How to reinvent yourself after unexpected change

Life can change in an instant. You could win lotto, find out a new baby is on the way, or maybe you get that promotion you have been manifesting on your vision board. Or on the flip side, your life-changing event may not be so welcome, such as a death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, divorce or bankruptcy. Life changing events are those big moments that change the path of our lives forever, demanding we adapt to a new reality.

Winning lotto is something I think I would love to have the opportunity to reinvent myself over, however, research has shows it’s not all champers and private jets. A surprisingly large number of lotto winners report that their lives did change, just not for the better. Friends started treating them differently, relatives hitting them up for loans and relationships that they were happy in broke down. They suffered the winner’s curse and for those unlucky ones, all the money in the world didn’t make their reinvention any easier.

There are two types of way we change, either we evolve, changing slowly adapting to factors in our lives, or we get suddenly jolted out of our comfort zone into a world of discomfort, uncertainty and significant change.  When faced with significant change, our first reaction is often to pretend we can carry on as if nothing has changed. For the males amongst us, it is like keeping the mullet haircut from the 70s and thinking it looks cool on you at 40. Regardless, we can choose to keep trying to live in the past, but the reality is our lives will have moved on and we no longer fit them like we once did. It is time to reinvent ourselves.

I have worked with many large organisations helping thousands of people undergo transformational change, and there is a process that increases the chances of successful reinvention. Unfortunately, there is rarely a 100% success rate when dealing with change. Some people just can’t adapt to their new world. They hang desperately onto a world that no longer exists and become more and more outdated and irrelevant as time passes them by.

You and I could experience exactly the same life-changing event, but how we deal with it and where we end up will be as unique as our DNA. Sure, there are steps to help us create the new version of us, but our different life experiences, values and goals means where we end up be uniquely individual. Here are 6 reinvention steps you can use to reinvent yourself when life changes.

1. Change happens, there is no avoiding it, so accept it. Yes, changes is often unwanted, and sometimes even exciting positive changes come with a need for reinvention. People who get promoted often talk about suffering impostor syndrome, where they feel people can see them as a fake and undeserving despite them rising based on their merit and hard work. Building a positive growth mindset will help you see opportunities even in the hard times, enabling you to keep moving forward and adjust to almost anything.
2. Doing a Reality-check is helpful when your world is in significant flux. You may need to be some time for recovering before you are ready to reflect and grow. Feeling sorry for yourself has a place, as does a large tub of ice cream, but hopefully before your butt grows too much you can brush yourself off and review how you got to where you are and what you have at your disposal to make the best of your situation.
3. Empower yourself. When we experience change we feel like we have lost some of our power and control over our own lives. This is why empowering ourselves to be able to take positive action is so important. Researching similar experiences, looking for mentors and coming up with a plan helps shine the light on the reinvention options available to us.
4. Take Action. When we feel under threat we will respond in 3 ways. We either fight back, take flight and hide or freeze like a gazelle pretending the lion can’t see it. Freezing happens when the scale, or fear, of the change is so significant we don’t think we can cope. However, adversity makes us grow, and growing makes us more adaptable, resilient and ultimately successful. For me when my mind goes into freeze mode I go for a surf. By simply doing something positive and totally unrelated, a path forward often seems to magically appear.
5. Try, try again. Whenever we reinvent ourselves, we are stepping into the unknown. We will make wrong moves, take missteps and may even need to backtrack. From when we were toddlers, we used failure as a tool. Learning to walk involved many falls, teetering and tears, until finally one foot followed the other and we were away. Accepting failure as a part of helping us grow and succeed will help soften the impact when we experience it.
6. Enjoy the journey. This last lesson is something I still struggle with. I get so focused on the future and the end goal that I forget to be present. The problem is that the present is the only thing that is real. The past no longer exists, and the future may or may not happen the way we want it to. So, missing out on the one thing within our control seems a little self-destructive. Hear that, Gary?

Regardless of what we experienced that led us to the point of no return, accepting the reality and possibilities of our life-changing event will help us walk into our future with confidence and purpose.  If you want to leave your life up to chance, go buy a lotto ticket and wait for your 1 in a billion numbers to come up. Or take back control and accept change is inevitable, but reinvention should be intentional. You got this!

Written by Gary Waldon.
Have you read?
The World’s Best Medical Schools.
The World’s Best Universities.
The World’s Best International High Schools.
The World’s Best Business Schools.
The World’s Best Fashion Schools.
The World’s Best Hospitality And Hotel Management Schools.