Make Reinvention Your Superpower (eBook)

6 Skills to Escape Career Quicksand and Revive Your Future

Glenn Llopis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-7338125-5-9 (ISBN)

Infos

What got you to where you are today won't prepare you for the changes of tomorrow. Almost without exception, no matter what job you have, what role you serve, what expertise you've developed, what standing you've built within your sphere of influence-there's something in the works that could make it all seem obsolete in a flash. At least, that's how it feels. But just because a particular expertise, job, or skill might not be in demand in a few years doesn't have to mean you, as a person, are not in demand. There are many threats, but it's not the threats themselves that make us vulnerable-it's our inability to respond, be nimble, demonstrate resilience, and reinvent. Most people are not prepared to direct their own reinvention. They've been navigating their careers based on the particular rules of each specific job, rather than on what matters to them. They've stepped into the sand and adapted their ways to the corporate ways. They've forgotten how to have new ideas after being trained that success depends on how well they execute old ideas. They're stuck in career quicksand. This book is for those of you who feel stuck and don't know how to get out of the quicksand, who are worried about an uncertain future, or are young and eager and want to avoid this quicksand from the start. Reinvention is a continuous cycle of discovery plus action: Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. Repeat. In this book, Glenn Llopis shares six skills to navigate your self-directed journey of reinvention. He combines research-based insights with practical tools to help you apply this wisdom to your work and to your life immediately, in your own way. With Glenn's help, you will deconstruct what you've become-how you've adapted yourself in order to achieve in the world as it was. You will learn how to reconstruct who you are-in order to be ready to thrive in a future that's still unclear. You will make reinvention your superpower.

Glenn Llopis (pronounced YO-p?s) is a Cuban American executive, entrepreneur, senior advisor, and speaker to Fortune 500 companies and organizations in retail, consumer packaged goods, healthcare, and beyond. He is the bestselling author of the books Earning Serendipity, The Innovation Mentality, Leadership in the Age of Personalization, and Unleashing Individuality. He has been a leadership strategy contributor to Forbes since 2010, and also contributes to the Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur magazine. Glenn was recognized as a top 100 leadership speaker and business thinker by Inc. magazine. He is a faculty member at the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). After a successful career as a corporate executive with notable entrepreneurial ventures, Glenn launched GLLG in 2007 to develop high-performance leaders, teams, and cultures focused on inclusion and the power of individuality. He is the founder of the Leadership in the Age of Personalization (LAOP) movement, which has inspired a grass¬roots effort among cross-industry executives focused on shedding the limitations of standardization to thrive in our age of personalization. Since 2019, GLLG has produced, hosted, and designed the content strategy for seven LAOP thought leadership summits and for more than 100 episodes of the Personalization Outbreak podcast, all featuring executives from corporate, healthcare, and higher education. Glenn has prepared more than 450 speakers, moderated over 100 panel dis¬cussions, interviewed more than 100 guests for the podcast, and led an executive consortium of 112 people to deeply examine the strategic insights and trends related to personalization in the workplace and in the marketplace. He is known for his unique and dynamic ability to facilitate and mediate roundtables and conduct executive coaching to propel next-level thinking for senior executives, leaders, and managers globally.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1

DISCOVER

Harness your natural curiosity to

discover something new.

Dear Annabella,

All of the insight shared in every book I’ve ever written originated from my dad, your Papa. He shared so much wisdom with me throughout his life. He gave me hope, inspiration, and unwavering belief in myself. I can only hope to pass these along to you, along with my own wisdom that was formed from the foundation he gave me. He taught me the importance of seeing: “Opportunities are everywhere. Pero pocos tienen ojos para ver. (But few have eyes to see.)”

Remember to look around. It’s too easy to get distracted with whatever someone is holding in front of you—a prize, a job, a promotion, a higher salary. Those are good things. But don’t forget that you can always turn your eyes in new directions. To truly see is not passive. Look up, down, forward, back. Notice things. Seek things out. Remember there can be several ways to interpret what you see—don’t just believe your first impressions. You have the power to see things through a different lens. With patience, you’ll discover what really matters, and you’ll be able to reinvent as often as you need to.

—Pachi

“The business of being static makes me nuts.”

Twyla Tharp is anything but static. Since she’s a dancer and choreographer, she’s all about movement. But more than that, her entire career has been a series of reinventions big and small—from the dances she designs to the way she approaches her work.

She’s got expansive range. She has choreographed 129 dances, 12 television specials, six Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows, and two figure skating routines. She has received one Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, 19 honorary doctorates, the Vietnam Veterans of America President’s Award, the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, the 2008 Jerome Robbins Prize, and a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor. She received a MacArthur Fellowship, one of the so-called genius grants.

Why so much attention? Because she’s not just good, she’s inventive. In her bio she describes what she does as combining different forms of movement—such as jazz, ballet, boxing, and inventions of her own making. Her dances are known for “creativity, wit, and technical precision coupled with a streetwise nonchalance.”

