twanless

How To Innovate Your Service Business

When you rein­vented your­self or your busi­ness, you were an inno­va­tor. You may have stopped there. So get back into it by explor­ing new ideas. Any­one who has rein­vented them­selves — or is in the process — is famil­iar with some aspects of inno­va­tion. Rein­ven­tion is a sub­set of inno­va­tion in that you look at some­thing and decide to do it in a dif­fer­ent way,...

twanless

The One-Hour Reinvention Plan

Every rein­ven­tion, whether per­sonal or busi­ness, requires some explo­ration. But, that explo­ration can too eas­ily become wan­der­ing aim­lessly. You need a map to guide you along the path. Recently I was work­ing with an entre­pre­neur on a way to start a new busi­ness. Quickly, it became appar­ent that he was pretty fuzzy on what he wanted to do. You see, he’d closed his for­mer...

twanless

How To Survive The Transition From Manager To Entrepreneur

Trans­for­ma­tion can be a won­der­ful thing – ask the grub that goes into a cocoon and emerges as a butterfly. But the tran­si­tion period can be tough. That’s why midlife or boomer man­agers who are rein­vent­ing them­selves as entre­pre­neurs, soloists, or free agents can face an uphill bat­tle.  Whether they were laid off in the reces­sion, took retire­ment or buy­outs, or...

twanless

Positive Deconstruction: Light Up The Dark

Recently, I expe­ri­enced one of my “gone-dark” peri­ods. I call them that because they’re those hit-rock-bottom emo­tional moments when every­thing seems dark and somber and depressed. In these moods, noth­ing seems good; every­thing seems wrong. There are so many prob­lems swirling around in your brain, that you can’t focus on any of them. You feel like a com­plete fail­ure, that...

twanless

For A New Identity, Play The Role

There’s a rather famous — and grue­some — exper­i­ment that sug­gests it doesn’t take much to change your way of think­ing to bet­ter aid your reinvention. The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment took a a group of men and made them act like denizens of a prison — half were assigned as guards and half were turned into pris­on­ers — and told them to act their parts. Within days, the men who...