This week we are introducing a topic entitled “The New You,” which is also a new e-course available in the coming week. The New You is all about reinventing yourself. We all have been
at a place in our life when we wanted to start over. Well the truth is we all have the opportunity to change our lives, to start over, to become who we want to be. It does not matter who you are, where you came from or how old you are. Whoever you are, you can start over today and create a new you. It starts with you making a choice to do just that.
The genesis of The New You concept was as early as 2003 when my grandfather passed away. A few months before his passing, I was able to get my first laptop computer. For the first time in my life I was able to type my notes and thoughts when I was away from home. Until that point I used the desktop computer in my home office to do this. Prior to that, I never thought I would become a writer. But it was at that point that things changed in my life. I started to think about recreating myself. After all, I had started four different businesses by then and they were all in the automotive industry.
So you now see it was a small thing that caused me to believe that I could create a new me. It was a concept that I wanted to share with others. I didn’t know how to do it, but I knew I wanted to take the message somewhere.
I was doing some research online today because I wanted to see how many successful people in our world had not finished high school. Then I made a broader search to millionaires, then billionaires who dropped out of high school or college. My search focused on people who achieved big things without the luxury of a typical modern-day education.
I was surprised at some of them: we all know the recent story of Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook and how he dropped out of college. But what about Richard Branson? He is one I did not know about. Then we move back in time to Henry Ford, or Thomas Edison. Without those two men we might be riding horses with buggies and still reading by candlelight. So lack of a formal education is not an excuse; you can start anywhere and an education is not necessarily needed.
But maybe the New You wants to have a college education or finish some other schooling. Both my dad and my brother, Ken, went back to school to get their high school diplomas later in life and went on to college when they were both almost 40. Ken has just started working on his MBA.
There are also stories of people who retire at 65 and decide to start an entirely new path in life, perhaps creating a new business. Many of the wealthiest men and woman who retire decide to take on a full-time role in a charity they had a passion for their entire life.
You have to start somewhere to create this New You. So where are you at right now?
Right now, let’s take a self-check to see where you are and what you want. I’m going to list five important questions for you to get a picture of this.
1. When you were a child, what was the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up? I know I’ve told this to you before. I wanted to be a Rock Musician, even though I believe I have no musical talent. I tried to take piano lessons as a kid but could not keep enough focus to continue. I now use a lot of facts about Rock ‘n Roll to bring motivation, passion and purpose to people’s lives.
2. What do you believe are your greatest strengths? For me I wanted to see others succeed. I had a personal belief that no matter what you went through in life you must stay positive and look on the bright side of things. My greatest strength was I always seeing the positive view of whatever is happening.
3. Who are the three biggest influences in your life? Whenever you see a success story, from the person who just built a big company to the Rock ‘n Roller who just got his first Number One album, you almost always also hear about who it was that greatly influenced their Lives. Who has influenced you?
4. Name your three biggest achievements so far. What are three things that you would list as your successes to date? All of us have been good at something. The sad part about this is being in your ‘30s and still listing something from high school as your last great achievement. But if that is what you have to go back to, it is still something to build off.
5. If you had to go back in time and had the chance to make any of your choices over again, would you make the same decisions? This is usually the tough thing – not only because you have the advantage of hindsight. The point here is, if you have not been able to learn from the effects of those things you did wrong, then you haven’t benefited at all from your experiences. Those who had a great lesson from a bad choice learned greatly from it and were able to make great successes of those parts of life. Others didn’t learn as much from a small choice, so they might decide to make a different choice if they had the chance because they can’t see any benefit at all from what they did originally. In my life, I’ve made a few really bad decisions. Some came with great consequences, but also great lessons. After the lesson was learned it was easy to make the changes needed in my life to make it better. So I would answer “Yes, I would make that same choice again.” That is a great learner.
This is a taste of some of the questions we ask to help you learn in our New You course. The real course goes into much more in detail to get you started and continues with practical steps for you to take to actually become a New You.
This week’s posts are to start some great thinking on your part about creating the life you want. But they are also to help you realize in life we make good and bad choices. What we want to do is be sure we learn from the bad ones and let the good ones make our lives better. Each and every action we take makes us a different person in the future. Think about that as you go through this week.
I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time for you to live the life you always wanted by loving what you do and those around you. And, with a little help from us, you can become the RockStar in your world.
