Why Reinvention is Not Starting Over
Written by Chitra Soerdjbalie, Business Owner
Chitra Soerdjbalie is an international model and entrepreneur who bridges the worlds of fashion, event planning, and female leadership. She is passionate about helping others build confidence, create meaningful experiences, and lead with authenticity in both business and life.
Changing direction can feel like starting again. A new industry, a different role, a business idea or an entirely new ambition can make years of previous experience suddenly seem irrelevant. I have learned the opposite. Every chapter teaches us something, and the skills we build often travel much further than the job title in which we learned them. Reinvention is not about erasing your past. It is about recognising what you have already built and deciding how you want to use it next.
Why do we think changing direction means starting over?
For many years, we were taught to think about careers as a fairly straight line. You enter an industry, build experience, move upwards and continue developing in that same direction.
My own career has looked very different. I spent nine years working in financial services before moving into television production. From there, I moved into another sector, where I spent seven years working across different roles. Alongside my corporate career, other parts of me also developed through modelling, entrepreneurship and event planning.
On paper, those worlds can look disconnected. In practice, they are much more connected than people might think. The mistake we often make is judging experience only by the tasks attached to a particular job. We ask: Will I ever use this exact piece of work again?
I think a better question is: Who did I become while doing it? Because while tasks change, competencies grow.
Your job title is not the only thing you take with you
When I look back at the different industries and roles I have worked in, what stands out most is not a list of individual duties. It is the skills I developed while doing them.
Stakeholder management. Negotiation. Budgeting. Planning. Structure. Organisation. Knowing how to communicate with different people and understanding that not everyone needs the same approach. Those skills did not disappear when I moved industries.
I now use many of them as an entrepreneur. I use them when planning events. I use them in modelling when discussing projects, expectations or terms. I use them when developing an idea and turning it into something concrete. Even experiences that seemed specific to one job have often taught me something I later needed somewhere completely different.
Research on occupational mobility supports the broader idea that moving between jobs is not simply a matter of throwing away one set of capabilities and acquiring an entirely new one. Research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) into job transitions looks specifically at the cognitive skills and skills related to tasks that workers carry between occupations, as well as where additional learning may be required. For me, that is one of the most reassuring things about reinvention: nothing has to be wasted.
Transferable skills matter more than we sometimes realise
We tend to associate skills with the environment in which we first developed them. Negotiating might sound like a corporate skill, until you are negotiating a modelling agreement or supplier terms for an event. Stakeholder management might sound like something that belongs in an office, until you are dealing with a client, venue, creative professional, partner and supplier who all have different interests. Budgeting might appear to belong to finance, until you are building a business or producing an event and realise that creativity without financial boundaries is not a plan.
Structure and organisation are perhaps the clearest examples for me. Whatever I am doing, I need a plan. I do not believe in moving completely without direction and hoping everything somehow falls into place. That does not mean everything happens according to the original plan. It means having enough structure to understand what you are trying to achieve, what it requires and what needs to change when reality looks different.
This is why I have stopped looking at my career as a collection of separate identities. I see it more as skill stacking.
Brainz has explored this same shift toward viewing a career through capabilities rather than simply job history: your résumé can be treated as an inventory of what you have built, improved, solved and learned, not merely a chronology of positions. That distinction becomes incredibly powerful when you decide to change direction.
One job does not have to contain every part of you
There have been moments when I wondered whether I was doing too many different things. But I quickly realised something: why should we expect one job to use every talent we have? It often cannot.
Sometimes a role fits us perfectly for a particular period. Then we grow. Our interests change, our strengths develop and what once challenged us may eventually stop doing so. That does not necessarily mean the job became bad or that choosing it was a mistake. Sometimes you simply outgrow something.
I believe boredom can sometimes be information. So can curiosity. So can the repeated feeling that another part of you wants room to develop.
For me, pursuing different things allows different qualities to come forward. Corporate environments use certain strengths. Entrepreneurship demands others. Modelling challenges me in another way. Event planning brings creativity, people, organisation and commercial thinking together. I do not have to force all of that into one job description to make it legitimate. It can all belong to the same person.
