The Muscle of Reinvention Building on Past Identities
reinvention
the act of transitioning from one
identity
to another is something we will all
experience at least once
if not many times throughout our lives i
grew up doing both
rhythmic gymnastics which is the one
with the ribbon and the balls and
this is me pictured at 19 years old and
ballet
and this is a picture of me at 25 years
old with the boston ballet
to be clear no i can’t do either of
these things
at this level anymore and no
doing both at the same time was not the
norm
i started ballet at the age of three and
gymnastics at the age of five
and was very quickly swept onto a track
where everything in my life became
secondary
to the pursuit of these two careers
i went through my high school years
straddling these two
distinct worlds and without explicitly
knowing it then
bringing skills from one into the other
in the gymnastics world i was known as a
poetic gymnast
and in the ballet world i was known as a
dynamic and athletic
ballerina and it wasn’t easy
growing up trying to have a normal
social life and juggle
academics while training multiple hours
a day
traveling the country and the world for
competitions and
training with the top coach and i came
very close to quitting
many many times you can just ask my
parents
but from where i stand now moving from
gymnastics to ballet to business i
wouldn’t trade
my experience growing up for anything
over the years i’ve experienced three
major transitions
and i’ve learned that the true art of
reinvention
is a muscle to develop it is a practice
that lies not in becoming something or
someone different
but in exploring and expanding more of
who you are
it is a process built on the shoulders
of past identities
and the unique lessons you’ve learned
along the way
it is my challenge to you to think about
change
as an opportunity for exploration and
expansion
as opposed to focusing on the feelings
of pain
loss and fear that we often feel at the
outset
i have been fascinated with this concept
of reinvention
since the early years of my gymnastics
career
you see athletes gymnasts dancers
we grow up in dog years and we know that
our reinvention
will come much sooner than the average
professional
as a gymnast at the age of 14
i competed in world championships in
budapest
and then i competed in world cups and
grand prix in
moscow israel japan
and so by the time i turned 17 i was
considered a
mature gymnast and looking at this photo
of my sister rosie and i
also a gymnast you can see why we don’t
push
well past the age of 20. it’s really
really hard on the body
i finished my career ranked number two
in canada and with my timing for the
olympics being off
i decided it was time to transition into
the world of ballet
when i transitioned into the world of
dancing i jumped from
one realm of dog ears into another with
a slightly longer runway
in the u.s most classical ballet dancers
reach around the age of 30. and
if you make it to the age of 30 as a
professional ballerina
that’s pretty darn good in my book i
imagined that i would dance
well into my 30s instead i enjoyed a
decade-long career with boston ballet
dancing iconic roles like the arabian
princess in the nutcracker
and fierce female roles like this one in
yorma ellos lost on slow
at the age of 27 a devastating
injury to my ankle became chronic and it
cut
my time on stage short while it was
scary
and jarring to move from being a gymnast
to being a ballet dancer
that decision was my choice it was
something i wanted
when it came time for me to hang up my
point shoes to transition entirely away
from ballet 10 years later
i wasn’t the one to call the shot and i
will always remember
the day in 2016 when the artistic
director
miko nissinin asked me into his office
i walked in the smell of rich leather
filled my nose
and there are amazing epic shots of some
of the most iconic
moments in ballet all over the office
some of which i’ve danced myself
miko welcomes me in i sit
rachel how are you doing at this point
i’m hoping to give a positive progress
report things have finally turned a
corner
the latest round of injections seems to
have worked and i think i’ll be back on
stage soon
but when i open my mouth i have to say
the truth
things are not going well i’m in a lot
of pain
and nothing seems to be working and i
feel like i’ve been trying
everything but i’m confident
that it’ll just take a few more tries
maybe a few more weeks and then i’ll be
back in the studio
and when i lift my eyes to meet miko’s
his are shining with tears something
i’ve
never in all the 10 years working with
him seen
rachel i can’t offer you a contract for
next season
you have one body and i cannot
responsibly ask you
to continue to push yourself in this way
hearing the words that i have feared for
three years hits me like a ton
of bricks the floor opens up in front of
me and i’m
falling and yet i surprise even myself
when i say
thank you thank you for doing
what i could not and in that moment i
was
in shock everything i’d sacrificed
somehow
gone in a second and then
the next year i went through this crazy
narrative of a breakup
the honeymoon phase where wow i should
have done this
years ago what freedom to denial
maybe it’s not really over maybe i
didn’t try everything
to a full-on existential crisis
who am i what
am i if not a dancer then what
and it was really strange to me because
i knew
this reinvention was coming every dancer
will have to hang up their point shoes
at some point
and i had even planned for this i had a
college degree
i had a network contacts but i had zero
idea
of where i was going next or how i would
possibly fit in
to this new world and in those moments i
wondered
if everything i had sacrificed was worth
this letting everything go
for a while seemed like the only way
forward i wasn’t going to
dance my way into my next job and if i
wasn’t going to dance at the highest
level
well i wasn’t going to dance at all
