Reinventing: Look at Your Resume Differently

Let’s talk about what it means to reinvent ourselves. I’ve discussed this in previous Leading Thoughts. Many of you have asked for more on this. Let’s get to it!

I’ve told you often that I admire those who reinvent themselves. They don’t get locked into one category of work or one definition of who they are. Instead, they draw skills and wisdom from their previous experience and form them into new ventures, new directions.

I’ve described my admiration for John Madden, who transitioned from athlete to NFL championship coach to legendary broadcaster to stunningly successful video game entrepreneur. I also think highly of Shaquille O’Neil—pro athlete, actor, policeman, Doctor of Education, entrepreneur, philanthropist, broadcaster, and social activist.

I could name dozens more. All mined the riches to be gained from every phase of their lives. All realized that no one phase would last forever. All courageously rethought, rebuilt, and relaunched.

So, that’s the review. Here’s the first truth I want you to know. You begin a reinvention by thinking about your resume in new ways. Usually, we think about how many years we were at Smith Company, what our title was, and what our responsibilities were. You have to go beyond this in order to reinvent.

I want you to think about your resume from the perspective of what work was most meaningful to you and what patterns you see within the jobs you’ve held.

An example from my life. You know if you’ve been with me here for a while that I was a pastor for twenty years. It might have been possible for me to merely state that as true and never draw more from it. But I remember that toward the end of my twenty pastoral years I began to see a pattern. Sure, I taught and led, built and strategized. Yet by thinking outside of the usual resume box, I realized that I had developed a bit of a specialty that I wanted to build on.

You see, though I won’t go into details here, I spent a great deal of time as a pastor restoring leaders who had crashed. I gained a bit of a reputation for it, as did our team. Even while I was still pastoring, other organizations contacted me for advice about what I came to call “leadership crashes.” As I pondered all this, I realized how satisfying I found all this work and how rewarding and useful it was. I did research into the damage leadership crashes were doing in society and how they could be prevented. I decided that even when I transitioned out of pastoring I wanted to continue this valuable work for which I seemed to have some skills.

Many of you know the rest. My firm specialized in leadership crashes for years. We prospered in this. I wrote a book about it. I have given hundreds of talks about the signs of a leadership crash—to NFL teams, to NCAA coaches, to some of the nation’s biggest companies, to military gatherings, and to social service organizations of every kind. This is some of the most satisfying and rewarding work I do.

How did it begin? I didn’t merely say, “I was a pastor.” I went deeper. What did I do that was successful? What “lit my jets” of passion? What did I find I had exceptional skill for? These were the questions that led me to a reinvention.

Now, what about you? You know your resume, but do you know your skill and passion history? Can you find your narrative that is something like mine? Go beyond names, dates, and positions on your resume. What was the work, the skill acquisition, the joy, the success, the need, even the esteem that points the way to a new venture?

Ponder this. I’ll come back to this theme in the next Leading Thoughts. In the meantime, find the potential reinvention narrative arising from your life.