By Deb Boelkes
Have you ever had to just start over? I mean, completely reinvent what you do for a living? Does the thought of doing so scare you, like jumping off a cliff?
These past 18 months have been challenging for almost everyone—and especially so for those who have lost their livelihoods or are facing the firing squad, thanks to vaccine mandate deadlines. My heart goes out to anyone struggling to find an optimistic path forward to reinvent oneself.
Reflecting on my 40-year career, I see it now as an unending series of rethinking who I am and what I bring to the party. For me, re-imagining who I could be and what I might offer to the world is stimulating. The endless possibilities inspire and energize me.
The possibility of failing at something new has rarely entered my mind. Maybe that’s because I’m bored by status quo. “Because we’ve always done it this way” mindsets repel me like diverging magnetic fields of two similar poles.
My first career was as a fashion designer. I loved having a blank sheet of paper upon which I could pour my talents to design creations never seen before. Yet, the winning ticket in the ready-to-wear market—which I failed to grasp at the time—was won by designing pieces that resembled the current fad, but with a slightly different flair. My problem was that I simply didn’t want to do that. I thrived on creating completely new looks, unlike anything else on the market. I wanted my line to be très different.
One day, my head seamstress said to me, “Deb, you have missed your calling. You need to be in haute couture” (custom and expensive high-end fashion).
My immediate response was “YES! Exactly!”
Quizzically, she replied, “Then what on earth are you doing HERE?”
She was so right. I instantly realized—based on my passions—I was working in the wrong market.
I had always wanted to run my own design studio. So, at the earliest opportunity, I set my design career aside to finish college and obtain an MBA, thinking I needed that to successfully run a haute couture salon.
Then life took me on a detour. While working on my MBA in Management Information Systems, I accepted an internship—which turned into a paid position—at Raytheon Missile Systems. The rest is history, as they say. I never returned to the world of fashion, but instead spent the next 30 years in big technology firms. Talk about a reinvention!
Because technology changes so dramatically, so frequently, I constantly had to reinvent myself to keep up with “bleeding edge” clients’ needs. Whatever technological knowledge I mastered at any point in time quickly became obsolete. Reinventing myself was a way of life in the technology space, just as it had been in fashion. Fortunately, I enjoyed the continuous metamorphosis. That said, not everyone is so comfortable with such rapid fire, externally driven change.
Eventually a dark mandate from on-high caused me to leave the relative comfort of corporate America. I had little choice but to reinvent myself, once again. This time I chose to become an entrepreneur focused on accelerating the advancement of high potential businesswomen. While I had always enjoyed every chapter of my career, this one turned out to be the most fulfilling.
Fast forward a few years to the chapter where my dear husband came home early from work one day to tell me he had just been diagnosed with late stage three breast cancer. Talk about a punch in the gut. Without a second thought, I handed over the reins of my firm to my team. As scary as the situation was, stepping away from my business was simply another metamorphosis. My mission, at that point, became 100% focused on supporting my life partner in vanquishing this dastardly foe. Although it took some time, the mission was successfully accomplished.
And now, voila! Here I am, reinvented once again, as an award-winning author, public speaker, and—behind the scenes—community activist.
In my latest book, Women on Top: What’s Keeping You From Executive Leadership? I interviewed one very inspiring master of self-reinvention, the now inaugural president of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, Kerry Healey, PhD. In case you don’t know her, Kerry began her career—after raising her children—as a researcher at a think tank. She was subsequently elected as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and then went on to establish a television company that created a TV series called Shining City, all before she became the President of Babson College. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could do all that in just one lifetime.
When I asked this master of reinvention about her decision to run for public office for the first time, she responded this way:
“Well, I knew I was going to lose. But I also knew that I would learn a lot by doing it. I have always tried to frighten myself a little bit every day. I push myself a little bit harder to do things at which I expect to fail, but which are not existential threats. I try to de-risk life by taking small, calculated risks that demystify failure. In that way, I’m able to enjoy life, even during periods of uncertainty.”
Well, life is full of uncertainty these days. For some of us, the careers and businesses that we’ve spent a lifetime building are gone, never to return. We have no choice but to reinvent our lives and our livelihoods.
If this describes you, keep one thing in mind. We are each put on this earth for a purpose. It is up to each of us to discover our ultimate purpose. Fortunately, your potential is infinite. It’s limited only by your imagination and tenacity.
May you leverage this topsy-turvy time to transform yourself, from the industrious caterpillar you have been into a butterfly. May you believe in yourself and your infinite potential enough so that you may become the kind of heartfelt leader you are truly destined to be.
Heartfelt leaders are needed now, more than ever. Best of all, they never go out of style.