at the same time i was convinced that
i still had more to share through my
dancing
interviewing as a former professional
ballet dancer with zero office
experience
is a hoot the number of companies who
could not see the value
of having a tall swan or a fierce female
dancer in their midst
was well not surprising
i remember one fine institution in
boston said
hmm well we don’t dance here
and that was not untrue the first
nine to five that i landed was as a
development assistant in the fundraising
offices
of harvard university
talk about a change of scenery and i
will leave the feeling
of moving from dancing in a 2600 seat
theater
to being in a literal cubicle for
another time
within the first two weeks of my time as
a development associate
at harvard i started to pick up on this
dancer spidey sense that maybe the
values i’d embodied and the skills i’d
honed
were actually of value in this
non-physical arena
i remember looking around and observing
that this meeting could be made
so much more effective and dynamic if we
put in some rehearsal techniques
or this presentation that i was watching
could be made so much more engaging for
the audience
and more enjoyable for the presenter
with some professional performance
technique
to help perform under pressure what if
my past was still relevant in this new
world
what if it isn’t about the dancing but
about
the ability to articulately read an
audience or
holistically communicate a message and
perform with ease under pressure
i wondered what other businesses might
find these skills
valuable on this hunch and after having
many conversations with friends just to
make sure i wasn’t going crazy
i founded choreography for business
i started training people in the
restaurant industry how to
move in awkward spaces with grace and
deliver high-level service with body
language and presence
and then i moved these concepts into
other industries
training aspiring young female leaders
executives consultants sales teams
i was beginning to see that it was in
leaving the confines
of the opera house stage that allowed me
to unlock
a deeper impact on the world and people
around
me no one told me that my ballet
experience would be
so valuable in the ballet world in fact
the general consensus is your dancing
years
are your best years which automatically
assumes
that once you’re no longer dancing your
best years are behind you
outside of the ballet world i was able
to reframe my experience
and shed a completely different
perspective
into other industries and professions i
was able to explore and expand
more more of who i was bringing my life
to a higher level and i definitely had
my doubts
and i still do but i also had these
moments of clarity
one such moment was when i was coaching
a client who is congenitally blind
which means he’s never seen a moving
human body before
i was working with him on his tedx and
building a physical framework around
memories he’d lived out
memories of coming home and finding a
big box of lego and
sifting through a big braille binder
creating
3d lego shapes with his hands things he
would
never see but could feel
and as i watched him perform his tedx
talk
i realized this is the power
of bringing the ballet out of the opera
house
and working with individuals on their
physicality
so what’s in this for you you might not
be a dancer
but maybe you’re an athlete or an
aspiring or already dedicated
professional
maybe you’re in the throes of transition
right now
we all at some point in our lives will
have an identity taken away from us
maybe it’s the identity of a role a
responsibility a passion or
a direction in early 2020
we were all invited to reinvent
ourselves
overnight our country and our world was
thrown into a different dimension and we
all had to face a common enemy
what do you do if a job or an entire
industry
disappears overnight
early in 2020 i can speak for myself i
found myself
yet again in a position of having
everything that i’d worked towards and
everything that i was really beginning
to love
be impossible elevating the human
experience
communicating in person and like many of
you
i spent a while fretting and
wondering how could it be
that i am back in this position
and then i took a deep breath and i
realized
i’ve been here before this feels
familiar
and this time i knew what to look for
in the exact same way that dancers build
muscle memory around
intricate and complicated choreography
that at first glance seems
impossible my muscles of reinvention
kicked into high gear
i thought of the values that i have and
still hold dear
connection communication performance
were those no longer relevant
it took another reframe for me to see
that while
in-person gatherings and conversations
had been outlawed
they had not disappeared they had simply
moved into a new virtual and remote
setting and an entire language was
bestowed upon
our world and people were going to need
help figuring out
how to engage and interact with this
two-dimensional audience
again the art of reinvention
does not mean you throw away your past
skills
your past experience your past self
it is about reframing and applying
a different perspective to a part of the
world that might have been waiting for
you
all along and it takes practice
as we all face the uncertainty of a
chaotic world
what do you value and treasure is there
some
unique perspective or experience that
you have that could be
exactly what someone else is looking for
what if our best years
are still to come
as for myself i know i will be
reinventing myself again
as much as i would love to say finally
here i am made it through my transition
now
i am firmly a fill in the blank
this is a lie this is a lie
and in thinking this way we handcuff
ourselves to
a fraction of what is possible
our world demands that we think
creatively and collaboratively
our world demands that we
collectively reinvent the way we consume
the way we create
what is the world missing it could be
a future you