Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran: There's No Such Thing as a Total Reinvention of Self

Big Think Expert Barbara Corcoran is well-known as a TV personality based on her appearances on the show Shark Tank. But before doling out advice and venture capital on ABC, Corcoran was herself a successful business owner for 30 years. When she sold her real estate company in 2001, Corcoran was surprised to find that reinventing herself came packaged with personal and emotional components she hadn’t expected. She ran through her personal experience in a LinkedIn post this week and offered advice undergoing a professional rebirth.

Among the topics she covers are the nature of reinvention (you can’t change yourself completely) and the inherent loneliness of starting over:

“When I sold my business, a major piece of my identity went with it… I was no longer part of a work community— of course I missed the parties and good times, but I even missed the endless stream of emails that used to be the bane of my existence. In my search for connecting with a new community of people, I plugged into the social media world and found that Twitter and Facebook made me friends with a whole range of new people and they became my stand-in community. I built myself a circle of support.”