everything I asked for, it was an incredibly challenging series of changes and growth to get there. Two and a half years later, we’re on a beautiful piece of land together, where we share resources and support. Our two household on one acreage family, eats most of our meals together. We host family feasts regularly and our daughter gets to play with her 3 doting older cousins regularly.

Now, I’m building a new business with the support of my family, as our beautiful little girl gets to spend her days with Mommy working from home and Shari (her “Omi”) watching over her through much of the daytime.

To deal with all the changes that were happening in my life, I had to reach inwards, and lean on the material that I had created when I helped others in similar times of change. I had to fully lose my old self, to make space for what was to come next. When I found myself as a new mother, in a new home and a new province, I was caught up in all the things I left behind. I missed my business, my old home, my friends and most of all, my previous self. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had lost my identity when I moved and became a mother. I didn’t know what I could offer the world anymore, and I didn’t know how to describe myself.

Your environment is a dead giveaway, on whether or not you are truly in tune with yourself.

I’ve always been very focused on my environment, I used to joke that it was my OCD at work, but it was something else, a hold over from my education and work in Architecture perhaps, and as I’d learn later, it was a major clue During my time of transition, I could see that my home reflected my inner chaos. My past self didn’t fit in my new life. There was no place for stilettos, pencil skirts and blazers, on a muddy acreage with a colicky baby and a house that needed finishing. I genuinely had a closet full of nothing to wear, and a house packed with half open boxes and projects on the go.  

As I very slowly settled in, to the new home and whole new life, I set about re-discovering myself, and it put me in an interesting space of self-reflection. I drew upon the resources I’d created years ago for the consultants I coached in my Consulting Cooperative. One of the things I’d discovered when new consultants came my way with through Micaura, the Consulting Cooperative, was that nearly every one of the people coming to me, was in the midst of a massive life change. Some had lost their jobs and couldn’t find anything that suited them. Some had a new perspective on life and were looking for more fulfillment from their days and their work, and others had burnt out in their previous lives and needed to re-build themselves anew. Young and old, male and female, some new to our country and others had socks older than I was, the one thing that everyone had in common, was change.

Through the course of those years running what I thought was an IT business, what I’d truly developed, was a method and means for people to build the lives they’d desired through entrepreneurship and freelancing. I only made money when we sold and performed our specialized services, but I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to people, learning about where they were in their lives and helping them determine where they wanted to go in life, then finding a path and creating a plan to get there.

I found a pattern emerging in the conversations I was having with so many different people. I began to develop a series of questions and activities, to help deepen the conversations and to get past the narrative that was at the top of their minds and get them out of the looping thoughts that sometimes got them stuck. Then I helped new consultants find their own niches and adapt those desires to specific services that clients desired. I taught new consultants how to create their own service contracts and packages, and we posted and marketed them online, on our company site. I coached people through managing client expectations, contracts, project scoping, project progression and product handovers and I helped people learn to market themselves, but first, I helped them find themselves.

It was all necessary work to do, before we could work together as a team. The people who stuck with me and did the work they needed, to continue to develop their new-found selves, found new roles and new opportunities. They were able to try out different skills in new ways, delivering projects to clients, and adapting their offering and services to suit the next clients coming their way. It was a lot of effort to help new consultants find their way in this kind of work environment, but it was so very fulfilling to see people reinvent themselves in a way that led them closer to their goals in life.

Two years ago now, as a brand new mom and isolated from the city where I’d done business for over a decade, and I knew I had some work to do. With nap times allowing me the time to think, I went to work on the challenging question of “who I am now?”. I spent time with other new parents and new friends, and I found myself having many of those same conversations that I used to have with consultants. I met others in life transitions just like I was. This time, I spoke with mothers who had fantastic families and incredible skills around the home but hadn’t had the chance to build a solid professional life before becoming a parent, or mothers were so changed by the love of their children, that their old career would no longer fit. We discussed their goals, their skills and their dreams and I once again found myself pulling out my old material that was once used for the cooperative, helping consultants find their passion.

