Why Successful Leaders Should Reinvent Themselves

Chis Curran: Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, Episode 133: Why Successful Leaders Should Reinvent Themselves.

This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated, enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of success. On the web at BusinessAdvance.com.

And now, here’s Pam and Scott.

Pam Harper: Thanks, Chris. I’m Pam Harper, Founding Partner and CEO of Business Advancement Incorporated, and right across from me, as always, is my business partner and husband, Scott Harper. Hi, Scott.

Scott Harper: Hi, Pam. It’s great to be joining you again for another episode of Growth Igniters Radio. And as always, our purpose is to spark new insights, inspiration, and immediately useful ideas for visionary leaders to accelerate themselves − and their companies − to their next level of innovation, growth, and success.

Pam, our regular listeners know that the CEOs and C-Suite Executives that we feature on Growth Igniters Radio are driven by a sense of purpose. The interesting thing about purpose, though, is that it can be expressed in many ways, not just in the position that you happen to have now.

Pam Harper: In fact, we’re seeing an uptick in visionary top leaders of growing companies who are proactively reinventing themselves and their careers to fulfill their purpose.

Scott Harper: Way before they are ready to go anywhere.

Pam Harper: That’s right, but they’re still in the minority. Many others are not reinventing themselves because quite frankly it’s not a top-of-mind thing. “We’re successful − we don’t need to do anything.”

Scott Harper: “Yeah, we’re busy.”

Pam Harper: That’s right. Today, we’re going to talk about why even the most successful leaders need to take a proactive, mindful approach and begin reinventing themselves. Our guest today has literally written the book about this topic. She is the keynote speaker, author, and consultant Dorie Clark.

Dorie is principal of Clark Strategic Communications. She’s an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She’s the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out, which was named the number one leadership book of 2015 by Inc. Magazine.

A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, The New York Times described her as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. Dorie is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and she consults and speaks for clients including Google, Microsoft, and World Bank. She’s also the producer of a multiple Grammy award-winning jazz album.

Scott Harper: That’s great.

You can read more about Dorie by going to Growth Igniters Radio, episode 133. Dorie, welcome to Growth Igniters Radio!

Dorie Clark: Hey, Scott. Hey, Pam. Thanks for having me.

Pam Harper: You are certainly an example of a person who’s reinvented herself. Your book is a fascinating read; I love it.

Dorie Clark: Thank you so much.

Pam Harper: Tell us a little bit about this journey. What has especially surprised you along the way?

Dorie Clark: Well, you’re absolutely right, there’s been a lot of reinvention. I actually started my career as a journalist and assumed that that was what my career was going to be, but just a year into doing that, I ended up getting laid off. Unfortunately, as it was the case in a lot of the news industry. I looked around, and there were not newspapers jobs to be had between 2000 and 2015 close to 40% of American journalists lost their jobs and therefore that precipitated a lot of reinventions.

In my case, I had been covering politics, so I’d transitioned into politics, and became a spokesperson for a number of political campaigns. Then, I ran a nonprofit, and eventually, about 12 years ago, started my own business doing what I do now with writing, and speaking, and teaching, and consulting.

But through that reinvention that I did, and beginning to look around and notice that it was becoming increasingly common, it really sharpened my understanding, which researchers have borne out, that reinvention is becoming a foundational skill for professionals of all kinds.

It could be if you’re forced to change your job like I was, but also even if you’re at the same company, even if you’re in the same position, the world is changing and you need to be able to adapt and stay ahead of that.

Pam Harper: Absolutely. This whole concept of reinvention, do you see yourself continuing? I mean, it seems like this is not just a once and done, for you it’s continuous. I know for us it has been, especially.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. It is an ongoing process. One of the frames that I use to talk about this, as a result of all the interviews and research that I’ve done about it, is essentially the difference between capital R Reinvention, and what I call lowercase R reinvention.

Capital R Reinvention is the big incidents that people think about. It’s, you know, “Oh, I got laid off,” or “Oh, I’ve decided after 20 years I’m going to change my career,” or something like that, these sort of disruptive moments. Those are exciting, but oftentimes they are a little traumatizing because they’re big, they’re abrupt, they’re sort of a disjunct. But what we all can do in order to make things easier, smoother, to make those transitions a lot more graceful, and a lot less painful is to become masters of the lowercase R reinvention, which is the ways that on an ongoing basis, just as part of our habits, how we live our lives, to continue pushing ourselves just enough, and just a little bit outside of our habits sort of ruts that people might normally get into. So that we are continually expanding our skillset, expanding our comfort level, which enables us to be much more ready, and more flexible when an opportunity arises that we can seize, or that we need to jump on.

