Do you feel as if you’ve had many transitions in your life? It sometimes seems to me that life IS transitions. A transition is not just an occasional thing that happens; for many women transition is constant. What for you constitutes a transition?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I recently was certified by coaching.com as a Navigating Transitions Coach. Obviously, we talked a lot about transitions during the certification process. Is any life change a transition, or do only major changes qualify? And if we experience lots of transitions in our lives, doesn’t it make sense to get good at doing them?
Kinds of Transitions
I recently heard Carla Goldstein, JD, President and CEO of Omega Institute, say that there are at least two very different kinds of transitions: those that come at us externally and those that “bubble up” from inside. The external ones are easy to understand. We start school or graduate, get married or divorced, start a new job or get fired from one, move to a new house or city or country. Sometimes we choose and plan for these transitions and sometimes not. We sometimes see them coming and sometimes they’re a surprise. Of course, these transitions do affect us internally—sometimes mightily—but something happened externally to set the transition in motion.
What about the ones that “bubble up?” They may be subtle. They may be slow. But if we pay attention to how we’re feeling, they’re unmistakable. For me, one of these happened after I’d been working for many years in a great job at a wonderful company. I was living in a house I loved in a dream community with near near-perfect neighbors, wonderful friends and to-die-for activities all around me. Sounds absolutely ideal, doesn’t it? And it was for a long time, and then it wasn’t. Slowly I began to realize that I was unhappy, just not satisfied with what I was doing, wondering if this was it for the foreseeable future. That gradual bubbling up became a boiling cauldron until I knew I had to do something.
What’s Next?
From women I talk to, I know my experience is not unique. At some point in their lives, many women seem to face the reality that this just isn’t it any longer. But what’s next? And it doesn’t seem to be confined to any particular group of women. Women in significant corporate roles, women who have worked primarily in the home, entrepreneurial women who have had one or more businesses for many years, and others all may hit this point at some time in their lives.
What is important if this happens to you is that you DO something about it. If you don’t, you will gradually wilt, stop growing, and just settle for whatever comes your way. So we come back to the question: How do we become good at making transitions?
Find Support
There are many answers to this, but the first step is to find some help or support, because most of us can’t tackle what could become a significant transition on our own. A woman who finds herself at this point in her life needs to enlist a trusted friend or a coach to help her figure out “what’s next?” and how she’s going to get there. As I recently heard Michelle Pollack, a wonderful coach, say, “It doesn’t mean she needs to completely blow up her life. Small changes may be sufficient, at least for the time being.”
When I found myself at the point I described earlier, I asked a coach I know to help me. Together we step by step made a plan for how I could gracefully exit my current job and fund enough non-working time for me to figure out what I wanted to do. This transition for many of us isn’t necessarily easy and it can be scary. But not as scary as staying where we are.
What Can We Learn?
So, we get good at making transitions by asking for help and not trying to do it all on our own. We also look at the transitions we’ve made in our lives and what we did that helped them turn out well. We look at how good we are at moving into a transition, which almost always begins with facing an ending—like losing a job, or having a close friend move away, or even dealing with the end of a wonderful vacation. What can we learn by doing this exploration?
It is important to understand that it is never too late to make a good transition. Never too late to try something you’ve always wanted to do. And if you succeed? Terrific! And if you don’t, you just need to try something else. And then something else.
What transitions are you facing? Please share them below so none of us feels alone in a time of change coming up for us.
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