The Art of Reinventing Yourself
Asya Grigoryan |
TEDxLenoxVillageStudio
• April 2021
I often remember myself as a young, energetic, ambitious girl in business attire always eager to grow higher and to learn more. I got my third master's degree at the age of 25 and got my first top managerial position at 27. The career promised to be exciting and big and I loved it! But life is interesting because it constantly throws us challenges and it had other plans for me. It took me on an adventure of constant self-discovery and rediscovery by taking me to different countries and challenging me to discover new and hidden sides of my personality and to reinvent myself each time with the alternative of getting completely lost. 7 years, 2 different countries, 3 different cities, between home and places that eventually start feeling like home, and yet... every time you start at a new place, your whole set of stereotypes, beliefs, and stories gets challenged, questioned, falls apart like pieces of a puzzle, and slowly gets together again in a beautiful, yet different picture and view of the world and of yourself in that world. We all reinvent ourselves many times throughout our life. Even without traveling, we often find ourselves between the past where we don’t fit in anymore, and the present, where we haven’t found ourselves yet. Life isn’t standing still and as a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said: You cannot step in the same river twice. For it is not the same river and you are not the same person. We go through relationships, we change workplaces, careers, we gain and we lose, we rise and we fall... Right now, we talk about the new normal, about the new reality created by the pandemic. It’s the new «country» we all found ourselves in and we need to reinvent ourselves to keep going, to adapt, and to thrive in the new environment. In my talk, I would like to share my journey as an ex-pat with the focus on reinventing myself few times within the past 10 years as well as to share insights, takeaways, and lessons that I learned from this journey.