Reinvent Your Life - Tips and Tricks that Really Work

Growing into confident, successful, happy women can be like a game of survival of the fittest. How do we ensure our life unfolds as planned? And what do we do when it doesn’t? Women have the power to recreate themselves and redefine their roles. It’s no longer survival of the fittest; it’s evolution at its best.

Women, in particular, fall into a trap where they allow their roles to define them. “We go to school, get a job or we get married, and suddenly we’ve created these roles but don’t know who we are,” says women’s success coach and entrepreneur Alexandria Brown. “We do stuff all day; we take care of everyone else.”

There comes a time when some women want a change in their lives. Although making a major turnaround isn’t easy for anyone, sometimes it’s just what you need to get your life back on track, Brown says. Here are a few tips:

Step 1: Recognize what isn’t working. Make a list of things that aren’t working for you or people that are holding you back. The first step is to be aware of what’s going on in your life.

Step 2: Make yourself your first priority. This is a hard one, especially for women. But set aside other people and do what’s best for you. “You’re responsible to your friends and family, but you’re not responsible for them,” Brown says.

Step 3: Dream big. Who says you can’t start your own company, or become a full-time volunteer? If you can dream it, you can do it.

Step 4: Let go. “You can make changes faster by letting things go than by taking new things on,” Brown says. Sometimes discarding a few small tasks is easier than taking on one gigantic new task. It will also create more room for you to do the things you want to do.

Step 5: Evoke your evolution. Basically, take action! Consider the following four women’s stories as an example for how you can reinvent your life. These women turned their lives upside down and resurfaced, smiling. Meet the successful moms, wives and friends who decided they weren’t going to live mediocre lives.

Healing the World, Following Her Heart

A graduate of an Ivy League school, Kristin Boekhoff pictured herself in corporate America. So when she got there, she continued dreaming. By 30, she set a goal to become a corporate information officer for a large company. And just as she planned, she achieved it. “I was 30 years old and had done everything I said I would. Now what do I do?” Boekhoff says.

She oversaw $7 billion in low-income housing developments in New York City, but still felt she wasn’t performing to her full potential. “I really feel like I have the ability to make a difference in the world,” she says. “I feel obligated to give back.”

A lifetime learner, Boekhoff attended eight colleges after receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cornell and NYU, respectively. When she developed an interest in Chinese or calculus, for instance, she studied diligently. But then one professor enlightened her to new knowledge: Of the 6 billion people in the world, he said, 4 billion live in poverty. “That shocked me to the core. I had to go out and see this to really understand it,” she says.

In 2006, Boekhoff saw how she could use her real estate skills to improve undeveloped parts of the world. A Fulbright Scholarship took her to Bangladesh that same year. By the time she’d completed the program, her heart was no longer set on corporate America; her new dream was to continue her work in South Asia. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and this is my time to go off and do something on my own,” she says.

Boekhoff stayed in Bangladesh and now calls a primitive village home. Her days are spent planning a sustainable resort that will employ local workers to cook, clean, make local artifacts and give tours of the countryside.

Visitors at Panigram Resort, as it’s called, will stay in mud houses that do not require air conditioning—a nod to Boekhoff’s belief in environmental and social responsibility. The resorts combine her real estate expertise and her real-life interest in making her own imprint on the world.

A recent twist of fate sent Boekhoff to Eastern Europe in search of more undeveloped land for future resorts. A friend from her former life in corporate America was inspired by Boekhoff ’s plan and has offered to raise $50 million to help Boekhoff follow her dream—developing 100 tourist resorts across the world.

“I take risks and I follow what my heart is telling me,” Boekhoff says. “I really think this is something I can do.”

Making Medicine a Personal Miracle

The hours fade into minutes and into seconds as Joan Nathan, mother of six, remembers a day that changed her life. She was eating a piece of homemade blueberry pie and counting her blessings. Some of the kids were playing at the baseball field, and her husband, Bruce, was tinkering with the broken lawn mower. But the few hours following are burned into Nathan’s mind like freeze-frame images.

First was a knock on the door; a neighbor kid told her there had been a car accident down the street. The concerned mother ran out the front door. “My feet felt like lead. I felt like I was never going to get there,” Nathan says.

She arrived to find her 10-year-old son, Eli, and his bicycle at the accident site, and even this warm, loving mom couldn’t save him.

Nathan’s life crumbled around her. She lifelessly picked up her career as a nursery school teacher, her students sensing she was lost. Her youngest son, Jared, also called Eli’s “best friend,” was devastated without his brother. The dedicated mom tried to stay strong for her family.

“I had to take care of my children,” she says. “It was the responsibility of being a parent that helped me through.”

Inspired by the tragedy, Nathan and her close-knit community of Medford, N.Y., took action. Nathan was instrumental in passing the bicycle helmet law in New York in 1993, which saved the life of a little girl in her neighborhood two months later. “Saving one life allowed me to take a deep breath,” she says.

