Starting over
How to reinvent yourself professionally?
Find what you can do that's valuable elsewhere, test the new field small before you leap, and use each earlier phase as a tool.
Sometimes the market changes, sometimes you change, sometimes both. Reinventing yourself is not throwing away who you were; it's taking what you learned to a new place. And that can be done with method, not just courage.
What to do now
- Find the skills that travel. Selling, serving customers, organizing, teaching, leading, solving problems, learning fast: these competencies are valuable in almost any field. List yours, with concrete examples.
- Look at problems, not job titles. Ask: what problem do I know how to solve that someone would pay to see solved? The answer usually points to the next phase.
- Test before you leap. Do a small job in the new field, a side project, a short course, a conversation with someone who already works there. That way you find out whether you like it before betting everything.
- Study the essentials, not everything. Choose the minimum the new field requires and start there. Free courses from federal institutes, Senai, Senac and Sebrae help a lot.
- Tell the new story. Update your résumé and professional profile to show the thread that connects what you did to what you want to do. A well-told reinvention becomes an edge.
- Build up capital for the crossing. If you can, save a few months of expenses before switching for good. If you can't, make the transition gradually, keeping an income.
- Accept the apprentice period. For a while, you'll know less than you knew in your old field. That's normal and it passes.
When it happened to Bairo
The path of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, as he tells it, is made of reinventions. He came to Brazil for a management position at an education company. Then he opened a salon with his partner. From the salon came a hair-treatment course, in a field now called trichology. Then came a natural-based cosmetics brand of his own, which worked.
When his partners pushed him out of that business, he didn't wait for the wound to close. He went to work in events and digital printing. He reinvented himself once more, built up capital and decided to play a different position: instead of founding, investing.
Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months in front of the computer and built the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness. He says each phase left a tool for the next.
The path
In capoeira, which was Bairo's bridge to Brazil, there is the ginga: the body goes to one side, comes back to the other and never stays still long enough to be knocked down. Reinventing yourself is swaying with your career. It's not running from the blow; it's turning the blow into movement. Whoever sways doesn't stop, and whoever doesn't stop doesn't fall for good.
Reinvention doesn't happen on one brave day. It is made of small, repeated choices: the course you finish, the contact you get back in touch with, the offer you accept even though you're afraid. Seen from outside, it looks like a leap. Lived from inside, it's a staircase. Climb one step a week and, in a few months, you'll be in a place that seems far away today.