Scott Harper: Okay. That really speaks to the point that Pam made at the beginning, is that a lot of executives don’t do this because they don’t really think about it, it’s not a part of their mindful experience. What you’re saying is that if you think about this before you have to do it, you’re going to be more prepared for those big disruptive events, but you’re also going to be enriching yourself all along the way? Is that why you wrote the book?

Dorie Clark: Yes. I was originally, of course, inspired by my own experience, but that was really just the starting point throughout the course researching Reinventing You. I talked to dozens of executives who had reinvented themselves in successful ways. I realized that there were commonalities, that there were things that they had done. During my own reinvention, I was sort of making it up as I was going along, I was kind of floundering a little bit, and I really didn’t feel like I had a roadmap.

I thought “If we could provide one for people, so that they could go through this process in a smarter, and faster way, that might be something very valuable for people to enable them to take what can be a traumatizing experience, and instead enable it to feel a little bit more in control, and therefore a lot more exciting and optimistic as a way of seizing this new opportunity.”

Pam Harper: See, I like that a lot because for the people like myself and Scott, who are possibility-driven, you want to know that there is a next, and a next, and a next, that just doesn’t stop. That’s the way we formed our career, both of us. We are seeing this trend, and as proactive, why do you think that this is becoming more common now?

Dorie Clark: I think there’s a couple of reasons, and they differ slightly. In terms of the proactive reinvention, the “I want to try something new.” I think that there has been a real push in our culture toward the attitude that people should be working to fulfill their dreams. I think that most people have bought into the ideology, which I think it’s a good thing, that we shouldn’t be unhappy at work. If you’re doing something that doesn’t feel right, or doesn’t feel fulfilling, that we should have enough autonomy in our lives to be able to say “No, I actually, I want to change things to be a place that’s exciting for me, or where I feel like I’m doing something that has meaning.”

Scott Harper: That goes into the whole idea of being purpose-driven. When you’re purpose-driven, you feel more fulfilled, and you also have a better idea of where you’re going.

Dorie Clark: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Then, on the other side, what I’ll call maybe the more reactive, or circumstantial reinvention, of course, everybody knows that disruption is accelerating pretty rapidly, and we’ve all heard the statistics about the churn rate of the Fortune 500, and how quickly companies are moving into it, and moving out of it. We’ve all, in our own adult lives, seen these pillars, the Circuit Cities, and the Blockbusters, and the Boarders falling, and as a result, there is a lot of disruption, this sort of implicit contract that employees had in the past with their employers has shifted, industries are changing.

Whether somebody is getting laid off, or whether their industry is just kind of stagnating, there’s a lot more room, more people are saying “Oh, it looks like I might need to do something different because the field that I thought I was entering in 1980, or 1990, or 2000, or even 2010 is pretty different.” As a result of that, we need to be a couple of steps ahead so that we are the actors rather than the acted upon.

Scott Harper: The interesting thing is some of the things that drive that turn, technology, for instance, and the internet, are also enablers that permit one to more easily execute that reinvention.

Dorie Clark: Yes, that’s exactly right. For any change, there’s always a positive and a negative that goes with it. On one hand, we might be wringing our hands about the loss of this so-called steady, stable job. But on the other hand, if you’ve ever been interested in things like working from home, working from remote, having the opportunity to really sort of strike your own deals and your own opportunities, this is a pretty amazing chance to do that, or to run a company that has a distributed workforce, and that takes advantage of this price differential, and the opportunity to get the best global talent.

Pam Harper: That’s right. In fact, we’re also seeing that people are moving into fields that they totally never might have thought of before. Moving from for-profit to nonprofit, to education. There are so many ways to reinvent yourself. We’re going to take a quick break right now, and when we come back, we’ll talk more with Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You, about what makes someone successful in their reinvention, and where to start without jeopardizing your current success. Stay with us.

Scott Harper: This is Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated − on the web at businessadvance.com. We enable successful companies to accelerate to their next level of innovation and growth.

