Ten or more years ago, during the process of reinventing myself from one career to another,  I worked for a while with an art therapist/counselor.  On the eve of a big job interview, one for which I was terrified she had me draw my fear. I drew a bib orange spiked monster on a page that was roughly 24x30" - I felt as though I was using up all her markers as I drew those spikes - hands clenched, bearing down with all the pressure in my arm.  I was tired but felt satisfied when I was done.  Fear to me was hot and spikey. Interested?  Follow the read more link

Trying to start a new way of living? Wanting to reinvent part of your life but feeling tired? Four simple steps give you a reality check to help your feelings of whether and to what extent you are making progress towards your goals. Picture a big uphill learning curve. The first parts are the hardest, inertia works against you and much of what makes this hard is lack of momentum. The important thing to remember is that you may have taken on a long process, if so, any ONE period of time will not be significant. What will count is how you put them all together. Let me tell a story about myself that illustrates this point. Interested? Follow the Read More link.

What are the six most important things for people in the midst of reinventing their lives to consider? You must be able to access your Spirit – that part of you that feels alive and that part of us likes new things and new adventures. If, as an example your business or school just announced layoffs – then the flip side is also true – there will be new opportunities.

The longest journey starts with a single step: Proverb Many people may be faced with reinventing their lives. Some will come to it by choice and others by necessity but it has been my belief that the human ability to start over, take what we have learned and apply it in new settings or problems is one of the greatest gifts of our humanity. Living in troubling and complex times, this skill is needed by many. An examination of where we want to go, the obstacles we face, and the support systems we can count on encourages us to “shoot for the moon” while grounding us in the “here and now” realities of our lives. It is our ability to maneuver through the tensions between our dreams (moving our hearts and bodies forward) and our current connections (conservative, holding us in place) that will determine the sustainability of our success. Interested? Follow the Read More link.

  The ability to reinvent oneself has a lot to do with motivation. At the same time no one can expect to have 100% of their motivation all the time, even those of us who are blessed with knowing what we want and the internal energy it takes to continue through the rough spots to make our dreams into reality suffer from lack of motivation from time to time. I recently had a lunch meeting with some employees at Pearson Publishing, the largest publisher of educational materials in the world. We were discussing the Future(s) project and the future of education altogether. The interest from Pearson’s point of view was “What motivates people to learn?” get that they thought and we would have pinned the variable that will drive the distribution of educational materials as the worlds paradigm for education shifts to personal learning environments (PLE’s) and away from schools. Motivation (as shown in the link above) is defined by Wikipedia as: “the set of reasons that determines one to engage in a particular behavior.” I work with doctoral students – if I am your mentor we start the conversation that leads to your successful completion of a dissertation with teasing out your personal motivation for the degree it will give you. Few are motivated by the work (although hopefully we find a topic that has that as well).