Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

To understand better what this means as well as what can be done about it, let’s return to Don, the high school teacher in transition whom we discussed in the last chapter. None of his coworkers had a clear sense of what was going on in his life, but it was obvious to everyone that Don was doing a halfhearted job of teaching. When his principal talked to him about it, Don promised to try harder and left the conference feeling scared and confused. Part of his confusion came from the gradual recognition that it wasn’t just that home issues were undermining him at work; it was that the same issues that were undermining him as a teacher were undermining him as a husband and as a father. In all areas of his life, he felt a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. Don had unearthed a significant truth about his situation, and over the ensuing months he thought about it a great deal. In the process, he discovered one of the important transitions that is likely to take place in a person’s work life sometime after the age of forty: the transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning in the work and its results. It is the shift from the question of how to the question of why.