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Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper − that’s me − and Scott Harper. Scott and I are talking today with Dorie Clark about reinventing you, and all the possibilities that come with that. Dorie, now, I know that you have a free download that people can take advantage of. Can you tell us about that? How can they find you?

Dorie Clark: Yeah. Thank you so much. It is true, I have an 88 question Entrepreneurial You self-assessment. If people are interested in these questions about how they can be more entrepreneurial in their thinking, how they might perhaps even set up a side income stream for themselves, even if they are a very happily employed staff at a company, which I personally think is a good idea for any executive at any level. They can get the 88 question Entrepreneurial You self-assessment for free at DorieClark.com, DORIECLARK.com/entrepreneur.

Pam Harper: Okay. Let’s talk more about how you get started. We know that we need to proactively reinvent ourselves, but what makes somebody with a strong C-Suite brand successful or unsuccessful in his or her reinvention?

Dorie Clark: When it comes to questions of reinvention, I think there’s a couple of things. One is that oftentimes we might feel like we’re making really dramatic changes, but they feel big to us on the inside, but oftentimes, because other people are busy, they’re not necessarily paying such close attention to what you’re doing, they actually might not even notice, which can kind of feel bad if you feel like you’re making this huge change.

For instance, let’s say, you’ve been somebody who maybe has a forceful personality, and you’ve been trying to be a little nicer, and temperate. The old brand that you have is so strong, if you make subtle changes, it’s hard for people to notice, because they just expect that the old you is going to come rearing out at any moment.

For something like that, I think it is useful to, and this is something that famed executive coach Marshall Goldsmith talks about, it’s that it’s very useful to declare proactively that you’re making the effort to make that change, to signal it, to call it out, so that people are on the alert to look for it.

Also, there’s a dose of humility required to say “Hey, I’m working on this change, I realize I might actually slip up sometimes, and if I do, please feel free to let me know, to call me out on it. But this is something I’m working on.” That actually prompts people to pay enough attention that they will start noticing that you’re behaving differently. That’s one challenge when it comes to reinvention.

At the other end of the spectrum, another challenge is when you try to reinvent yourself, this is perhaps particularly the case if you’re moving careers, or you’re changing functional roles or something like that. You try to make a change, and other people kind of don’t believe you. They may question your credentials, or say “Hey, wait, why are you doing that? What do you know about this? Is this really a good idea?”

Of course, we all hope that the people closest to us would be the people who would be the most encouraging, but oftentimes they’re the people who in the name of being the devil’s advocate or only trying to help, they sometimes cast some aspersions on your plans. It’s important to recognize that you might get a little bit of blow-back, and to be prepared for that and to soldier through.

Pam Harper: Dorie, what about somebody who is a CEO, they’re successful, and maybe the board is saying “Don’t do anything.” Or you don’t really want to let the board know what you’re doing? You don’t want to jeopardize your current success.

Dorie Clark: This would be a situation, Pam, where … Give me an example of a kind of reinvention that you might be talking about, just so I can contextualize my response appropriately.

Pam Harper: Well, it goes back to this trend that we’re seeing where people who are successful, they’re leading their companies, but they want to do something else, say they want to become an entrepreneur, a business owner in a different industry, as opposed to say being the CEO of a larger company.

I had one gentleman that I was talking with who said “I like this company, it’s growing.” It was growing so fast, Dorie, and it was quite large from where he had started with it, and he said “This is not fun for me anymore. When it gets a little bit larger, I’m out of here.” He didn’t really want to signal that to other people. How does he keep his success and at the same time begin that transition?

Dorie Clark: Yes. That’s a great question. Ultimately, for people who are in less high profile roles, of course, one of the things that one would theoretically advise is that if you have a desire for entrepreneurial ventures − something like that − it’s pretty useful to start spending nights and weekends working on it, so that you can test the premise, test the product market fit, and then only devote yourself more fully to it once you have that initial validation.

But, it becomes much trickier if you’re the leader of a company. The eyes are on you. There’s a few advantages that you do have, though, of course. Number one is that if you are the leader of a company, presumably, over time, you’ve been compensated reasonably well. One advantage there is that for an employee that is a little bit lower down the rung, they may be very concerned about a gap in income between “Oh my gosh, if I leave my job, and then if I start a new venture, that could be pretty scary in terms of meeting the mortgage payments or what have you.”

