Find Your Wings, and Soar!

September was a momentous month for me … my 2nd wedding anniversary to the love of my life, the 5th anniversary of my big move from the East Coast to my dream city of San Francisco, and the 6th anniversary of my divorce from my first (26-year long) marriage and the end of my 30-year corporate career. It’s a great time to celebrate … and to share my lessons learned about how to reinvent yourself after a crisis, find your wings and thrive. If you’ve recently navigated a big life transition and want some tips for happiness and success, read on.

Here are the lessons I’ve learned, which I’m sharing as a 5-step WINGS process (including my examples) to help YOU to find your wings and soar:

Wholeness

Whether you’ve gone through a separation, divorce, or job layoff, it’s a big loss. And like any kind of major loss, there’s grieving to be done. If you try (like I did) to short-cut the grieving process, the tears will come back to bite you at the most inopportune moments, so take time to reflect on your loss.

Seek to understand the underlying causes of the situation and what you learned from it. You may realize (like I did) that your crisis was a wake-up call from an unhappy relationship or a less-than-fulfilling job. Use the wake-up call to assess what was missing from your life … and to set a vision for a new chapter of your life that would nourish your heart and soul.

Inner Self

This is the time to reinvent yourself from inside-out. Simply jumping to a new job or a new relationship will just repeat the same patterns you’ve experienced in the past. Instead, go deep within yourself to understand who you really are at your core, and who you can be. Seek to understand the patterns from your past … both the good and the bad patterns.

Tap into your inner self … What’s really important to you? What are your passions? Learn to love and respect your true, authentic self … and the right people will love and respect you too.

Navigate Your Obstacles

What stops you from moving forward? What causes emotional swirl and indecision for you?

Typically, our biggest obstacles are in our own minds … the fear of failure, fear of the unknown, self-limiting beliefs about what’s possible for us, and our very loud Inner Critic (the Gremlin who tells us we’re not good enough). Once we realize that these paralyzing messages are simply an outdated but natural self-protection mechanism, we can recognize when they pop up and take action to control the negative self-talk. By shining the bright light of awareness on them, we can take away their power so that we can move forward.

Generate Your Roadmap

By setting a clear vision for a whole and fulfilling life, you have a “destination” toward which you can create a roadmap.

In my case, my post-divorce and post-corporate vision was to live in my dream city of San Francisco, develop new relationships that would nurture my heart and soul, and do work that fulfills me and helps other women navigate major transitions in their lives and thrive. I created a roadmap and took actions to get me there. It took less than 2 years to transform my life, reach my goals, and achieve the happiness and success I was aiming for. Along the way, I noticed that everything was miraculously falling into place. It was as if the universe was conspiring to help me reach my destination. I realize now that the key was in having a clear vision of what I wanted my life to be like … and to trust that it would happen.

What’s YOUR vision for your ideal career, your ideal relationships, your ideal life-style? What actions must you take to get there?

Stay on Track

There most certainly will be speed bumps along the way. Unexpected things will happen that can derail you and your best-laid plans. You need to develop strategies and systems to stay positive, motivated, focused, and accountable to yourself. It helps to have an accountability partner or professional coach to help you stay on track and maintain that precious forward momentum. When going through a major life transition, you don’t know what you don’t know, so don’t hesitate to get help from others who have been on that path. You’ll reach your destination much faster.

I hope you found my WINGS process to be helpful and inspiring. Want to learn more about how to apply it to reinvent YOUR life? Curious about how a personal coach can help you navigate a big transition in your career or life? For a complimentary consultation, go to http://wingsforwomen.net/consultation-request-form.

Keiko Hsu
Wings for Women