The Evergreen Power of Reinvention

This Halloween, one of my daughters decided to be a gumball machine. Her costume is everything you want a Halloween costume to be – comfortable, warm enough, and super fun. Red skirt, red tights, white sneakers and a long sleeve white shirt with pom-poms all over (gumballs) and a sign reading “25 cents.” One minute she was asking for a quarter at a local restaurant, next minute that’s what she was going to be for Halloween. One of those marvelous kid-notions – excited and ready to create. I love the "go rogue" nature kids seem to exhibit every year when Halloween rolls around. I marvel at how readily they tap into hidden parts of themselves. Maybe it’s because they sense the rare opportunity hidden under the candy: for a little while, you can be anyone or anything.

This summer I enjoyed a blissful week with my college best friends and our families. One day my friend Gaby was telling my daughters a story about her own summer camp experiences when she was younger. She admitted she was known best during the school year as an academic -- always diligently hard at work on math and science, reliably studious and serious. These work habits had created a kind of persona that left her feeling a little boxed in.

Then she went to sleepaway camp and a few weeks of not being that person turned out to be transformative.

There was no math or science at camp. There were only direct questions posed every day by her surroundings, that were agnostic to one’s grades or perceived academic prowess: Do you like building fires? Can you raise the sail on a boat? Do you know how to make tie-dyed T-shirts? Gaby, to her wonder and delight, discovered new sides to her personality. She didn’t deliberately set out to play pretend, or to act like somebody else. The new setting simply presented an opportunity. It gave her license to explore other facets of herself, allowing hidden talents to shine. Without those crutches of math or science to lean on, she felt safe to explore who she could be, deep down, tap into things that weren’t necessarily apparent before camp. She un-boxed herself.

At a young age, Gaby discovered the evergreen power of reinvention. It doesn’t require going back to summer camp to tap into your unexpected sides. What if you could show up at work tomorrow, and be totally anonymous? Who might you become? What would you reveal, to yourself and others? Would you tamp down parts, amplify others? In a reshuffling of expectations, what license might you grant yourself?

Self-help guru Tim Ferriss has a similar standing piece of advice. Look at the habits you’ve developed at work, he says. What if, just as an experiment, you tried doing the exact opposite of those habits for 48 hours? Say less (or say more), agree with someone (or argue the opposite), volunteer when you’d rather be a wallflower, get rid of the person everyone else expects to show up.

Whether you’re celebrating or not this Halloween, maybe there is an opportunity to emerge from the piles of candy having revealed a new side of yourself. Or at least having tried something on for a bit to see if it fits.

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