If you're experiencing a career lull, you may want to develop a career development plan to expand your options in your current field or seek an entirely new one.

As I mentioned in my book Life is Long, the four phases of the ten-year reinvention cycle are a bit like the phases of the moon because what rises and ebbs is commitment and energy. For this post, I'd like to walk you through Phases One through Three, as this is where self-discovery takes place.

Phase 1 begins with a tiny new-moon sliver of hope as you look for what you want and explore its possibilities.

For most people, Phase 1 is a series of mini-cycles that go from imagination to education to experimentation and back. In Phase 1, you discover desire, explore interests, and test them through mini-cycles of imagination, education, and experimentation. It's important to let your imagination run free at first. Here are some free resources to get you started:

Use desire-finding questions and exercises to uncover childhood dreams, innate interests, curiosities, and discontents.

Explore what you've discovered through low-stakes online research like courses, conferences, and internships. Research job titles, brainstorm combinations of interests, and consider what frustrates you in your current industry.

As you start figuring out what you want and researching what you'd need to do to get it, interest and excitement grow, you enter Phase 2 with a commitment and a career development plan.

In Phase 2, you make a skill acquisition plan and start implementing it so that by the time you hit the full-moon intensity of Phase 3, you're ready to give it everything you've got.

In the first half of Phase 2, you check your reinvention against your personal reality by performing an inventory of:

In the second half of Phase 2, make a commitment to your reinvention to start acquiring skills. This is hard work, because you're still living your old life while building a new one. It takes a lot of energy. Don't give up and don't get stuck here too long.

While you are working on your new career on the side, at some point you will need to take the leap and fully commit. It's scary, but the training wheels need to come off.

In Phase 3, you fully transition from the old to the new. This takes time and patience. Most overnight successes are years in the making-five to seven years in fact-so if you're still not turning a profit two years in, don't quit. Learn and pivot. That's your learning plan.

All the hard work you did in the first two phases will come in handy when you face the inevitable difficulties and setbacks of Phase 3. When you're exhausted, tap back into Phase 2's excitement and desire.

This will be the most challenging phase of your reinvention. You may need to work a full-time job to support yourself while also putting in a forty-hour week working on your new career, and the people around you may not understand your efforts. See their opposition as confirmation that you're doing something extraordinary.

Phase Four is all about start-up life and taking that big scary leap from side-gigging your future to living it. I will talk about that next.