No one to say we’re only dreaming

Eli Manning’s retirement speech stated that the end of his football career was just the beginning of something he hadn’t even discovered yet.

Life was not shrinking for him, it was morphing into a whole new world of possibilities. Peyton said that football was a mighty platform that had given him a voice that would echo well beyond the game.

My favorite part about the speech is, his mindset requires tremendous faith. Because when a person is in that liminal space, when the ground beneath them suddenly disappears, they feel deeply disoriented. The future seems like a shapeless place. Kind of like getting sacked by a three hundred pound linebacker.

In this situation, we have no choice by to renegotiate our place in the world. And to do so, we need to have the existential courage to stand on their own and bring forth the future from nothing.

Piece of cake, right?

Not so much. Reinventing ourselves is about as easy as outrunning that linebacker. You’d be surprised how fast one of those guys can run.

Point being, the process of changing ourselves into something entirely new is mostly a mindset change. Certainly, we can update our wardrobe, move cities and revamp our resume. But all of those things are just cosmetic tweaks that happen as an extension of that inner work.

Tracey writes in her inspiring book about reinvention that:

Our job is to engage with the phenomenon of context. Context is the human environment that determines the limitations of our actions and the scope of the results our actions can produce. And when we reinvent ourselves, we are essentially creating a new context from which to relate to reality. From there, we create a new realm of possibility, one that did not previously exist.

This may sound like spiritual, life coaching management gibberish to you, but it really did work for my own reinvention. Specifically the lever of language.

Thats what really helped me change my context from a mindset perspective. After more than a decade of identifying solely as an entrepreneur, I started taking jobs that let me continue to expand my professional journey by day, while holding onto my own unique brand by night.

Into my thirties, instead of referring to myself as an entrepreneur, I started using the term dual citizen. Which meant someone who was his own patron. Somebody who worked a regular nine to five job, but also bankrolled his own projects in his spare time.

My younger self never could have predicted this change, but the becoming a dual citizen turned out to be deeply fulfilling in a way that belonging to a pirate nation never could be. And as that context began to shift, over time, the rest of my life followed suit. It wasn’t perfect.

There were was still fear and loneliness and doubt. But coming out of that liminal space and into the new clearing that my mindset had created, it felt different. Better. Healthier. Truer. To quote the aforementioned quarterback, my life was morphing into a whole new world of possibilities.

Aladdin sang it best on the fabled magic carpet ride:

A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view, no one to tell us no, or where to go, or to say we’re only dreaming.

Do you believe in yourself, in the process, in the universe enough to make the leap? Even if the future feels like a shapeless and scary place, stepping out is worth it.

Those linebackers can’t keep chasing you forever.

What context are you dismissing from your mind because you’ve convinced yourself it’s not possible?