Reinvention

Changing Your Life, Your Career, Your Future

Arlene Dickinson

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781443451642
• eBook ISBN: 9781443451666
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

Do you want or need to change your life, but aren’t sure where to start—or whether you have what it takes?

At fifty-seven, Arlene Dickinson’s life was turned upside down. Her company was on the brink of disaster. Her sense of herself as a strong, confident leader was in tatters. She was overwhelmed by feelings of loss, fear, and shame. Five years later, her business is booming, she’s never been happier or more excited about the future, and she’s raised tens of millions of dollars and built a whole ecosystem to help other entrepreneurs.

How did she turn things around? By following the process she’s always used to transform underperforming companies—only this time, she used it to transform her own life. Applying business principles to her personal life helped her figure out very quickly where she wanted to go and how to get there. Having a clear set of practical steps to follow kept her on track when emotions threatened to derail her progress.

In Reinvention, Dickinson shares this blueprint for locating your sense of purpose, realistically evaluating your strengths, assessing opportunities outside your comfort zone, and charting a bold new path. Whether you have a big career dream to achieve, or you need to rebuild after a personal setback, this step-by-step plan for reinvention will help you change your own life—for the better.

 

Part One

GETTING STARTED

Chapter 1

Excuses, excuses

Not all that long ago, an Albertan entrepreneur came to Venture looking for help marketing a terrific product that had the potential to break out nationally, maybe even internationally. People in the office were jockeying to work on the account—the product was that good. We researched the market extensively, came up with ideas about how to brand the product, connected the CEO with retailers and distributors who could get it into stores across the country, and unveiled a marketing and communications strategy. And the CEO loved everything about the work we’d done, except for one thing: implementing the strategy would require a significant investment of money and energy. Well, yes. Reinventing a mom-and-pop local business as a national brand does cost something—but consider the potential rewards! Wasn’t that the whole reason the CEO had come to us in the first place, to try to take the company to the next level?

The dream of building a powerhouse brand was achievable; we had the market research to prove it. But when the moment of truth arrived, the CEO’s confidence evaporated, replaced by a severe case of cold feet. The plan was so ambitious. More people would have to be hired. Production would have to be stepped up. Maybe we could cut out the social media piece, or do it on the cheap? And what about the website—was a top-notch site really necessary? And so on. The CEO had a lot of good excuses for not following through on the reinvention strategy, which is why, unless you live in Calgary, you’ve never heard of this product. The company is still struggling along, trying to implement bits and pieces of our plan on its own, without much success. Business reinvention requires a comprehensive approach, one fuelled not only by cash but by conviction.

There were some long faces around our office when we finally realized that this company, which we’d all thought of as the little engine that could, wasn’t going to be reinvented as a booming national business. Despite having a great product. Despite research, statistics and charts galore demonstrating the existence of a large potential market. Despite having a brand strategy all teed up and ready to go. It was the little engine that could, all right . . . but had decided not to.

Disheartening as it is when a CEO turns his or her back on a company’s potential, it’s just a company. If it limps along or even fails outright, it’s not the end of the world. Employees disperse and find other jobs. Customers find another way to get a similar product or service. Another company usually comes along to take over the premises and buy the manufacturing equipment. Even a founder who’s forced to declare bankruptcy can rise from the ashes and build something amazing.

This is one big difference between reinventing a company and reinventing your own life: you may not get a second chance. You only have one life, and some windows of opportunity open briefly then close forever.

Here’s the other big difference: if you need to, or want to, reinvent but don’t even try, that really is the end of a world—your world, the one you might have created for yourself. And that isn’t just disappointing. It’s tragic (and that’s a word I don’t use lightly).

So before we move on to the process of identifying your core purpose and currency—all the things that make you you, and which should guide your reinvention—we need to take a brief time out to tour the biggest obstacles in your path. I’m talking about the ones you may be wheeling into place at this very moment: your excuses for avoiding change.

Many people, like the CEO I just told you about, fervently embrace the promise of self-improvement . . . right until the moment they are required to take action. Then their internal critic slams on the brakes. We all have one: that little voice that whispers discouragement and reinforces self-doubt at crucial moments. It can sound extremely persuasive and rational in your own head, so you need to know how to argue with it and shut it down in order to keep moving forward. This is one debate you absolutely need to win.

“I’m too busy looking after everyone else”

I spent the first part of my life shaping myself according to what I thought other people wanted. By the time I was twenty-one years old, I was a good wife, a good mother and the perfect Mormon churchgoer. A classic pleaser, in other words, trying to be all things to all people, and trying to please everyone but myself. Suppressing your own needs and living for others is exhausting; pleasers experience measurably higher stress levels, which can cause sleeplessness, anxiety and depression.

