7 Ways to Reinvent Yourself

Reinventing yourself shouldn't be confined to a promise made on New Year's Day and broken a month later. Now is the time to reflect on the past, consider who you want to be in the future, and make resolutions to be that person!

But how?

If you’re like most, you’re sitting in your chair, wondering how, exactly, you can become that better person. You might feel that you’re too old or too set in your ways, or you don’t have enough time or money or energy.

But the truth is that none of those things are standing in your way.

If you’re willing to put in a little work, you can be anyone you wish to be. You can break that bad habit. You can change your appearance. You can alter how others perceive you. The possibilities for self-change are limitless.

But you have to stop waiting for the future to find you, and take action.

To help you do that, let’s look at these 7 ways to reinvent yourself.

Decide Who You Want to Be

This is the foundational step. You can’t make any changes until you have a plan for who you want to be.

The thing to remember is that none of us are simply a fixed set of attributes. You’re not doomed to forever be the grumpy one or the unreliable one or the “loser”. You’re more than that.

Nor is your environment unchangeable. Things like jobs and houses and friends are all changeable if they’re destructive parts of your life.

To begin to find a direction, find your greatest strengths. Find out what brings you joy. Make a list of both and look for areas where the two lists intersect.

What are your goals? Write those out as well, and beneath them, write out what skills you’ll need to learn and what steps you’ll need to take in order to accomplish them.

Voila. You have the beginnings of a plan. Decide who you want to be, and the rest of the journey is made all the easier.

Change Your Style

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Your style does a lot for you, and it’s a great place to reinvent yourself.

Your taste in fashion acts as a silent language, constantly communicating about you to others—think of it as a subset of body language. Want to reinvent yourself? Feel like being perceived differently? Start changing your life by changing your wardrobe.

Not only does style affect how others see you, but it affects how you see yourself. Want to become a more confident person? Start dressing like one! Find clothing that emanates power and accessorize it to your tastes. Want to be elegant? Get inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe. Want to be seen as the glorious artist that you are? Well, there’s fashion for that, too!

Use your style to express yourself like never before, to release the inner you that has been begging to come out.

Don’t neglect personal style in your quest to reinvent yourself—that goes for you, too, men. Here, the simplest changes can bring about both a surprising boost in confidence, and greater social mobility.

Change Your Mindset

Don’t let your mindset hold your back. You can reinvent the very way you think, too.

The concept of neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to physically reorganize neural connections in response to training—is now well-studied. All of us, young, old, and everything in between, are capable of wholly changing even the most engrained habits.

Armed with this knowledge, we can intentionally shape the way our minds work!

When we identify our bad habits, replace them with positive ones, and focus on maintaining those good habits, we shape our brains, and by extension, our minds.

One of the best ways of making this process stick is through novelty—our brains are wired to seek the new. To ancient man, new things meant either danger or possible benefit—our brains had to be able to snap to attention and be ready to learn.

Novelty engages those parts of the brain that are essential to learning and changing, so if you want to kick a bad habit and replace it, try doing so while in a new environment. Go to the park or the beach or your dusty old attic.

So head out to someplace new and start that exercise regimen, replace smoking with chewing gum, or read that first novel. You may just find that the change comes all the easier.

Change Your Job

You spend 8 to 12 hours a day at your job—sometimes more. If it doesn’t suit you, half of your day is taken up by something that makes you miserable.

So why not change things up?

Many people—especially those who have worked in a specific field for many years—think they’re trapped in their profession.

Not so! You’re more than a simple list of personality traits and job skills. You’re a living, changing human being capable of being anything. Those traits and skills are within your power to shape.

Remember those goals and strengths you wrote down earlier? Bring them out and use them to help you figure out which professional field will be both stimulating and joyful for you.

Start researching. Find out what different job fields are like, and write down ones that match your strengths and preferences. Take the Myers-Briggs personality test—it’s a useful personality test that can help you narrow your search. Read “What Color is Your Parachute,” by Dick Bolles, a comprehensive manual for career-changers.

You’re not trapped. Your career is something that can be reinvented, so if you’re not happy, don’t wait. Create the change that you desire.

Make New Friends

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Your peers have more of an influence on your development and potential than your family does. Choose them wisely.

This doesn’t mean becoming Machiavellian, using the people around you to gain the upper hand in life. It simply means surrounding yourself with people who constructively challenge you, who bring you joy, who you can bring joy.

It also means avoiding those who cast negativity over your life, those who use you, who set consistently bad examples for you, and tend to pull you into their messes. It means avoiding those who don’t care about you, and who shrug off your friendship.

Studies show that choosing friends who are superior to us, in some way, can help us become superior, as well. For example, if you’re low on self-control, hanging out with a disciplined friend can help correct that.

Be mindful of the new friends you choose. Don’t be afraid to pursue relationships with the people you admire rather than simply those who drift into your life. As in all things, be intentional, and you’ll succeed in reinventing yourself.

Learn Something New

One of the best ways to reinvent yourself is to become an expert on something.

This doesn’t simply mean college or graduate school—although these are excellent resources for career-changers or those who like a bit more structure in the process of reinventing themselves, and that precious slip of paper you receive at the end can open all sorts of doors for you.

Learning something new can be as simple as picking up a musical instrument or learning a new language or studying your vehicle’s maintenance manual.

Reinventing yourself doesn’t have to be a dramatic shift. It can be a slow process, made up of small, quiet steps toward things that make you happier.

Because that’s the goal. It isn’t simply to strive toward some abstract concept like “effectiveness,” or “power”. You know what makes you happy. Go after it. If you love expressing yourself through music, learn how. Do you love to create beautiful words? Study poetry. Are you fascinated by how things work? Go to school and study engineering.

Let this year be the year you do it.

Never stop learning. That’s incredibly important. Remaining teachable allows us to constantly evolve throughout our lives—in essence, this mindset lets us to continue the process of reinvention for all time, always moving toward the better, the brighter, and the happier.

Improve Your Health

Exercise and proper nutrition are the most cited of all New Year’s resolutions. They’re also the foundation for many of the other points on this list.

Properly caring for your body gives you the energy to pursue your dreams, and helps you avoid setbacks that can take you off the path to happiness.

This coming year, reinvent your body as you get into the best shape of your life.

To avoid burnout, the most common obstacle in New Year’s fitness goals, start small. Take a 30 minute walk every day. Take the stairs at work. Give your dog a nice long walk.

Once you can do that without pain or fatigue, move up to some light jogging to build aerobic endurance, and maybe even start hitting the gym and making use of resistance training machines.

Work with a fitness trainer—your local YMCA likely has some excellent ones who are very willing to help you achieve your goals.

Above all, be consistent. Make the time for at least 30 minutes of exercise a day, and adhere to recommended dietary guidelines at every meal. The motivation of a resolution can help you achieve your goals, but it is consistency that will let you keep your winnings.