Reinvention does not mean rejecting your previous life
This is perhaps the biggest misconception around reinvention. People can make a new choice and immediately feel as though everything that came before it has become irrelevant. I disagree completely.
Changing direction does not mean rejecting your previous experience. In many cases, it is exactly that experience that enables you to make the next move more intelligently. When you begin something new at 30, 40, 50 or beyond, you are not approaching it with the same toolkit you had when you first entered the workforce. You know more about people. You know more about yourself. You understand what you are good at, what drains you and what environments allow you to perform at your best. You have made mistakes and survived them. You have probably learned how to communicate, negotiate, solve problems, manage disappointment and adjust when things do not go according to plan.
So no, you are not starting from zero. You are starting from experience. That is a completely different starting point.
Reinvention can happen at any age
I also think we attach unnecessary deadlines to ourselves. By a certain age, we think we should have chosen our career, established our identity and learned exactly what the rest of our professional lives are going to look like.
But people grow and change. Why would our needs and ambitions remain exactly the same? What interested you ten years ago may no longer fulfil you today. The life you imagined at 25 may look very different when you are 40. New experiences can expose talents you did not know you had or give you ambitions you had never previously considered.
That does not make you inconsistent. It makes you human.
A career transition can, of course, require planning. Depending on the change, you may need additional knowledge, qualifications, savings, experience or time. Reinvention should not be confused with making every decision impulsively. But preparation and postponement are not the same thing. There comes a point when you have to start moving towards what you want.
Another Brainz contributor describing a major career shift makes a similar point: career change often requires understanding why you are changing and being willing to build on resources you already possess rather than assuming everything must be created from scratch.
What if your different interests are actually connected?
When someone has several professional interests, the immediate advice is often to narrow down. Pick one thing. Choose your lane. Focus. Sometimes that is good advice. Focus matters.
But I also think we can become so obsessed with fitting into one professional box that we fail to notice the common thread running through everything we do. For me, that thread includes working with people, organising, negotiating, creating structure and turning ideas into something tangible. Those abilities appear in different forms across different parts of my life. The setting changes. The skills travel.
Instead of asking yourself, “Why have I done so many different things?” it might be more useful to ask: “What keeps showing up in everything I do?” That question can tell you much more about your professional identity than a job title ever will.
Your next chapter does not invalidate the previous one
If you feel the need to change direction, I would encourage you not to begin by focusing on everything you still lack. First, take inventory. Look at the roles, industries, projects and experiences you have already had and identify what they actually taught you. Not only technical knowledge, but the competencies underneath it. Perhaps you learned how to lead. Perhaps you learned how to negotiate. Perhaps you became excellent at bringing structure to chaos, building relationships, solving problems or remaining calm when things go wrong. Then ask yourself where those strengths could create value next.
Your next chapter does not have to look like the one before it to benefit from everything that came before. If there is something you have wanted to explore for years, do not automatically dismiss the feeling because you think it is too late. Listen to it. Investigate it. Make a plan. Work towards it.
Because one of the thoughts I would most like someone to have after reading this article is very simple: It is still possible. You may change. Your ambitions may change. What you want from your career may change too.
The goal is not to spend your life proving that an old decision was the right one. It is to use what you have learned to make the next decision with more experience than you had before.
Sometimes reinvention requires a leap of faith. But taking that leap does not mean leaving everything behind. You bring yourself with you. Nothing you genuinely learned along the way is lost.
Read more from Chitra Soerdjbalie
Chitra Soerdjbalie, Business Owner
Chitra Soerdjbalie is an international model, entrepreneur, and founder of Curated Moments by Chitra. After stepping onto her first international runway during Milan Fashion Week in 2022, she continued to build her presence in the fashion industry while championing confidence, representation, and authenticity. Through her work in fashion and event planning, she creates meaningful experiences that bring people together and leave a lasting impact. Passionate about female leadership and personal growth, Chitra inspires others to embrace their visibility, pursue their ambitions, and lead with confidence.
