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It always amazes me when I meet people who are resistant to change. In many ways, that’s like being resistant to life itself. You see, life is a growing experience, and growing, by definition, involves change. In essence, no change means no personal growth because the two are actually synonymous.
If you look back on your life, I think you will discover that you have been reinventing yourself from the beginning. When you were a child you saw a vision of the future based on your limited knowledge and experience. You may have said that you wanted to be a fireman or a ballerina when you grew up, well…
Did you become your childhood vision?
Chances are, you did not grow up to fulfill your childhood vision of yourself. Why not? Probably because by the time you were a teenager, you had completely reinvented yourself. Your personal growth meant that you had acquired new knowledge and had new experiences. Your whole perception of the world and your place in it had changed.
Instead of seeing life from a child’s point of view, you were beginning to see things as a young adult. Because of personal growth, you were no longer the same person. Wouldn’t it have seemed ridiculous not to change at that point? Of course it would, because personal growth requires change.
Where did personal growth lead you next?
By your mid twenties you had probably reinvented yourself again. Why? Same reasons as before, more knowledge and experience. In other words, personal growth caused you to grow into a new and different version of yourself.
Now, let me ask you this, at what stage do you imagine that this process stops? When does the need to reinvent yourself cease to exist? If you have followed my reasoning so far, you will see that there is only one answer to this question. The need to reinvent ourselves only stops when our personal growth and development stops!
You cannot have personal growth without change!
When you take in new knowledge and implement it, it changes you. When you have new experiences and learn from them, it changes you. Whenever you act on what you learn it’s called personal growth. So as long as we continue to grow, we will need to reinvent ourselves periodically.
When we resist this process it can have a very negative effect on our sense of joy and our enthusiasm for life. If we know that we need to make a change and yet refuse to do so, it creates internal conflict. That means that our resistance has put us at cross purposes with our true self.
Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself
When we reinvent ourselves it’s like multiplying our knowledge base and perspective. It allows us to consider things from several different angles. We don’t give up our former self, we simply add another dimension.
For example, to be successful in marriage we can’t keep the same mentality we had when we were single. We need to reinvent ourselves and adopt a completely different point of reference. But we can still relate to the thinking of a single person. We didn’t lose that ability, we added to it. We became more multidimensional than we were before.
Enjoy personal growth, embrace change!
I can’t count the number of times I have reinvented myself during my life. As a result, life has been an amazing and exciting adventure. This is a common thread that seems to flow through the field of personal growth and development. If you pay attention to the personal stories of others in this niche, you will notice that they all reinvent themselves periodically.
Every time we add a new dimension to our lives we gain knowledge, insight, and experience. Over the course of a lifetime that becomes a deep well to draw from. There is a richness of wisdom that can only come through experience. That’s a richness we can never know unless we learn to embrace personal growth and change.
How have you reinvented yourself over the years? Are you comfortable or uneasy with change?
The lines are open!
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