Everyone does it eventually. Either by choice or being forced, it’s almost inevitable that you will have to go through a change where new skills are required, a new image, maybe it’s a whole new career. My clients ALL are doing this in some form or another and what I am helping with is utilizing their existing resources and introducing new technology and internet strategies to move in that new direction.

Reinventing yourself requires a lot of thought. It requires you to examine what you really want, possibly an exercise in defining your life purpose, if you want to get really deep. Once you have that figured out, you’re laughing - that’s the biggest hurdle!!

How you get there will start to unfold, almost magically, I believe.

Here is a great blog post on 10 Life Lessons for Reinventing Yourself.

There are, however, many ways to help get you there if you do indeed need help with your new idea, business direction, transition, whatever it may be.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to get it done, to get your message out to people that you have re-invented yourself or your business. With the internet and world wide web, it is relatively easy to spread your message if you truly believe it’s of value and remarkable enough to be shared.

I was discouraged the other day by a new client’s story of how he spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on a website that took years to get right and after it was done the site frequently went down and he reckons he lost a number of sales because of the problems with the site. And now the website, his main marketing tool, sits idle.

There’s no need to reinvent his business in this case - but reinventing the way he looks at his website would be a good exercise, at how he can attract traffic to his website and somehow try and recover some of the time and money he invested in what is arguably his most important marketing tool, is a good strategy.

Another client is transitioning from a business she built up over the past three decades and is now reinventing herself as her new business. Cutting away the fat, putting a high price on her time, expertise and value and doing what she loves.

And yet other clients are having to transition from a second generation business to reinventing themselves and joining the online world where people get their news.

It’s so fun and exciting to have the opportunity to help these clients, I am a lucky lady. It’s not a short process by any means, and I have to constantly work on patience being one of my biggest virtues but I’ve learned that it’s the business owner/entrepreneur themselves who control the speed by which the transition and reinvention happens. Obviously. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s only so much motivating one can do and it comes down to how badly someone wants it.

It’s hard to make a transition and easy to stay with what you know.

A great book to read about this is “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson, MD which you can get here. It’s a great parable about how change is truly a blessing. I have the kid’s version and my boys love it and request it often.