As an entrepreneur, I’m no stranger to reinventing myself. I’ve continued to readjust my business strategy for a variety of reasons including changing market conditions, morphing needs of my clients, and vacillation of my own interests and goals. That’s the great thing about entrepreneurship; you’re in charge of your own destiny and the future of your business.
This reinvention is a bit of a balancing act, however. You must be fluid and flexible, while still being consistent at the same time. The reason I say that is because it takes a long time to see results in business. If you change direction too much, you won’t make any progress. I’ve noted this phenomenon with some of my clients who are often looking for a quick win. They continue to change direction repeatedly without any substantial gains because they don’t stay in the same spot long enough. So, even though we are continuing to reinvent ourselves, we must also move towards the same direction to maximize our chances of success.
Here are some actions that we can take to ensure both:
- Define our core values. It’s important to understand what we hold in high regard in life, and what we want from our business. Knowing our core values can help us align our actions with the outcomes that we desire and allow us to make the tweaks necessary to attain the sort of success that we crave.
- Reinforce our goals. Goals are only words written on paper if we don’t continue to take actions towards them. We’ve got to revisit our goals from time to time in order to ensure that we are moving towards them in a positive way. This involves being honest with ourselves and looking at our progress. We’ll need to make tweaks to ensure that we are still on track and/or modify our goals to better match with the reinvented version of ourselves.
- Make self-reflection a part of our routine. When it comes to reinventing ourselves and taking steps forward towards where we want to be, we need to make sure that we are doing a lot of self-reflection. We can do this through writing, journaling, meditating, reading, and asking ourselves certain questions on a regular basis, such as: Am I happy? Am I on the right path? Have I made any progress towards my goals? Have I been true to myself in the process? What have I done well? What can I do better? Who can help me? Do I have the right people surrounding me? Can I access the right resources? What do I need? What changes should I make?
- Take an inventory of your activities and partnerships. Adding on to that self-reflection, we have to consider whether our current activities and schedule are allowing us to achieve what we want, or to become the person that we want to be. Do we find our work fulfilling? Are we allocating adequate time and energy to make progress? Do we want to better align our actions to showcase ourselves in a new way? These are all important questions to ask to find the right balance between consistent progress and reinvention.
Being an entrepreneur, and business professional for that matter, is tricky. We must maintain consistency while still continually reinventing ourselves at the same time. By practicing some of the strategies mentioned above, we can ensure that we are doing both in order to claim the outcomes that we want and deserve! want and deserve!