As I used my previous life’s work to help my new friends, gently coaching under the radar, encouraging self-exploration and growth while we walked together and parented our young children, I also turned all these questions on myself.

I struggled to find what I could do with myself, that would bring value to our family, while still expressing who I am deep down. I bounced around many different areas, and thought I’d never find something I could stick with. I threw myself in to my skin and home care line, seeing the value a chemical-free life could bring to others, but it would take my full dedication, many years and large upfront investments, to make that business a success. I tried my hand next building mining computers, and successfully made several machines, and then used them as space heaters and computing power around our house, while they generated Bitcoin. Both of those hit some of my passions, but I couldn’t stick with them because they didn’t really encompass all of what I was. It began to feel like I’d be that housewife-entrepreneur that would cost more money to keep busy than she was bringing in. It wasn’t for a lack of trying or effort put in either. I would work until the wee hours of the morning for weeks and months on end until I crashed and crashed hard. One of those times even earned me an ambulance ride.

I love art and technology, and for me that meant Architectural Technology, that I graduated from in 2005, was a wonderful starting point. Drawing and designing, to create something purposeful, covered a significant portion of the things I love deeply. It didn’t fully encompass my desire to help others, or my love of nature, my desire for deep family connections or a chemical free, eco-friendly lifestyle, so I knew there was more refinement to find my line of best fit.

So, I listened to myself like I once listened to my consultants. I put myself through the paces and the course material that I had once created for others. I learned that my original passion and my post secondary education in Architecture, was really a passion and an insatiable curiosity for how we can shape our environment to our benefit and how our environment influences us. I love the architecture of our social connections as well as the structure of our lives and the physical buildings that result from that human energy. I love the efficiency of nature’s cycles and ecosystems. I could combine all these factors into my more complete view of architecture. I would be someone who designed social and ecologically responsible systems, rooted in real structures. I would draw upon the wisdom and forces of nature, combined with the incredible technology at our disposal today and work with our environments. I would be a lifestyle architect.

Lifestyle Architecture.

Lifestyle Architecture is more than picking the right things for your home like Martha Stewart, and it’s more than posting pretty Instagram pictures. It’s seeing your life as the single greatest structure you’ll ever create. It’s a structure that no matter how productive or focused you are or aren’t, you build it everyday. It a structure that you can shape consciously only if you have a blueprint, or it can be a pile that gets roughly added to as years go by, if you don’t. If you see each day of your life as a brick or a stone added to your site, with a blueprint and a team, you can build a great cathedral during the course of your time on this earth. Without a long-term plan, you’ll have a pile of brick and stone. When you first know what your deepest desires truly are, you have your first pass at and allowing other forces to fill in the blanks, so long as your main goals are met. As a lifestyle Architect, I help people find themselves, find their mission, and rally their team.

Through this time of personal change, came my opportunity to gather myself and review all the parts of who I am, all the pieces that didn’t seem to fit into one picture. With effort and reflection, now it’s clicked into focus. I’ve taken the personal coaching manual I created during my time running Micaura, the Consulting Cooperative, and it’s now grown significantly, into a book series being published in the early this new year called The Household CEO: The business of family. 

I created this collection to help those going through life changes of any kind, to connect with themselves and their calling, then to rally the resources around them, their family, to build a legacy together.

What I found was even most important of all, wasn’t anything I could write down on paper, it was what I could get you to pull out of your own mind. You have all the answers about what you want in your life, you just need to be enjoying yourself while you do. So, I made it all fun. I created games to help families deepen their connections and a game that helps split up the chores. I created a playbook, that helps you reflect, and a coloring book of mandalas with thought provoking sentiments, all to help you dig through the noise and distractions and see the cathedral under the pile of bricks.

This mission calls to me so strongly, that I am giving away everything that I once used to train my consultants, for FREE. I want for everyone who wants to build the magnificent cathedral of their lives, to be able to get started today. If you’re making changes to your life, whether you’re trying to find the work that truly suits you, or if you want your household to run more efficiently, or if you’re worried about your ecological footprint, or if (like me) the everyday chemicals of your life are impacting your health, I want to hear from you.

