Reinvention, Intuition, and Resilience: Themes for 2021

Were you forced into change in 2020? ??

 One of the most unexpected things to come from this global pandemic: reinvention.

We’ve had to look at our lives, get rid of the pieces that weren't working, and step into things that were. Or we chose to take on the things we always wanted because life suddenly had a little bit more downtime. 

If you said to me, “The way you get pushed into your purpose is when the world shuts down,” we would probably all laugh. But this idea of reinvention is very real, and whether you chose this pivot or you were pushed into it, in a sense, the resilience gained, as a result, is the same. 

Reinvention = Resilience

Reed Diamond is a seasoned actor and reinvention expert, working in an industry where stagnation certainly equals irrelevancy and a refusal to change is career suicide. Reed and I, introduced by a friend, recently had the opportunity to talk about reinvention and resilience and how to really break the worry cycle around these two life-changing topics. 

Why We Worry

Worrying, in a sense, is a type of control. When we can’t imagine the outcome or the potential outcome or event is causing anxiety and stress, we can fall back on worry as a type of control - even if we aren’t actually controlling anything. Worry creates space where we can hide from vulnerability and never take chances. 

“When you’re auditioning and you’ve got 50 people watching you, seeing you make your mistakes, you learn to be private in public, you learn to create under stress, and you learn that your mistakes - those little things that go sideways - are good for you. You learn to practice resilience.” -Reed Diamond

And, in a world where worry is second nature, Reed and I spent a few minutes digging into worry and “pre-worry”, which is spending time in the worry, before the worry exists, which causes us to then worry about the worrying. Whew! It’s even exhausting to say. 

Taking Action

Breaking this worry cycle means believing in your own abilities to follow through, to find success, to get over the hill. This internal fortitude, this resilience is how we learn to eliminate the pre-worry because in those moments, rather than worrying about the worry -we find ourselves saying, “I’ve got this. I can do this. I know what I need to do. And here’s how I’ll do it.” 

Everything Isn’t A Catastrophe

Sometimes we get addicted to the catastrophe or catastrophizing and the rush of it, but internally this is the kind of stress that kills. So, today, I want to challenge you, when you feel the worry or the pre-worry coming on, that you take a time out and you lean into your resilience, you tell yourself you are in control and you can handle this. You don’t have to have the answers, you just have to believe that you can figure out what those answers are. Make a conscious pivot. 

“I was an out of work actor and I would worry myself sick - to the point that I realized I had to do something different. I would get a calendar out and I would figure out how long I had until I actually had to worry about something. I would put it on the calendar, “Two months from now, that’s when you get to worry,” I would say to myself. It’s not a problem now, so we’re going to use that energy for something more effective. I’m not the type of person who’s going to give up so I learned to make that muscle stronger. I learned to love the challenges.” -Reed Diamond

Rest Is A Myth

The lie that life tells us is that we will get to a point where there is no struggle and that is so contrary to the reason we wake up everyday and choose to live. When we get to the place of rest, well that’s when we are not living anymore. Everything in between is about challenges, growth, resilience, and learning to love every moment of it - seeing where the highs and lows have made us the individuals that we become. Every single day we have to/get to create or recreate what this looks like, and every moment of that is a choice. Have to versus get to - that’s a choice. Creation or recreation - that’s a choice. 

As Reed so wisely put it, “We resist and see uncertainty as a threatening thing because that’s how we’ve been wired. Yet the only certainty is that everything is uncertain. So how do you leverage uncertainty? How do you embrace uncertainty? That’s the challenge. I debrief at the end of the day. I look at what I thought went well, what I thought didn’t go well.”

 This type of ritual erases the uncertainty because I’m making myself aware of any gray area and just being present and transparent. Being diligent in this doesn’t make things easy - but it does make things meaningful. And this is a personal goal for me in my own life… to make the moments meaningful, whether they are challenging me or whether they are simply adding joy. 

If you’d like to hear more about this topic, enjoy my interview with Reed Diamond on The Conscious PIVOT Podcast here.