About Reinvention

Reinvent. Pivot. Those seem to be the new imperatives for these crazy times. Reinvent yourself. Pivot your job. And the advice all around always tells you what you SHOULD be doing. Or, they lay out “5 Easy Steps to Reinventing Yourself,” but that advice and those steps don’t tell you how to get there.

Whether you’ve been affected as a direct result of Covid-19, or find yourself in an untenable position at work, or have come to the realization that what worked for you in the past will not sustain you into the future, like many people this idea of reinventing yourself may have been creeping into your awareness.

But how do you get started? How do you get yourself out of the box in which you find yourself at this point in your life?

The Reinvention Project provides you with effective tools and techniques that can help you find a new job or role, or transition to a brand new career. It can help you leave corporate life to start your own business. Most importantly, it can help you reinvent how you live your life with intention, purpose, and meaning.

Specifically, The Reinvention Project is a detailed how-to program with a set of tools and methods that are not the same old stuff that circulates on LinkedIn and through outplacement services. The Reinvention Project draws its materials from Positive Psychology and solid academic research from several fields, presented in a way that is immediately usable by anyone. These tools help facilitate deep thinking and reflection on how to align who you are, with what you do, and why.

It starts with a very affordable and accessible program: The 21-Day Get Unstuck Challenge. It is a step-by-step method to overcome negative self-talk, discover purpose, take those first steps, and find hope again. After participating in the Challenge, you can add on live one-on-one sessions with Mark.

Mark’s forthcoming book from which the 21-Day Challenge is drawn, The Reinvention Project: Change your story, change your life will be released in Fall, 2021. Over time, we will be adding webinars, live group sessions, and other events

You’ve likely experienced résumé-rewriting services, or outplacement consultants, or find-a-new-job-quickly blog posts that give advice like join networking groups and events, search the “hidden” job market through connections, determine your core competencies and highlight those, or use strong action words in your résumé.

And you’re doing the same things over again, hoping for a different outcome.

The Reinvention Project’s Program is different because it:

• Starts in a different place

• Uses different methods

• Takes you to a different outcome

Let’s look at each of these

Starts in a Different Place

The Reinvention Project begins with who you are as a person. “Who you are” really means “who you are at your best.” Rather than listing so-called core competencies (a laundry list of presumably desirable skills), we focus on what you want to do more of that brings you success; what you want to create in your world; what you want to become and change in your world; and what will happen around you when you are successful.

Uses Different Methods

The Reinvention Project draws on research from Positive Psychology and related fields such as Organization Development, Appreciative Management, Positive Leadership, and even Brand Marketing. Methods from these various disciplines are combined and tailored specifically to enable you to discover more than a job or career. The Reinvention Project helps you find specific paths to earn income that align with what you want to accomplish in your life, and do it in a way that builds on your key strengths and respects your core values.

Takes You to a Different Outcome

We all carry with us a story that we’ve rehearsed and repeated, seemingly forever. That story causes us to make certain decisions and shun others. Worse, that story is what creates our individual limiting beliefs and self-defeating behaviours. In fact, we become the stories that we tell about ourselves. Because the Reinvention Project encourages and enables you to deeply think about and bring forward you at your best, and discover a new path towards success throughout your life, you begin to change that story, creating a different outcome. Hence, the Reinvention Project’s motto: Change your story. Change your life.

Mark’s passion is understanding the dynamics at the intersection of organizations and their people, and discovering ways to bring out the best in both. He employs a unique mix of art and science to quickly and efficiently guide individuals, teams, working groups, and entire organizations discover new ideas, insights, and innovation—what they haven’t thought of after they’ve thought of everything they can think of. His unique approaches to individual coaching, as well as team and group dynamics, draw from reading between the lines and picking up patterns in the way people talk and think that reveal deep underlying truths.  And he can align disparate factions from all over an organization to help them string together a story to explain and understand their current situation, and set a course for a desired future.

Mark brings to this work a toolkit full of techniques, methods, and practices, many of which he invented or modified over his career. His skill has been honed through more than three decades of facilitation, coaching, in-the-field management and leadership, and formal post-secondary teaching. He has coached hundreds of clients on how to reinvent their life and pivot their career. Over all the years of helping people reconnect with what energizes them in their lives, Mark has collected, adapted, and invented dozens of specific tools and techniques that work. It is these very tools and techniques that form the heart of The Reinvention Project.

His experience comes from 20 years in the IT industry, 6 years doing Masters and Doctoral work at OISE at University of Toronto and 15 years of coaching executives and organizations to become their best selves. Over the years, some of his facilitation and organizational coaching clients include: Green Mountain/Keurig, Brinks Security, Economical Mutual Insurance, Coffee Bean Technology, Blommer Chocolate, Elizabeth Lauder, Ketchum Communications, Unit 7 Marketing, Miles Nadel JCC, Ontario Ministry of Health, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Women in Film and Television, Lakeridge Health, Ontario Shores, Centre for Training in Psychotherapy, UNESCO, Ars Electronica, Government of Canada National Managers Community, City of Brampton, Durham College, Ontario University Institute of Technology.

Previously, Mark had a senior academic leadership role and was faculty at Adler Graduate Professional School. Prior to that, he was Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at University of Toronto. He currently teaches in the Psychology program at University of Guelph-Humber. And, he is a member of the inaugural faculty for the Master of Supply Chain Management at Schulich School of Business at York University, teaching the Business Communication and Team Dynamics course.