Later, while cleaning her closets—and “cleaning her soul,” she says—Nathan found her old medical textbooks she thought had been tossed years ago. The books awakened the dream she had long since put aside. She studied with delight and rediscovered a happiness she hadn’t felt since before Eli’s death.

With persistence, encouragement from professors and a supportive family, Nathan went back to school and became an RN. Today she is a nurse practitioner, a happy mom and, above all, a listener. Her experience allows her to relate to sick or grieving patients.

“People seem to respond to my touch,” she says. “I see so many people suffering. I want to be an encourager of joy.”

Back to Her ‘Old Self’

When Kati Tolle arrived for summer school as a student teacher, one of her preschoolers didn’t recognize her. “Don’t you remember Miss Tolle?” she asked. The youngster shrugged; she didn’t look anything like the teacher from last year. Even some of the instructors were shocked.

The 65 pounds Tolle shed in her last year of college brought back her “old self,” she says—now a bubbly, energetic elementary-school teacher. Tolle dons last year’s ID to show how far she’s come. “Some people didn’t recognize me. That’s the difference a year makes.”

As a child, Tolle always played sports. She was swinging a bat before the age of 4, and her dad, an umpire, encouraged her through her glory days in high school. But when she went to college, she left softball behind. “I worked out so much my whole life that this was my first break. I stopped doing it altogether,” she says.

The weight gain was slow at first. A few years in, Tolle started hating pictures of herself. Then, her boyfriend of seven years proposed, and Tolle tossed aside the engagement pictures, unhappy. “Ryan asked me to marry him when I was my biggest,” Tolle says. “He didn’t care what I looked like. But I did.”

Tolle looked for excuses, but doctors confirmed her thyroid levels were fine and she didn’t have diabetes. So Tolle, who stands at only 5 feet 2 inches, made a commitment as she weighed in at 185 pounds: Run as far as she could, every day.

At first, she only ran to the end of the block. Slowly, she gained momentum. “I knew if I did too much at a time, I would give up,” she says.

Tolle skimmed health and fitness magazines for food tips. She began making healthy food choices and stayed home to cook instead of eating at restaurants. When Tolle added weight training, the weight “fell off,” she says.

“In a month, it transformed me. There’s no way I thought I could get down to this point. It transformed my whole life.”

Today, Tolle gets up every morning before work and runs for 30 to 40 minutes. In the evenings, she lifts weights for about 30 minutes, focusing on one part of her body each day: chest,

legs, arms or shoulders/back. “You don’t have to kill your body,” she says. “If you stay active and do something, that’s what really counts.”

She ‘Looked Death in the Face’

More than a decade ago, Cara Polk hung up the phone and collapsed into a heap on her bathroom floor. She sat there motionless with one pressing thought: “I’m going to die and I never took tango lessons.”

It’s amazing what our minds do in crisis. For Polk, missed opportunities flooded her mind as she found out that the lump on her breast would require a mastectomy and a summer of chemotherapy. She was deprived of proper sleep and nutrition, and her body gave in. “I had been neglecting my body and my spiritual side,” she says. “All of a sudden, those were the parts of me that were going to keep me alive. I had a lot of kissing up to do.”

Polk took a leave of absence from her stressful job as a software consultant. She was often getting only four hours of sleep each night and was constantly worried about job security. But the summer she moved to her parents’ farm was one of the happiest of her life, despite the chemotherapy, she says.

She remembers people dropping by to see her daily and receiving about 25 handwritten letters from a former boyfriend’s second-grade students. “I had never been good at letting people into my life,” Polk says. “It let me know how wonderful people are.”

After her recovery, Polk took a therapist’s advice and rearranged her bedroom to purge old, unhealthy memories. She considered his suggestion frivolous, but Polk, always a “pleaser,” obeyed. In her closet was the blouse she wore the day of her lumpectomy. And her bed was bare—she’d been too busy to buy a comforter. Polk realized she needed to change her environment and her life.

She took a leap of faith and started a business, now called Living Well Designs. Polk consults with others about how to make their homes into positive spaces. “Change your space, change your life,” is her motto.

Polk remembers one client who said he couldn’t overcome a divorce from more than five years ago. On closer inspection, Polk found he was sleeping on the same mattress and comforter that he shared with his ex-wife, and the scent of her perfume still wafted through the bedroom. In another instance, a woman complained of depression, and Polk found “boxes and boxes” of her mother’s will and death arrangements underneath the bed—certainly a depressing memory.

“It doesn’t matter how beautifully decorated a home is,” Polk says. “To jump-start positive change, use your space as a catalyst.”

Today, Polk says she is comfortable in her own skin and finds joy in every day. “I looked death in the face and said, ‘I don’t care anymore.’ Finally, I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

Additional Reading

• A Place to Call Home
• Who Says You Can’t?
• See a Need. Do a Good Deed.