6 Keys to Reinventing Yourself

We're in the process of reinvention - all the time - because we're evolving and changing - all the time.

One of my favorite quotations is "I am not the same person I was yesterday." And then the quotation I came up with several years ago after going through some intense life changes was "The who I am today cannot catch up with the who I am becoming."

And if we own our own businesses, and our businesses change and evolve, too, then it's almost as if the reinvention speeds up or intensifies somehow.

My purpose and brand have been getting clearer and clearer (or perhaps I should just say "more different and more different"!). That means that we either can't get into place all the changes and evolutions in real time or we've been really lax in making certain changes and then catch-up is HUGE!

That's what I feel about my recent (slight) rebranding. Two years ago I moved from Write Well U as a company with several trainers offering basic writing and grammar classes to a company that was more about me and writing from your soul.

Earlier this week, I finalized that change so that Write Well U is now Writing From Your Soul.

This all coincided with making the smart but very tangible decision to move from a static html side to a WordPress platform. I planned on keeping the same basic look and all the copy.

Easy-peasy.

Well, not quite... because, see, my "who I am becoming" decided to rear up and say, "Hey, while we're at it, let's play bigger and REALLY decide to kick things up."

So a basic platform move turned into

A snazzy redesign of my free gift, the Writing From Your Soul 13-step System, with upleveled graphics and layout and a cool bonus

With that redesign of my free gift came 3-D graphics that would work so well to be added to the banner

Oh, and while we're changing things around, let's add a new page to the site called "Client Success Stories"

With the new 3-D graphics and the new page, my website designer suggested we widen the banner for more options and less crowding

We also decided to add some plug-ins with a cool built-in calendar, testimonials that can be added anywhere, an awesome social media plug-in, and all the other neat WordPress functionality

Since I was rebranding fully to writingfromyoursoul.com, that meant a domain change, including email change (which means updating profiles in social media, administrative accounts, etc.)

And moving to WordPress meant that I needed to (and wanted to) move my blog from the TypePad platform to WordPress. Since I've been blogging since 2006, that's a lot of posts to transfer.

All of the sudden, a "simple" change to catch up to my reinvention that started a couple of years ago had a lot more to-do's than I thought. It's been good, and I'm thankful I put a few things in place so that I haven't stressed out.

Here are the 6 keys to reinventing yourself:

1. Give yourself plenty of time and padding when you launch your reinvention, whether it's a company rebranding, divorce, moving, a book. The thing that saved me was that my goal line for launching the new website was this last Monday, and I planned on announcing it officially (other than this article!) next Monday, giving myself a week. I've needed that week to take care of all these things that I didn't think of and that have popped up.

2. Get help. One of the unfortunate side effects of moving from TypePad to WordPress is that the image files don't transfer over perfectly, so it's meant that someone has to go in and reattach the images to each blog post. (Remember when I've said I've been blogging since 2006? Yeah.) This was a task to definitely delegate.

3. Take advantage of things being in flux. My original plan was to leave most of the copy as it was, but as I was checking things and making other changes, I edited copy on a few pages. Those pages feel that they're more in alignment with the new brand.

4. Along with #3, forget perfect. There are plenty of pages I did NOT go in and edit. There are plenty of tweaks and changes I still want to make. And guess what? It's good enough - and probably even better than just "good enough" right now.

5. Write everything down. This whole project has generated a huge list of to-do's, and I've been writing them down as I think of them. Occasionally, I even do some of them and cross them off. But if I didn't write down what needs to be done, I'd feel even more overwhelmed.

6. It doesn't all have to be done now. That's the benefit of #5... write it down, and it will get done some time.

The thing about reinvention is that there will always be things to do, but if you can let it flow, build in some padding, forget perfect, the reinvention process might go a little more smoothly.