You, theoretically, if you’re the CEO of a company, built up enough of it, of a nest egg, that at least for basic expenses there’s not necessarily the dragon breathing down your neck, so you do have more flexibility in that regard.

The other thing that I would say you could certainly do, even if it would be a little bit too risky for you to start talking, for instance, the potential customers, or something like that, is that you can begin to ask yourself “All right, what is the pivot that I want to make? Is it something else in this space? Is it in an adjacent space?” You can take advantage of your current situation at the company to say “Where do I want to start building my profile?”

Oftentimes, you have some advantages. As the CEO, you have credibility, you can often, for instance, get invited as a speaker at conferences, you can often attend lots of high-level networking events, et cetera, et cetera. You can start writing up ads on topics, and start building your thought leadership around that.

Even if it’s something that’s a little bit of a pivot, let’s say you say “I’m really into AI.” Your company isn’t an AI company, but maybe there’s some tether, there’s some connection, you can begin moving enough in that direction so that you’re starting to build your credibility as a thought leader in advance, so that once you do officially sever your ties, and it becomes legit for you to start building your new company in earnest, you have enough of a pre-existing reputation that people won’t be scratching their heads and saying “What is this guy thinking? How weird.” But instead they’ll be saying “Oh, well, you know, of course, yeah, that makes sense in retrospect because clearly he’s known for his work in AI.”

Scott Harper: Okay. That goes back to something that we were talking about earlier, the idea of you have an established brand, you want to do something else, there may be some skepticism. What’s the key to successfully building that transitional narrative? Especially if it’s a big reinvention.

Dorie Clark: I am a big fan of content creation. The reason that I think that this is so useful, and in fact under-exploited, you know what I mean? Many people might say “What? Everybody is creating content.” But really, I think, as a branding tool, it’s something that even more people could be doing to good effect. Because it sounds sort of basic when you lay it out, and yet very few people take advantage of this fully. If you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in this space, you can never do it unless you are sharing your ideas. If you don’t share your ideas, people don’t know what they are.

They can’t congregate around them. They can’t say “Oh, yeah, she makes so much sense. Let’s hear more from her.” A lot of times people just sort of assume that somehow they can gain credibility without taking that step of publicly sharing their views. I would double down on content creation, whether that is blogs, articles, speeches, podcasts, videos, whatever the format is, it matters less, but sharing the content and sharing the ideas really gets you out there.

Over time, it allows people to see with their own eyes that you know what you’re talking about. Even if you’re moving spaces, even if you’re shifting industries, they might say “Well, she’s a pharma person, what does she know about tech?” But if you keep creating content that shows, that indeed, you know about tech, you are knowledgeable, you are thorough, you have a unique perspective, after a while, you’re going to wear down even the critics because it’s rather incontrovertible proof.

Pam Harper: Excellent. We’re going to take another quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You, about three immediately useful ideas for beginning to proactively reinvent your career without jeopardizing your current success. Stay with us.

Scott Harper: You are listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper, and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated. We’re on the web at BusinessAdvance.com. Pam, we’re talking about why successful leaders need to reinvent themselves, and one of the most important aspects of reinventing yourself, especially if you intend to move on, is developing a successor to whom you feel comfortable delegating. This isn’t easy, however, because there’s usually ambivalence and unaddressed issues that need to be faced. That’s why we’ve written a Harper Report called Keep The “Success” in Leadership Succession.

Pam Harper: This is a must-read report, because it’s both practical and focuses on some of the most critical, and surprising, executive team and board conversations that go into finding the best successor for your role.

Scott Harper: To dig into this issue, go to GrowthIgnitersRadio.com, episode 133, and request your complimentary copy of the report Keeping the “Success” in Leadership Succession in the resources section. While you’re there, check out our other free resources and episodes on Growth Igniters Radio.

Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. Over the last two segments, Scott and I have been talking with Dorie Clark about how you can reinvent yourself. Dorie, you have actually three books, we’ve been focusing on Reinventing You, but it is a trilogy. How can people find out more about those books? Also, you have that entrepreneurial assessment.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, thank you so much, Pam. The three books are Reinventing You, Stand Out, and Entrepreneurial You. It really walks people through the process of how to reinvent themselves into the job, or the career that they want, how to become a recognized expert in their field, then finally, with Entrepreneurial You, how to monetize successfully and really create an income, and an income stream that is commensurate with the worth that you bring.

For people who’d like to learn more, I actually, I’ll mention one other different resource that might be of interest as well. It’s the Stand Out Self-Assessment, which helps people figure out more about what their unique ideas are, and how to share them in the marketplace. It really hones in on question of personal brand, and what you uniquely bring to the table. For anyone who’d like to get that, you can download it for free at DorieClark.com/join.

Pam Harper: Perfect. This actually leads right into this section, which is the most immediately useful ideas. People want to get started right away doing something. Now, you’re talking about these resources. Let’s talk about three of them, but one at a time.

Dorie Clark: Yes. We’re talking about resources, and about getting started. One of the most important things that I like to suggest for people to do is to think about their activities in a framework that I laid out in Entrepreneurial You, thanks to somebody that I interviewed named Michael Parrish DuDell. That is to break your activities into mind share and market share.

Basically, what this means is that too often, for most professionals, we kind of double down on one or the other, and it doesn’t really serve us well. Mind share activities are ones that give us visibility, sort of promotional kinds of things.

But market share are a lot of kind of behind the scenes activities that pay the bills. That’s great. Obviously, you need to have a lot of that. But if you double down on market share, and all you’re doing is just paying the bills, you oftentimes will find yourself a few months, or a few years down the road, you may be making a good living, but not enough people really know who you are, or what you do.

Within the context of an organization, for instance, if you think about mind share, it’s really a question of how do you get more people to know you? Are you spending enough time doing networking, meetings, with people outside your immediate orbit? Are you making an effort to get yourself known and heard more broadly aside from the people who just literally happen to work with you? Are you speaking at conferences? Are you involved in professional associations? What are you doing to raise your profile?

The payoff is much more long-term, you’re not going to get dollars in your pocket immediately, but if you do some mind share activities in addition to market share, it sets you up much better for the future.

Pam Harper: That’s one of the big challenges that the people that, our clients are facing is they’re stressed, they don’t always have all the right people in place. They do see that they want to be more proactive, they want to continue to develop themselves. It’s a balancing act.

Dorie Clark: Yes, that’s absolutely right. I think it’s easy for people to say “Oh, I’m just going to do my thing.” But if you want to be successful, you can’t necessarily get away with just doing the thing that you feel comfortable doing. You have to be willing to do your job, and also raise your profile additionally. Otherwise, unfortunately, you’re going to pay for it down the line.

Scott Harper: If you’re mindful and strategic, you can find those places to do that as well.

Dorie Clark: Exactly.

Scott Harper: What’s a second piece of practical advice, Dorie?

Dorie Clark: A second piece of advice that I would suggest for people is to always think about how to question fundamental assumptions. What I mean by that, there’s actually a case study that I share in Entrepreneurial You, speaking a podcast, since we’re on a podcast, about a guy named John Lee Dumas, who’s a well-known business podcaster.

Part of what made him successful was that in the early days, everybody told him “Podcasts are great, you’re going to have an amazing time doing your podcasts, go for it. But, one thing you need to know, you’re not going to make any money from it.” That was “the truth,” I say in air quotes, because even the people who were most famous, and most successful at the time, they weren’t making money. They were trying to give him good, honest advice.

But, what he realized, which other people were much slower to realize was that because of the way that podcasts are monetized. If you’re going to do sponsorships, the number, the metric that sponsors look at is your number of monthly downloads, it’s not subscribers, it’s monthly downloads. John realized that if he, instead of doing the typical thing, which is doing a weekly podcast, if he could do a daily podcast instead, that’s a lot more work, admittedly, but you immediately 7X your number of monthly downloads.

By doing that, even with the same number of subscribers, so by doing that, almost immediately he was able to shoot his podcast up into the level that sponsors were interested. He started bringing in money much faster, and much more successfully than anyone else had before.

It was really by just looking at that variable, that crucial variable, and saying “Wait a minute, what if I did something different?” As you guys probably know, he does monthly income reports, he shares his income publicly, he’s making, literally, hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually between $200,000 and $500,000 per month from his podcast. He’s been able to just maximize it in the extreme by questioning assumptions.

Pam Harper: You never know what’s possible until you try it, saying “Why not?” Instead “Why?”

Pam Harper: Dorie, what’s a third immediately useful idea?

Dorie Clark: The third one that I will suggest to you guys is also one that’s drawn from Entrepreneurial You, and it comes from my case study of a woman named Stefanie O’Connell.

One of the resounding themes in the book, I think it’s certainly true in entrepreneurship, but it’s true in all facets of corporate life, really, is that for a lot of initiatives, a lot of big things that people are trying, a lot of why they fail, honestly, is that people get discouraged. They say “Oh, we’re not getting traction,” so they give up.

Dorie Clark: One of the crucial aspects that you have to get good at, is really understanding how to tell the difference between when something is not working, and when something is not working yet. Because a lot of people give up prematurely before they’ve been able to see any results. But if they had kept on further, it may well have gone exponential.

What I learned in the process of interviewing Stefanie O’Connell, for Entrepreneurial You, is that she did a great job of doing what I call creating intermediate metrics. In her case, she was an entrepreneur, a lot of times people, the metrics of success they come up with, are these kind of grand ones. “I’m going to make $1 million.” Or “I’m going to be on the cover of Oprah Magazine.” Something like that.

Of course, it’s going to take a long time to get to that, it’ll take years to get to that. When they see six months in, a year in, 18 months in, that that hasn’t happened, they say “It must not be working,” and they give up.

Instead, Stefanie did a great job focusing on very clear attainable metrics that allowed her to track with far more precision whether she really was making progress or not.

Pam Harper: Dorie, what would be an example of a metric that she would’ve used?

Dorie Clark: In her case, for instance, she built her brand, and her business through blogging. For a long time, for months, and months she was blogging all the time free. For her, the first time she actually got paid to blog, even though it was $25, was a sign for her that she was making progress.

Clearly, most people would look at that and say “$25, what does that matter?” But for her it was the metric that “Wait a minute, somebody has noticed what I’m doing, and they say that it’s valuable.”

I think, for all of us, in our respective businesses, if we think about it strategically, we can realize there are metrics that we can set up that show us that we’re at least moving in the right direction, that’s what enables us to keep having the faith to move forward.

Scott Harper: Yeah. It’s kind of the product management mindset, where if you start with the end in mind “I want to do this,” what has to happen for that to happen? What has to happen for that to happen? Down the … Now you get to where you are, but you have a roadmap, and working backward gives you that roadmap.

Pam Harper: Dorie, do you have any final thoughts about this whole topic of successful, top execs reinventing themselves?

Dorie Clark: I think that, in a lot of ways, successful executives have a special position. It may feel, in some ways, more intimidating to reinvent themselves because they are already successful, therefore it feels like they have a lot to lose in terms of money, or status, or things like that.

But, a great advantage that they do have, and can harness over almost anybody else who’s in the reinvention process, and is well borne-out in psychological research a phenomenon called the “halo effect Psychologists have been aware of this for 80+ years. Essentially, what this means is that if we’re perceived as good at, or very successful at something, people tend to generalize, this is just kind of shortcut that the human mind takes. They look at you and they say “He’s so good at this thing, he just must be good in general.” That’s of course how we end up with actors as politicians, things like that.

That’s something that we can harness to our advantage. If you have been a successful business leader, people are going to be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you couple that with the network that you hopefully have built over the years, and some of the financial reserves that you have built over time, that gives you a wonderful position of strength from which to reinvent.

People want to help you, they’re going to be biased in your favor in terms of assuming that you can do it, and they want to help you do it. I think that for people who are looking to make a reinvention of whatever kind, whether it’s a small pivot within your organization, whether it is changing to a different company, whether it is starting an independent venture, any of those things are very possible if you decide you want to do them.

Pam Harper: Dorie, thanks again for being our guest today.

Dorie Clark: Thank you so much, Scott and Pam.

Scott Harper: Thanks, Dorie. Thanks to you out there for listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. To check out resources related to today’s program, download Dorie’s resources, share on social media, read her bio, or open a conversation with us go to GrowthIgnitersRadio.com and select episode 133.

Pam Harper: Until next time. This is Pam Harper.

Scott Harper: And Scott Harper.

Pam Harper: Wishing you continued to success and leaving you with this question to reflect upon.

Scott Harper: What am I going to do starting today to proactively, and mindfully began the process of reinventing myself?