At a “higher” level, there are positive and negative job-related experiences that can trigger a desire or need for reinvention. Your job might be eliminated, the work becomes boring, your skills aren’t being used or salaries get cut. On the positive side, sometimes you get to reinvent yourself ― see, not just have to, but get to ― you’re your job is expanded ― you get to do more ― or enriched ― you get to go deeper into a responsibility.

Higher still are the positive and negative organizational, industry and societal-level triggers. Again, we’re probably more familiar with the negative reasons for reinvention, but should take time to tune into the positive ones.

Transitions as triggers are usually obvious, but some are less so. We recognize transitions or milestones such as graduation, marriage, birth, death, divorce, promotion, and being let go. Other transitions include career stage transitions as mentioned above.

Finally, please note that reasons for reinvention, whatever they are, are relative. Some reasons are internal ― related to developmental issues in your life ― and some are external ― trends in society and other things we have no real control over (Helfand, 1995). The triggers listed may be either positive or negative depending on the people involved on the situation. For example, a change in supervisor may be a reason for reinvention for one person and a positive trigger for another.

Reinvention Pre-requisites
While there are plenty of reasons to reinvent yourself, doing it is not easy. Many times you know you need to act and yet you just can’t. What gets in the way of successful reinvention?

The 12 closed doors to successful reinvention described by Pollan and Levine (2004) are: thinking you’re too old; thinking reinvention is too great a financial risk; thinking a successful transition will take too long; waiting for permission from others to change; believing that you’re not living in the right place or that you’re not physically fit enough to make the change, or that you don’t have enough or sufficient education and training, or that you haven’t got what it takes to pull off the reinvention, or that you might fail, or that you might succeed. And some of us are simply too pessimistic or fatalistic to take the next step. Mostly, we need the courage of our convictions (Helfand, 1995). The “wrong” motivator or drive can become a quagmire, pulling you down, down, down, rather helping you up, up, and out! Envying someone else and feeling unappreciated or undervalued and bitter is not the stuff of which substantive reinventions are made. So, make sure you have a personally compelling, meaningful, and relevant reason to reinvent yourself.