She started her own dance company in 1965, Twyla Tharp Dance, just two years after completing an art history degree in college. In a profile of her wide-ranging career, the Academy of Achievement calls her the “High Priestess of Creative Movement.” They paint a picture of a unique creator at work, saying while modern dance had historically aspired to high seriousness and spirituality, Twyla’s work is humorous and edgy, combining ballet technique with natural movements like running, walking, and skipping. She’s worked with classical music, pop songs, a clicking metronome, even silence. Always, “the choreography [is] dynamic, unpredictable, and underpinned by an unusually thorough musical intelligence.”

At American Ballet Theatre, Mikhail Baryshnikov danced the lead role in Twyla’s Push Comes to Shove, which juxtaposed classical music by Haydn with rags by Joseph Lamb (a contemporary of Scott Joplin). She created an original dance musical for Broadway, Movin’ Out, built around the songs of Billy Joel. She’s also written four books.

She has said, “The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.” She is clearly a force of nature within the world of dance, and has reinvented the art form many times over.

While I don’t know the intricacies of modern dance, I do know the ups and downs of reinvention—and I love learning about someone’s process, no matter the creative endeavor. In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla gives us a peek behind the curtain.

She said her starting point for every dance she creates is an empty file box, the kind we all use in our offices. She fills it up over time with everything that went into the process of taking that dance from idea through to implementation. The box becomes a living archive of all the discoveries she made along the way—ideas, goals for a project, research, seemingly random items that remind her of a detail or a feeling.

I like this vision of her discovery process. That’s how we all must begin: by noticing things, tucking them away for later, using them as inspiration to notice even more things, and letting the ideas simmer in our minds.

In fact, I have my own boxes—shoe boxes. When I was a young executive at Sunkist, I was given the opportunity to relaunch Sunkist’s Juice Beverage Division. Throughout my mid-20s, the company trusted me to travel to every major U.S. market. This experience was exciting and a journey of self-discovery, meeting new people, learning about new cities and states. With each new experience—and there were hundreds—I would call my dad and ask him, “What does this mean? How should I approach this? What should I be looking for?” After the day’s experiences and conversations with Dad, I would go to dinner and reflect. My dad always encouraged me to put my thoughts in writing, so I ended up writing my thoughts on restaurant napkins. I have a collection of restaurant napkins filling 90 shoe boxes! Those are the notes that inspired my first book, Earning Serendipity.

But even pros like Twyla have to be on their toes to notice when something about their own process needs reinvention. In The Creative Habit, in a chapter titled “Ruts and Grooves,” she says she noticed a time when her rehearsals with her dancers started to feel routine and dull. There was no fire. But she knew the problem was not her dancers—it was her.

This sounds to me like her version of career quicksand, feeling stuck in a rut. She realized that to get out of that quicksand, she needed to change things up. When she was young, the routine was that she would work out her ideas on the dance floor herself before introducing them to her dancers.

“That’s fine when you’re 35 years old and in the best shape of your life,” she said in her book. “In my 50s . . . the range of my movements shrunk. My stamina was diminished. As a result, the ideas I developed on my body no longer challenged my dancers.”

So she reinvented the way she did things, to make sure her ideas weren’t limited to what she could do. “I brought in young talented assistants and talked more, danced less.”

Don’t get me wrong, she could still dance. She still improvised alone before rehearsal. But she saw that she needed to change the way she was doing things. This realization did not come easy, and did not come without pain.

“It was brutal to recognize that my body could no longer take me where my mind wanted to go. But I surely owed it to my dancers to turn onto myself the same brutal honesty with which I viewed their efforts.”

This is one of the first steps we have to take in our own reinventions: recognizing when one is needed.

Like Ray Anderson from the Preface, Twyla reinvented her industry. But reinventions come in all shapes and sizes. This point in her career marked what we might think of as a “smaller” reinvention. It wasn’t the kind of public change that rocks an industry from the outside. It shifted things for her on a more day-to-day level. But that change was a key pivot in her own process that helped her continue to make those bigger industry changes.

My point is: We have to be open to a process of discovery that forces us to examine ourselves, our habits, our ruts, and our beliefs from all perspectives, from the big (Is this career right for me?) to the seemingly small (Am I doing things in a way that works for me?).

Discovery takes a concerted effort. Have you ever noticed how invisible things become when they’ve been in your physical space for a while? Sometimes I’ll write a to-do list on a sticky note and put the note within my line of sight. But within a day or so, even though the note hasn’t moved, I don’t see it anymore. It’s become part of the background, and I don’t pay attention to the background.

We do the same things in our lives. We’re so focused on the present task that we stop seeing other things around us. Or we don’t notice when someone else’s negative attitude starts to creep into our own mind. This limits our ability to discover what’s possible.

We have to improve our ability to discover new things outside our typical, familiar field of vision. How can we make new discoveries, have new ideas, or spot opportunities if we’re only seeing what we’ve...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
• ISBN-10: 1-7338125-5-5 / 1733812555
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7338125-5-9 / 9781733812559