Taking Inventory
I am older, a senior, and resurrected. Now I get to decide how to live again.
I have reached another plateau, a new level.
Becoming a Senior Citizen comes with a new set of benefits and challenges. Regardless, I’m in a new phase of expectations, adventures, and lessons. And although I don’t have the same income as when I was employed, I also don’t have the same expenses. I now have enough resources to serve as a base, a foundation that will allow and fund my next expedition.
Fortunately I have enough money, time and health to explore new frontiers. Now, what will I choose to do with these critical assets? How will I invest them to yield higher returns? To create a Higher Version of Today?
Reinvention is a series of choices and actions to move from where I am today to where I think I want to be. It’s simply an experiment.
And the problem with reinvention is that most of us lack the vision to move from who we are to who we want to become. Yet, the vision for my next iteration is simply an act of asking and then answering a set of simple questions. And before asking those questions we must also accept two required truths.
First, Reinvention requires the death of my former self and the rebirth of my inner child, my original design. After a life of programmed living, I realize that I’ve spent my life living in a haze, living someone else's vision of how and who I was supposed to be. Why was I living a miserable life from a set of expectations that simply weren’t mine? Why was I never happy? The short answer is that I was living by someone else’s expectations.
Second, Reinvention requires a self directed, purposeful, and engaged experience. It’s way more demanding than opening up my social media and imagining that I was living the influencer’s life, or worse yet, turning on the television imagining that somehow I was living the drama as if it was my life. Most of us are simply observers of someone else’s habits, values, and success. And that’s how we both live and die.
So how can we change our outcome, our narrative, our habits, and become the person we’re supposed to be? The person we want to be?
It all begins with a simple self review.
The act of questioning Why…and then answering the question in complete truth. Self review begins with a simple inventory of how we’re currently living, a fearless yet honest inventory.
1. How am I spending both my time and money?
2. How am I treating my body?
3. What do I passionately desire? (without justification.)
4. Who am I spending my time with?
Four simple questions asked and answered in complete honesty. And then to ask ourselves how would we prefer to spend our time, and money; how we want to take care of our health; as well as who we’d prefer to spend time with. It’s simply the act of questioning and answering ourselves honestly. And then making changes daily to move from where we are to arrive at who and where we really want to be.
It all starts with an inventory.
In Practice
Begin tracking how you spend your money and time. I recommend a simple budgeting spreadsheet and a calendar. Record the activities of each day for one month in both. Then ask yourself why. Why are you spending your precious resources of time and money this way? Are you on track to becoming who you desire to be?
Action Item
Remember a time in your past when you really achieved something significant. Hold onto that memory and amplify it in your mind. Then go deeper and remember how it felt to really achieve something that was so important to you. Now say YES! This is how I want to feel again
