In a previous article, Know Your Worth, I wrote about the importance of knowing your value in order not to short-change your potential for contributing to the world; not to accept poor treatment and to be discerning about how you spend your valuable time and with whom.    The concept of knowing your worth is critically important, but even more so with what is going on with companies and careers these days. 

In a fascinating CNNMoney.com blog titled, Know Yourself by Patti Sellers, Fortune Magazine Editor at Large, she makes a strong assertion that the one core competency you need in our current turbulent times is to Know Thyself.  She also says that it is foolish if you are not rethinking your life or career.   I agree.  The intent of her post was not to scare you, but to jar you into the realization that times are changing and the skill you need is reinvention and old rules for managing your career no longer apply.

Reinvention puts you in the driver seat of a personal evolution to revive or invent again.  It allows you to ask the important question of self-discovery that moves you from being frozen in fear to taking action.  Make the necessary steps to move forward.  Knock yourself off the fence and shake off what made you stuck.  But when you move forward, be prepared to be unconventional in your approach and look at options you may not have thought of or considered before. 

Reinvention is a big word and it takes courage.  Reinvention requires that you determine what you are going to do to make a difference in your life.  It requires that you are honest about your baseline and then commit to making tweaks to extraordinary changes to make a difference.  One thing is for sure, whether big or small, change  begins with a single step.  We can all do that.  

Abandon the words, "I have always done it this way" from your vocabulary; consider unconventional paths to success; know what is important to you; learn from the market and create a flexible career model that gives you options.   Reset your thinking to allow for fluency and change.  Consider this valuable advice from Tom Peters, branding enthusiast:

"It's over.  No more vertical.  No more ladder. That's not the way careers work anymore. Linearity is out. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. It's full of moves that go sideways, forward, slide on the diagonal, and even go backward when that makes sense (it often does.)  A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand."

Reinvent as if your career depended on it.