It’s also an excellent way to ensure you stay frozen in place, for two reasons. First, changing your life in fundamental ways takes time and energy; you don’t have much of either when your focus is figuring out what other people want, then supplying it. Second, if you’re running around trying to keep other people happy, they won’t want you to stop. They’ve got it good! If you try to back off on the pleasing, there will be loud grumbling, if not a protest march—and the mere idea of upsetting someone else strikes terror into the heart of the average pleaser.

So one of the most important questions to ask yourself before you start figuring out how to reinvent your life is “Who am I living for?” Are you the person who, when called on to come into the office for the third Sunday in a row, will do it even though you’re busy or tired, or just don’t feel like it, because the idea of letting other people down makes you feel too guilty? Are you the go-to emotional caretaker for everyone you know? Are you doing the vast majority of the work at home, despite the presence of an able-bodied spouse and children who are fully capable of dish washing and dog walking? If you’re nodding (or wincing) in recognition, you have your answer. You’re living for other people.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that so long as you truly feel fulfilled. But if, deep inside, there’s something you still want to do—need to do, in order to feel whole—and yet you haven’t made any progress, you have a real problem, just as I did in my twenties. Living for other people makes it difficult, if not impossible, to live for yourself. But I have no other choice! you may be thinking. No one else in the office will do the grunt work to get this report out the door. Plus, my husband’s mom is ill, my kids have hockey practice or tutoring every day after school, and I’m hosting my friend’s baby shower next week. You’re saying I should just turn my back on my commitments?!

No. But there’s a difference between having legitimate obligations and simply being unwilling to say no. Some people take on too much because they have difficulty asserting themselves; others do it because they like to feel indispensable. And, perhaps unconsciously, some people look after everyone else because it makes it very easy to procrastinate about making changes in their own lives.

I know it can feel impossible to scale back when a lot of other people are counting on you. But bear this in mind: if you collapsed from nervous exhaustion tomorrow and the doctor put you on two weeks’ bedrest effective immediately, everyone would somehow muddle through. You’re not as indispensable as you might think—except to your own reinvention. Without you, it’s never going to happen. You are the only person who can change your own life. You need to be able to count on you too.

So here’s the very first change to make if you’re serious about charting a new course for yourself: you need to break the yes-habit and start saying no. Whether it’s an invitation to serve on a community board or a request to volunteer at your kids’ school, if you can’t afford the time, say no. Politely but firmly, without a lot of explanations or excuses that invite someone else to keep begging (or guilting) you to change your mind. Ditto for lunch with the friend you’re no longer even sure you like all that much. And after-work drinks with the gossipy co-worker you don’t entirely trust. You need to reclaim as much of your own time as possible.

Another way to do that is to accept help when it’s offered. If friends or family remark that you seem overwhelmed and ask if there’s anything they can do to help, say, “Why, yes!” And then ask them to take on a specific, time-limited task, like driving one of the kids to soccer practice or dropping off that huge sack of outgrown clothing at Goodwill. A lot of people are happy to lend a helping hand, so long as you’re not asking them to assemble Ikea furniture or look after your cat for a week.

Also, you should ask for help if it’s not being offered. If, for instance, you’re doing most of the janitorial work at home, invest a little time in training everyone else to pick up the slack. Even very little kids can help fold laundry, set and clear the table, and pick up their own stuff (when older kids object, show them some of the research that proves that kids with chores do better in all areas of their lives). Some of the time and energy you’re expending on others must be redirected to meeting your own needs, starting with figuring out what they are (more on this very soon).

In order to do that, you’ll need to separate yourself from other people’s demands and needs—and perceptions. It’s hard to figure out who you really are and what you really want when you’re accustomed to seeing the world, and yourself, through the eyes of family, friends and co-workers. You may be overly invested in how they see you, too. Everyone thinks I’m really nice. I don’t want them to think I’m the pushy, ambitious type.

Whenever I hear a woman—and it’s always a woman—say something along those lines, I am trying to train myself to point out, as gently as possible, that ambition is not a dirty word. Ambition doesn’t make you less feminine, less empathetic, less nice or less nurturing. Ambition doesn’t make you less of anything, actually, and it is absolutely crucial if you want to make more of yourself. If there are people in your life who make you feel that it’s wrong to want to be the best you can be, the problem is theirs, not yours. Speaking of obligations, here’s one: you have an obligation to yourself to reach your potential and achieve your goals.

The bottom line is this: to change your life, you have to be comfortable being the star of your own movie. I’ve struggled with this, as many women of my generation have. We were conditioned to play the perpetual supporting role, serving a man’s needs above all and carefully designing our own decisions in ways that would prop him up. To younger women, raised with a completely different sense of their own possibilities, this probably sounds hilariously retro. It does to me now, too. But I’ve been in a few of those old-school relationships—ones where everything I did was to make my partner happy, because if he wasn’t happy, nobody was happy. There was no room for me to be myself, no air to breathe and certainly no space for me to reinvent myself.

