The extraordinary circumstances we have lived in this past year have resulted in many of us thinking about reinventing ourselves, be it out of necessity, due to changes in our lives and our surroundings, or simply due to having more time for reflection, for taking an honest look at our life and evaluating the possibility of altering our course.
The word "reinvention" used to sound to me as very radical, and I have to say I was almost afraid of it. Until I remembered what my good friend Bea told me once: that along the way in our own history we are really living many lives; every time we turn a page, it´s a new life.
And I realized I had already reinvented myself, and more than once.
Coming as I am from the IT world, what came to my mind was comparing each of those reinventions with a "version change" in my life. Every significant change has meant some progress, some learning, which I´ve been able to incorporate to the next version of myself. Some of those life events I chose, others I didn´t. Some of them were bigger than others, the same way an operating system or application can get upgraded to a "major" or "minor" version (if I´ve lost you already, here´s more information about software versioning).
So I got to work and ended up building my own version history:
- V0 (version zero) - I arrive in this world (more specifically in Cáceres, Spain) on March 10th 1978.
- V1.0–I decide to study Computer Engineering – the first "real" decision of my life.
- V1.1 – I get a boyfriend.
- V1.2 – I finish college and move to Madrid, searching for a job.
- V1.3 – I get my first job, in a consulting firm.
- V1.4 – I change jobs, my assigned project gets cancelled and they let me go.
- V1.5 – I find another job, in another consulting firm.
- V1.6 – I get interested in translating and take a course - university expert in translation Spanish-English
- V2.0- I get married and move to Dublin, Ireland
- V2.1 – I find my first job in Ireland, as an analyst/programmer, in a great company (bye-bye consulting)
- V2.2 – Mi daughter Irene is born - I become a mother.
- V2.3 – I have a miscarriage in my second pregnancy.
- V2.4 – My daughter Alicia is born.
- V2.5 – I take a Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) course.
- V3.0–I decide to take a career break and spend more time with my daughters
- V3.1 – I take a course in teaching Spanish as a second language.
- V3.2 – My daughter Eva is born.
- V4.0–I separate from my husband (later on I get divorced).
- V4.1 – I start working in another great company, as a systems analyst.
- V4.2 – I buy my own house to live in, with my daughters.
- V4.3 – I transition from IT to a business role within the same company.
- V4.4 – I adapt to working from home and changing the shared custody routine.
So there you go: at least three reinventions, three big changes, with their little gradual changes in between... Funnily enough, my first calculation ended up in version 4.3, now that I´m 43 years old :-)
I hope this example motivates you to reflect on your own experiences, on how you have upgraded versions so many times already, facing big and small challenges, and how you have succeeded and learned with all of them... that will give you confidence to face whatever comes next, continuing to evolve.
In the meantime, as it couldn´t be any other way, I´m already working on my fourth reinvention, preparing version 5.0.