Even though everyone knows change is inevitable, they resist it. When a career or a personal reinvention is exactly what’s needed to move ahead, people wait for life events to overwhelm them before taking the first steps toward changing their attitudes, habits, and direction.
A large part of resistance is the internal resistance to starting something new. Ingrained habits are hard to break, and whether it involves drawing a line in the sand or writing a line in a journal, telling yourself you’ll start (or end) a type of behavior on a set day is one of the most challenging actions people undertake in the modern world.
While the American Dream is still sold as an attainable over-hyped success story, starring you or someone you know, our subconscious mind is working overtime in the background, intricately calculating risk versus reward. We want to follow our dream and ambitions, but too often a voice within reminds us there are more forgotten losers than celebrated winners.
The good news is once you begin, you realize risk-taking is at the start of just about any project you have to do or want to do. Beyond the knowledge that starting is not only the hard part, but essential in every project, we are working with safeguards and safety nets our ancestors never had. Our modern society not only provides us with the opportunity to fail big when trying new things, but it has become one of the new norms in our culture. In the businesses world, a business supplied with millions of dollars and a staff of 20 will be considered a startup for several years. Even if ultimately another business with the same idea gets to market sooner, the startup has time to make course corrections and find the way forward.
So many false starts and startups in life begin with a vision to create something – a product that will change lives, a movie or a book that will have a message that resonates deeply, or a new way of interacting with others. Reinventing one aspect of oneself (health, career), or reinventing a technical device that could impact the lives of millions begins at the beginning.
Knowing where to start had stopped countless ideas from coming to life. The drive we feel to reinvent ourselves shouldn’t be viewed as a distant question that never will be answered. Deep, honest analytical reflection about what we truly value can be one of the strongest foundations for reinvention.
Reinvention is a process, and most likely it won’t be life-changing on day one. Anyone who had done yoga, created art, meditated, or built anything knows that nothing happens all at once, but through daily practice, focus, and accumulated skills, things coalesce and transform.
The big picture we often get from our media is that life is a collection of absolutes. Large-scale events occur all at once, we are told. But this isn’t how life is lived. We live life though small daily changes and adjustments, which will cause dramatic change over time. Stepping back to get a clearer focus on our goals is often the best way to take a much needed step forward.
The writing team of Smith and Foster comes from an extensive background of New Media content creation, in both the written and visual content creation side of the web. They are established professionals with writing and art backgrounds, unique perspectives on culture, and two diverse and similar backgrounds.
