A friend of mine called me late last night.

“I’ve been laid off,” she said.

“I guess now I’ll have reinvent myself,” she laughed.

“You’ve done it so many times I thought I’d call you for some advice.”

The conversation was mostly light and she wasn’t depressed or angry at all. I asked her why she didn’t seem too upset by her sudden change in status.

“I’ve watched you quit, be laid off and fired so many times and still come up smelling like a rose that it doesn’t really seem so bad,” she said. “I’ve actually kind of envied you. I never had the courage to just quit and I kept my mouth shut about how I really felt so I never got fired. Now I kind of get to reinvent myself and it’s a little exciting really.”

She wanted tips. What advice could I give someone who was “reinventing” themselves? This is what I told her. Well, I told her a lot more, but in essence, this was it:

Reinventing yourself is an on-going process. You don’t have to lose a job or change jobs to reinvent yourself. You can just decide to do it.

Reinventing yourself is more about becoming aware of who another aspect of your true self is, rather than creating a whole new self. In essence - most of us simply shelve a part of ourselves and ignore it until someone dies, or we retire, or marry, or get divorced. Then that part of us - that more authentic self is free to come out. If we nurture it and get to know it, we call that “reinventing” ourselves.

All we’ve really done is listen to a part of us that never got to speak much. That’s all reinventing ourselves is.

Like an athlete who plays football in the fall and baseball in the spring. We are the same. We just express ourselves in different ways. We are us all along. That’s the secret of reinventing yourself. You open different windows, close old doors, look at the rooms and the things in them from another angle. That’s all.

I don’t know if she understood it or not. I think she did. Kids reinvent themselves all the time. One day they’re a superhero, the next a soldier or pirate or an athlete. The knack is simply something we forget how to do when we grow up. We listen to people telling us we have to BE one thing or another, when we don’t really. We can still be whatever we want to be.

Who do you want to be today? Reinvent yourself - even for just an hour. Best to keep in practice.

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