After three months of a book tour for What’s Up Down There? that sells me to the world as the “Girlfriend Gynecologist,” I’m officially hanging up my white coat and giving away my speculums to shift my practice from a medical practice to a pure coaching practice. My mother thinks I’m crazy, but bless her heart, she said, “Honey, if you’re happy, then I’m happy.” And I’m blissful. Gleeful. Bubbling over with pink sparkly joy. I can hardly contain myself.

Plate o' Love (side of Medicine)

For years, I’ve been telling people that I practice love with a little bit of medicine on the side. Lately, the medicine part has felt like more and more of a distraction. The details of lab tests, Pap smears, and prescriptions seem so secondary to what I’m really good at--the LOVE. Recently, as much as I’ve loved my medical practice at the Owning Pink Center, I’ve found myself feeling like some heeby-jeeby bug-like creature that longs to shed the last sleeve of the white coat skin I’ve been trying to escape for years now so I can fully unfurl my wings and FLY.

Letting go of this gigantic defining factor in my life--releasing my identity as “DOCTOR'--feels like lifting an elephant off my chest. I feel light as pixie dust, and with this lightness, I feel like I can do anything, like I can continue to reinvent my outer life so it better matches my inner life.

Since 90% of my medical practice has been coaching women to live fuller, more vital lives by owning all the facets of what makes them whole--their creativity, their spirituality, their health, their sexuality, their relationships, and the very purpose of their lives- it feels like a natural reinvention. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve just been calling it something else.

Each unpeeling of the onion of ME gets me one layer closer to the essential heart of who I really am, and the more I unpeel the onion, the more blissful I feel, the more authentic I am, the more whole I become.

Do you long to do the same? Here are some tips I learned along the way.

10 Tips For Reinventing Yourself

1. Don’t put yourself in a box or let anyone else put you in one. Avoid the temptation to limit yourself to a “niche” that is too narrow for all of who you are. Keep yourself expansive.
2. Remember that life is not a one way street. Reinventing yourself doesn’t mean you can’t drive two ways on the road of your life.
3. Hold onto your childhood dreams. It’s never too late to live your truth and let your freak flag fly. Let your dreams be limitless.
4. Send your inner critic to time out. Don’t judge who you really are.
5. Avoid worrying about what “everybody” thinks. After all, most of the time, “everybody” boils down to only a few key people whose opinions may not be the best guiding forces in your life.
6. Trust your inner guidance over even your wisest mentors. Check in with your body. Listen to your gut and your heart. YOU know best.
7. Resist the temptation to let fear rule your decisions. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
8. Don’t rely on labels to define you. Your purest definition comes from within--and nobody can ever take that away from you, no matter how you reinvent yourself.
9. Surround yourself with other people who fearlessly reinvent themselves. Let them blow pixie dust beneath your wings while you return the favor. Butterflies love flying companions.
10. Be ALL YOU, ALL THE TIME while you’re considering your reinvention. Switching one false mask for another merely covers your truth with another façade. Unveil the beauty that is YOU without apology.

What about you? What layers of the onion do you long to unpeel? How would you reinvent yourself if you took fear and judgment out of the equation?

Hey, if a doctor can take off her white coat after twelve years of education and ten years of practice to be more of who she really longs to be, we as beings evolving together can do ANYTHING.

Flapping my butterfly wings,

Lissa

Need guidance as you reinvent yourself? Let Lissa Rankin help you catalyze the kind of change that will take you deeper into the joy of living an authentic life. For more about Lissa's coaching or to make an appointment, click here.