This is the real danger of living for other people: it means that no one is living for you. And you are the only person in the world who can do anything about that.

“I’m too scared”

I have a friend who says that she spent the last sixteen years of her eighteen-year marriage trying to convince herself to leave. Although she was married, she felt like a single mom. Between travel for work, entertaining clients and nights out with his friends, her husband was absent far more often than he was home. When he was home, he was usually glued to his phone, and would shoo her and their kids away if they “disturbed” him. Emotionally, the couple’s connection was almost non-existent. “One year, I counted up the number of times we’d done something together, even watching TV, just the two of us. It was twice,” she remembers. Still, lonely and unhappy as she was, she stayed. “I was scared I’d be alone for the rest of my life, scared that I couldn’t support our kids, scared that it would scar them for life if I got divorced,” she says in a wondering voice, as though speaking about a person she barely recognizes.

Then, one fine day, her husband came home and announced, out of the blue, that he’d lost his job. And oh, by the way, they needed to sell the house. Immediately. He’d managed their finances, because she “didn’t have a good head for numbers”; two years earlier, he’d forged her signature to remortgage their home, and had invested the money, along with their savings, in a friend’s surefire business idea. Sure enough, it had failed. Everything was gone. Including her reluctance to act: within a week, she’d filed for divorce.

The next few years were not easy, to say the least, but finally, at forty-eight, her career started to take off. “I threw myself into it,” she explains, “because I had no other choice. I was broke, and I had two kids who needed everything that kids need. But also, I got a lot better at my job. I became more focused, to the point where I could do the same amount of work in half the time, or even less.” Why? Well, being happier meant she had more energy, and she freed up a lot of mental real estate once she stopped debating with herself about whether or not to leave her marriage. After she’d reinvented herself as a successful professional, she had the confidence to start dating again and, in her early fifties, remarried. Happily this time.

“I kick myself that I spent so many years being miserable, as though I was powerless to do anything about it,” she says now. “Looking back, my fears were misplaced. I could support my kids, and the split actually wound up improving their relationship with their dad—he spent a lot more time with them than he had when we were married. And I didn’t wind up alone. But even if my worst fears had come to pass, they were so minor compared to what I sacrificed in the meantime. I frittered away sixteen years of my life, both professionally and personally. Sure, I had friends, and interests, and a great connection with my kids, but I achieved so much less and felt so much worse about myself than I could have.”

She’ll never get those years back. Nevertheless, she considers herself lucky. If her husband hadn’t squandered their savings, she would probably still be with him, squandering her life. She might never have realized that the only thing she had to fear was fear itself.

“I’m too old”

If you’re on the other side of fifty, you may be telling yourself you’ve already missed your chance. “I can’t start anything new at my age. Reinvention is a young person’s game.” But “old” doesn’t mean what it used to—not even in a place that celebrates youth the way Hollywood does. Nicole Kidman, now in her early fifties, recently told a reporter that, for actresses, “there isn’t a shelf life like there used to be. That’s why it’s so important to keep changing. We live longer now, if we’re fortunate. So there has to be a place to put all that creative energy.” Exactly.

Many older people are risk-averse, though, and reinvention always involves some degree of risk, whether it’s a personal sea change, like getting remarried, or a professional one, like launching a new business. Some people think, Oh, but I can’t take risks at this stage of life—I have too much to lose! Think about how bleak that sentiment is. It means that you plan to eke out the last ten, twenty, thirty years of your life in a state of preservation rather than growth. That strikes me as insanely risky: you risk becoming a monument to your former self. But surely your former self learned at some point that fear can be overcome, failure is survivable, and there are no rewards without risks. Don’t you want to keep experiencing that high that comes from putting yourself out there and trying something new? Why would you ever willingly give up that feeling?

I look at the age equation this way: the older you are, and the unhappier you feel, the more urgent it is to find a new sense of purpose or a new direction. You don’t want to waste another minute.

Luckily, the clock doesn’t run out on reinvention, and in some key respects it actually gets easier as time goes on. For one thing, you have more experience coping with change. I remember when I couldn’t imagine using anything but a rotary dial phone to communicate over a long distance. Now I text, which has transformed the way I express myself, as well as the amount and type of contact I have with friends and family. I’m an old hand when it comes to adapting to new technologies and cultural trends, and if you can remember life before e-mail, so are you. Yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Getting started
• Part Two: Going backwards
• Part Three: Here and now
• Part Four: Life changing
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher