Tereza Urbánková
is a PR, communications and marketing professional with 20 years’ experience and proven success in delivering award- winning communications programmes for multinational companies operating in industries such as hospitality, retail, IT, defence, broadcast, logistics, pharma and engineering. After having lived and worked in the UK for 12 years, she moved to Germany where she now works for Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, as Head of Global External Communication, Animal Health. Tereza is a member of the Executive Committee of the Czech British Chamber of Commerce in London. She speaks Czech, English, Spanish and Russian and can be reached through her LinkedIn profile.
We face challenging times. Whether it is social movements, widespread discontent, various threats, world instability, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the impending climate change, it looks like the world has been crushing on us from different angles, which can be overwhelming. On the other hand, this may be a perfect time to take stock, reassess our life and make changes.
At the start of the pandemic, when lockdown was introduced in a lot of countries, some people used the time to do what they had been putting off, such as tidying up the cupboards or doing some home renovation, in addition to trying to cope with the situation. As time went by, others have come to the conclusion that the best way to cope with this new reality is to evolve with it – not by letting change happen to us but actively participating in our transformation.
There is no right way to make a change, the most important thing is to make it purposeful and keep moving forward. While some changes can be small but meaningful tweaks to our lives, others can equal a larger ‘reinvention’. Reinvention is about changing the course of how we respond to an evolving reality; the reality that touches every life on the planet, the existing ecosystems which are currently altering in ways not seen before.
When the spring lockdown kicked off in Germany, I contemplated how to make the most of the, sometimes frustrating, time at home. I decided to emerge from this pandemic fitter and with more skills that I may use in the future. I found a few online fitness routines and created a workout programme giving me a variety of exercises for a week. It was somehow easier to find the time to exercise when at home than trying to work around the time set by my gym. I also searched for a couple of internationally accredited online courses to complement my skills which I found and began studying. When reflecting on the past several months, I thought of a few techniques that might help guide you on your transformation journey if you wish to pursue one:
Educate yourself – sometimes when we want to create a change, be it personal, professional or more widely spread, we may need to commit to some learning. I chose to study life coaching and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) online courses. Both can greatly complement my personal and professional life.
Revisit your goals – we are living in unprecedented and turbulent times, so ask yourself what you wish to accomplish and who you want to be. This can be an opportunity to look at your life from a different perspective reflecting the current reality.
Think about what your strengths are – perhaps you could build on them to get where you want to be. Creating short- and long-term goals with concrete steps and milestones can be crucial in mapping the path that will lead to a change in your life.
You need resilience and willpower to go through with it. Discipline is key, as it is so hard to slip back to frustration, fatigue and ‘can’t be bothered’ mode. It is important to maintain focus although the goal may seem too far way. This is easier said than done when we are already going through a change of working from home while having other challenges to deal with at the same time. The life coaching course also teaches about how to help clients overcome resistance and instil motivation in them. Recognising the source of resistance can help; it can be general fear, lack of belief the effort will bring results or fear of how others will react, to name but a few.
Make sure you have people around you that support your reinvention. As change can be hard, we sometimes need people to lean on to be able to continue. But don’t lean too much as this is your personal journey!
Reinvention can happen regardless of age or circumstances. However, it does not mean to throw away everything and start anew, the best power of reinvention lies in leveraging everything you’ve ever done – the good, the bad, the ugly, the successes and the failures. It taps into the very real (and often unappreciated and unarticulated) skills, insights and expertise you have gained along the way. So you don’t need to try to create a new personality from scratch to reinvent yourself.
Dealing with failure when going through a change is also important. Of course, not everything works as planned no matter how hard we try. Life goes up and down, side to side and all around. Sometimes it is hard to focus. Maintaining the trajectory and holding the course is not always easy and failures should not crush our spirit. Instead, it can be productive to examine failures, perceive them as a challenge and something to learn from. The life coaching course has taught me that success is 80% mindset and 20% action, so it is really about how we wire or rewire our brain to make a change real.
“Your power to choose your direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation.” Stephen Covey
We all have the power to steer the life to the direction we want to. And if not now, then when?
By Tereza Urbánková