Check the link at the bottom for my free material.

Now looking back on this decision, three things come to mind.

1.      I’m glad we did it.

2.      I had no idea what it would take to get there.

3.      I had to become a different person, to have a different life.

The moral of my story is, that if you want something that you don’t currently have, it might take drastic measures to get it. You might have to move, or you might have to become a different person altogether, or both. You might not fully appreciate what it will take to get there until you’re already doing it.

Just like becoming a parent, once the wheels are in motion, that change is coming for you. Once you hold that new baby in your arms, you’re forever a parent. Once you’re a parent, your child will grow and change. It’s life. Life IS change, and you either choose the change you want, or change happens to you. I shudder to think of what our lives would have been had we not made this bold move. I’m sure we would have been fine, but now we all have so much more. We have flexibility and a strong support structure. Together we have options and whatever the world throws our way, we’re in a better position to handle it as a team. Here on this acreage and with the support of our family, it’s not just our little girl who’s growing, all of us are growing, and becoming the people we always wanted to be.

The challenge and change that lay ahead for us all, is that technology grows faster every year, and markets are rapidly being reshaped with it. It’s impossible to really know of any job that can or will last a lifetime. I don’t think there is such a thing anymore.

Change is coming, and you either see it and start moving now, or you can wait for it to be forced upon you and your options will be limited. If you see an end coming, to a phase in life, a job or an era, it is best to accept the end of that self identity, and celebrate the beginning of a new one.

It’s time to re-invent. Even if you don’t have to completely change your life, or who you are now, look down the road a little. Do you see change on the horizon? How can you adjust and align yourself with the forces that overpower us all?

So, here’s the good part in case you skipped ahead (no hard feelings!)

FIND YOURSELF

Choose your change, by deciding where you want to go in life. If you know what you want your life to become, you can make your own path.

If you find yourself looking through job postings, you’re picking from a catalogue, a life and self description that was created by someone else. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re writing your own description. If you build a house on raw land, you’re creating your own space in your image and according to your skill level. If you pick a home from what’s on the market, your options are restricted to what’s available, and in your price range.

There’s nothing wrong with finding your dream house listed at just the right price, or your perfect job listed on LinkedIn, quite the opposite. The dream house we design doesn’t always work out as planned, and the businesses we build for ourselves can easily be harder and more painful than anything offered by an employer. Just because you create something for yourself, doesn’t make it better.

But how do you know what’s perfect for you, from the options available, unless you’ve worked that out ahead of time? It’s great if someone else built your ultimate dream home, and it’s move in ready for a price you can afford. But, you need to have your own ideas clear in your mind, otherwise you’ll never know if you’re living a life you truly want to live, and you’ll be easy prey for salespeople. What you need to know, is who you are deep down, and what you want out of this life. Without that blueprint, you’ll always be jumping from one thing to the next, being sold on the next big thing and never quite finding what you’re looking for.

Knowing that there will be change in your life, don’t resist it, look for it, knowing that life will always bring change. It might be subtle, but year over year, you’ll see the gradual movements, that’s the power of reflecting on your year past. You might stay in your home, but the house itself evolves to suit your family’s changing needs and phases. You might stay with your current employer, but the demands of your work will evolve with the changing landscape of the company, which is also evolving to meet the ever-changing market. In any case, the world you adapted to last year, is not the one you’ll live in this year, or the year after.

Look for the things in yourself that never change. The parts of you that have been there all along. That’s who you really are, and it will help you know what you need to aim at, no matter what else changes in your life. For me it was a desire to shape my environment, and to help others shape theirs, I was drawing my first scaled drawings when I was 8 years old, using graph paper from my dad’s work, and a tape measure I found in the garage.

I do an exercise called “tell me about yourself as a child” that helps people look into the person they’ve always been. You can do this yourself, by thinking about your earliest memories and joys, seeing the patterns that first established themselves in your early life. If the picture is still murky, feel free to contact me. This insight is perhaps your most important first clue.

