Over the weekend, I had to redo my resume, and it turned out to be a lot harder than I had anticipated.

It’s not as though I hadn’t done this very thing before—hundreds of times before.

But as I worked on this new resume, I realized that, before, I’d always had the luxury of working from a template; a trusty foundation which I had only to build from.

It was your standard resume template: Profile, Experience, Education and Skills. Maybe an area for references. All in all, it was pretty straight-forward. Because I’d been doing the same thing for the past fourteen years. I went into banking when I was 18 and didn't leave it until I was 32. I never had much to talk about on my resume other than banking.

Until now. Now, my perspective has changed, my goals have changed, my career has changed (or, at least, is in the process of changing), and my resume must change with it.

I’ve always had a difficult time with the idea of being defined by the laundry list of professional experience and accomplishments that the resume has come to represent. It’s even more frustrating and limiting now, when I am trying to construct a new foundation. Because I realize that even though the old template outlines an entire professional career—the last 14 years of my life—it will no longer do.

And that’s a little bit scary.

Because this time, redoing my resume wasn’t just about adding a new job title, or new skills. Nor was it about simply reworking the old template to gear it towards a new role I wanted to take on. This time, redoing my resume was an act in redefining myself.

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As I worked on the resume and tried to focus on my skills as they are removed from banking, I started to feel more and more apprehensive. There was this internal dialogue going on in my head, where to buy priligy in usa evaluating everything I added to the resume: CRM Administrator? Weellll, not really, you never actually got certified; Writing and Editing? Come on, this is supposed to be professional experience; Liaison? Ohhh, big words.

I wasn’t getting very far, and I wasn’t doing a very good job selling myself to me. I really wanted nothing more than to close out the file completely and work on something else. But I had promised this resume to someone, and I knew avoidance wasn’t going to gain me anything except more anxiety over not delivering on my promise.

So, I started trying to look at this task with my new perspective. And that new perspective is all about believing that I am capable of changing. That I’m not limited to doing just one thing, or working in just one field. That I am not defined by my resume. That just because I did something for 14 years doesn’t mean that I can’t do something else for the next 14.

And when I thought of it that way, somehow, the task started to look a lot less threatening.

Rather than an impersonal, standardized summary of qualifications and work experience related to a specific field, this new resume was an opportunity to really showcase what I am good at, my skills—both those I have mastered, as well as the new skills I am learning—and current projects I am working on. It was an opportunity to redefine myself for my own purposes, and that felt very empowering.

FunctionalI finished the resume and sent it off, feeling pretty good about it in the end. It was a small exercise, but it taught me a big lesson, and that is the fact that I am constantly relearning what it means to switch gears and choose your own direction. I’m constantly having to give myself permission to think differently and to approach things with a different perspective.

Change is scary, no matter what form it shows up in. But I am grateful for the opportunity for growth it provides, and the challenge it forces. Without these, we would never learn what we are truly capable of.

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