Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

To feel as though everything is “up in the air,” as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something—if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.

All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

Those who had chosen to make the changes that had put them into transition tended to minimize the importance of endings; it was almost as if the act of acknowledging an ending as painful was an admission that the change triggering the transition had been a mistake. On the other hand, those who had gone into transition unwillingly or unwittingly found it very hard to admit that a new beginning and a new phase of their lives might be at hand. They were as invested in seeing no good in their transition as the other group was in denying distress.

Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.

It is, after all, the ending that makes the beginning possible.

The big events—divorce, death, losing a job, and other obviously painful changes—are easy to spot. But others, such as marriage, sudden success, and moving to your dream house, are forgotten because they are “good events” and therefore not supposed to lead to difficulty.

Just because things are up in the air now and you sometimes feel as if you were right back where you started, this is not a sign that you have made a mistake or have been wasting your time for the past ten years. It is only a sign that you are in one of life’s natural and periodic times of readjustment and renewed commitment. You are at the end of the novice period of adulthood, a time when long-term commitments are often made.

The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability.

Oscar Wilde hits home: “The Gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

3. Don’t act for the sake of action. The temporary situation is frustrating, so there is likely to be a temptation to “do something—anything.” This reaction is understandable, but it usually leads to more difficulty.

7. Think of transition as a process of leaving the status quo, living for a while in a fertile “time-out,” and then coming back with an answer.

So make your time of transition a time of renewal and transformation. Come out of it stronger and better adapted to your world than you were when you went in.

we need to note that the extremely high level of change in today’s organizations is likely to keep your career in a semipermanent state of transition. Reorganizations, mergers, technological changes, strategic shifts, and a steady stream of new products insure that most organizations are in a constant state of turmoil.

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and an old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions.

To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old one you have now. Even though it sounds backwards, endings always come first. The first task is to let go.

After that, you encounter the neutral zone—that apparently empty in-between time when, under the surface of the organizational situation or invisibly inside you, the transformation is going on. Everything feels as though it is up for grabs and you don’t quite know who you are or how you’re supposed to behave, so this feels like a meaningless time. But it is actually a very important time.

Your work life, like your relational life, has its own natural rhythm. The task is to find the connection between the change in your work or career and the underlying developmental rhythm of your life.

1. What is it time to let go of in my own life right now? This question marks the first difference between change and transition, for the latter must start with letting go. As we noted in “A Lifetime of Transitions,” we periodically reach the point where an attitude, a belief, a style of responding to challenges, a goal or a dream for the future, or an assumption about others—that served us well up to that time—simply isn’t what we need for the future.

Finding out what it is time to let go of often provides the way to initiate a transition meaningfully.

1. What are the indications that your work life is in transition? Remember that a change in your work life is just that—a change—and that being in transition means that something more than that is going on inwardly. It means that you have reached the point where it is time to let go of an idea or an assumption, a self-image or a dream.

2. What is the developmental context of this work life transition? If you had to put into words the personal and career issues that you are dealing with at this point in your life, what would they be? If you had to give a title to the chapter of your work life that is drawing to a close, what would it be? And how about a title for this transitional introduction you are in now—what could it be called?

3. Imagine that you are really old. Let’s say you’re ninety. From that time in the future, you can look back on yourself now. Then you’ll know what was really going on now and even how things turned out. You may also know how they might have turned out if you had taken a different path. From that vantage point, was this present point in your life a time when it was a good idea to keep on in the same direction, or was it a time that cried out for change? And if the latter, what kind of change was called for?

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. —T. S. ELIOT “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets1

CONSIDERING THAT WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH ENDINGS all our lives, most of us handle them poorly. This is in part because we misunderstand them and take them either too seriously or not seriously enough. We take them too seriously by confusing them with finality—that’s it, all over, never more, finished! We see them as something without sequel, forgetting that they are the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. At the same time, we fail to take them seriously enough. Because they scare us, we try to avoid them.

“Once there were two monks who were traveling through the countryside during the rainy season. Rounding a bend in the path, they found a muddy stream blocking their way. Beside it stood a lovely woman dressed in flowing robes. ‘Here,’ said one of the monks to the woman. ‘Let me carry you across the water.’ And he picked her up and carried her across. After setting her down on the far bank, he walked in silence with his fellow monk to the abbey on the hill. Later that evening, the other monk said suddenly, ‘I think you made an error when you picked up that woman on our journey today. You know we are not supposed to have anything to do with women, and you held one close to you! You should not have done that.’ ‘How strange,’ remarked the other. ‘I carried her only across the water. You are carrying her still.’”2

We hear a lot, thanks partly to the important work done by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, about the stages of the “grieving process,” that string of emotional states starting with denial and ending with acceptance, through which people who are coming to terms with a loss typically go. But there is a parallel and separate process that we don’t hear so much about that is not so much emotional as it is cognitive. It is the one in which people in transition gradually stop thinking of themselves as part of a we and start thinking of themselves as an I. Let’s call this one the “mourning process.” This shift is often accompanied or punctuated by a good deal of emotion, but those feelings are reactions to the process, not the process itself.

Anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows a good deal about personal transition because such an undertaking replicates the three-part transition process: It starts by making an ending and destroying what used to be. Then there is the time when it isn’t the old way any more, but not yet the new way, either. Some dismantling is still going on, but so is some new building. It is a very confusing time, and it is a good idea to have made temporary arrangements for dealing with this interim (“neutral zone”) state of affairs—whether it is temporary housing or a time of modified activities and reduced expectations to make the old housing work. And as the contractors always warn you, remodeling always takes more time and money than new construction. Good advice in regard to transition, too.

The lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that if you want to change—really to change, and not just to switch positions—you must realize that some significant part of your old reality was in your head, not out there.

One of the most important differences between a change and a transition is that changes are driven to reach a goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in.

You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence.

Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation.

Thus it is important in times of transition to reflect on the past for several reasons—not least of which is that, from the perspective of a new present, the past is likely to look different. For the past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaiting a builder.