FIND YOUR MISSION

You’ll know you’ve found your mission, when you’ve found “the line of best fit”. When you use all the parts of yourself that you’ve developed over the years that helps others and brings value, you find the calling that combines all the varying aspects of your skills and personality into a single mission.

This can be a tricky feat, especially if your interests seem very diverse. Your mission will emerge when you’ve found a way to combine your greatest skills, deepest desires and the truest parts of yourself into a singular, focused mission.

Your mission is unique to you. While I have created a number of exercises to help you pull this mission together from your own mind and unique collection of talents and experience, you can figure this out on your own as well.

If you can list your skills, hobbies, education and experience, and find a line of best fit that connects them all, you know you’re on a track that can last you a lifetime. You’ll know what truly drives you, and while the world will continue to change around you, you’ll know what your true calling is, and you’ll be well suited to flex and change with the times, staying true to yourself and your mission.

The exercises I do for this stage are a little more complex, but again, here’s the starting point that you can easily do on your own.

1.      List your highest, most valuable skills and experience

2.      List your passions

3.      Write your eulogy. What mark do you want to leave on the world after you’re gone? What’s your cathedral?

RALLY YOUR TEAM

The next, and perhaps most important thing is teamwork. You can plan all the things you like in your mind and for yourself, but there are other players in your life that you’re playing the game of life, with. Getting everyone on the same page, pulling in the same direction… well that’s no easy task, and the bigger the group and the closer the quarters, the more challenging that is. BUT. Teamwork can move mountains, and there are amazing family empires out there who’ve done just that. When families work together to make each other’s lives better, it’s magical and its beautiful. You end up not having to trade off having time with your family, and making a living, when your family works together to make life work.

You don’t need to be in business together to achieve this result but having a group of people who support each other in the business of being alive, is critical to success of any kind.

We used to call it community. When we used to say, “it takes a village”, it’s because we had one and saw its value. Life and business mixed, and we made sure everyone got through the year. Before selfies, we had groups of people whose survival depended on each other’s cooperation.

Now I think, the time has come to rediscover the power of family, community and teamwork. But, with more distracting us than ever, it’s hard to keep everyone’s eyes on the horizon and the big picture, if there is one. If your goal as a family is to just get by, that’s a challenge you’ll struggle to reach, every year. If your family has a large goal and mission together, you can see that vision built, brick by brick, that no matter how hard it can be, you’ll see something growing every year.

If there’s one thing I’m certain of in 2019, it’s change. What I hope for you and the ones you love, is change that you bring upon yourself, in the direction you hope to go in life. I hope you go together, as a team. A home-team.

To help this process along, is why I’ve created the card game “Big questions, Little Questions” and generated coloring books and the series itself. It’s important to deeply understand everyone in your family, to align everyone’s desires. This is not a quick or easy thing, it requires time and patience, but it’s the single most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done, no contest. When your family’s relationships are strong and everyone is really pulling in the same direction, nothing else you can do on your own will compare.

You CAN reinvent yourself, and your life.

You've been reinventing yourself since birth. As a child, you grew so fast you didn't have time to contemplate who you were. You were a whole new person every year. You went from baby, to toddler, to child, to teenager, to young adult, in a few short years. You went through phases, you tried different looks, hobbies, friend groups, interests and vocations. It was an expectation that between family get-togethers and holidays, that you would be different from one time to the next, and now here you are.

Kids grow up so fast, they don't even have time to get used to one body, as it keeps changing on them faster than they can appreciate until they're adults. Then, when we become adults, we think we’re done changing.

The older we grow, the slower we change and it's easy to get stuck, unless something shakes us up, like a job loss, moving, or becoming a parent. It’s somehow become a mark of stability and success to be consistent, and unchanging, as though it’s a sign that being the exact same person over time means you can be trusted and are somehow better.

Now in today's world, we can assume that change is coming for us. Something will come along to shake our lives up or pop our bubble. So, it's important to go back to being as flexible as you were as a child.

You can change, and if you plan your change, you can shape yourself as you choose.

I believe in you, and I’m here to help. Have an amazing, life changing, 2019, and I hope to hear from you.

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