Reinvent Yourself

“If you don’t like something, change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”

—Mary Engelbreit

You don’t have to be Cher, Madonna, or Lady Gaga to reinvent yourself. We can all make little tweaks and changes in our thinking and the way we do things that can add up to a major overhaul in our success and happiness.

I recently attended a seminar where the speaker had a positive spin on change, saying this is a time of reinvention. That word drums up all sorts of images, but it doesn’t necessarily imply dropping everything and sailing around the world. Reinvention is about changing how you work and changing how you see your work, according to Pamela Mitchell, founder of The Reinvention Institute (www.reinvention-institute.com). In other words, doing what you already do, but doing it differently. It could entail a change in your attitude and approach to your work, or it could mean getting some new skills that help you do your job better.

Reinvention can also mean a job or career change, and with the current economy this has been a forced path for many. Mitchell purports that as we progress in life we will often reevaluate where we are and what we want, and so reinvention is a life skill that can always serve us through multiple changes in our life—those of our own choosing or the ones forced upon us.

How do you view your job or career? Is it time for a little reinvention? You have the perfect outlet for sharing what’s happening in your field through our Annual Compensation Survey, which we opened at the beginning of the month. It is time for us to once again check in with all of you—clinical engineers, biomedical equipment technicians, imaging specialists, managers, and directors—to gauge salaries in different parts of the country and to hear about your satisfaction levels, benefits, and how you have been impacted by the economy. In the last couple of years workloads have increased, hiring freezes have affected many of you, and discontent has reared its head. We will be interested to see how your work—and how you view it—have changed since last year.

Our survey is completely confidential, we never print your name, so if you haven’t taken the short survey yet, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to answer the questions. Please take extra time in entering your salary, as the survey hinges on this accuracy. The program is limited in what it can decipher, so please enter your yearly salary, not hourly, and enter it carefully, such as 58,000 and not 58K, or 58.000, or 580,000—which, as you can imagine, 580,000 can really throw things off.

Another hint to yield more accurate results is the title you check. Once again, we broke down the biomedical technician title into BMET 1, BMET 2, and BMET 3, but many people end up writing in biomed, biomedical tech, or something else that also refers to a BMET, which skews results. If your hospital doesn’t use levels with your title, consider a BMET 3 as a senior tech, and judge where you fall based on your years in the field, and then please check one of the BMET titles.

The survey runs through September 30 to allow you time to tell us how you view your job and how things have changed during this last year. We’ll publish the results in the December issue. If you have a great idea about how to reinvent yourself within your work, blog about it with us.

Julie Kirst