A methodical process for answering “What’s it time to let go of right now?” and “What’s waiting for me?”
Overview:
Many of us haven’t been taught how to methodically navigate, process, and learn from the changes in our lives. As a result, we fear change, carry around unresolved burdens from our past, and get stuck in repetitive patterns that we wish we could break free from.
Many of us are exhausted by the changes in our lives and have lost faith that those changes will yield a meaningful result.
In the late 1970s, however, William Bridges developed a model for processing and managing the shifts in one’s life.
He suggested that all healthy transitions consist of an ending, a neutral empty period, and a new beginning.
We must begin with the ending, letting go our our old selves (internal) and our old frameworks (external) before we can properly redefine our new identity (internal) and pursuits (external). This can involve making peace with the loss of relationships, roles, jobs, skills, places, et cetera.
The second stage involves making peace with emptiness, letting yourself settle, and asking for guidance. This is a confusing time when we’re tempted to dwell in the past or rush toward something, but it is important to allow your understanding to take shape and new systems to develop.
The final stage is discovering the new beginning, making peace with the infancy of this step, and then progressing forward. This can involve learning new skills, committing to new values, or taking on new roles that might be unfamiliar for a while.
A closer look at the ending stage:
Endings, in general, often prompt fear because we’re leaving behind the familiar sense of ourselves and are unsure what’s next. They often begin with something going wrong. We have to accept that they’re an ordeal, a kind of death, but that it is also important to fully inhabit and experience it.
Our attitude toward an ending is greatly affected by whether the transition is voluntary or involuntary. For instance, whether you’re leaving a job or getting fired.
In both cases, people often downplay the importance and meaning of the ending. When a transition is voluntary, it gets downplayed because we feel like we exercised control over the choice and have therefore already done the work of transition. With involuntary endings, it gets downplayed because the pain and fear of the event has produced less faith about the future, and we want to rush to either a temporary or new place of safety.
In both cases, there is also the temptation to focus on the external — e.g., getting a new job. With external changes, you’re often pivoting toward a goal, but people who only deal with the external are often destined to repeat patterns. In addition, trying to rush through a transition by simply making an external adjustment can leave us with unresolved feelings about the past and a lost connection with our instincts and passions.
Complete transitions involve making internal shifts, and therefore assessing what beliefs and behaviors are no longer productive. The biggest changes occur internally, and when they are complete, external changes are often a by-product or a side-effect.
Accept that transition is a slow process and make accommodations for it.
Transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are, stop doing things the way you’ve always done them, stop seeing things the way you’ve always seen them. An ending involves a sense of loss — of purpose and meaning — followed by emptiness. It begins with letting go of some worldview or some concept of yourself, and it will have an effect on your current motivations and connections.
When a person is overwhelmed by external changes, the internal shift taking place are almost impossible to comprehend.
The ending process consists of five parts:
> Disenchantment
> Disengagement
> Dismantling
> Dis-identification
> Disorientation
Disenchantment:
Many transitions begin with this stage: The discovery that what you thought of as real, solid, and valuable is not as real, solid, or valuable as you previously believed. Most of our culture thinks in terms of accumulation and compound interest, but the lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that you must accept that a significant part of your old reality was in your head.
Disengagement:
This involves creating distance from the activities, relationships, settings, and roles that have been important to us. It allows us to identify and experience what we’re losing or what has been lost. It stops the emotional triggers that prompt habitual thinking patterns. In some cases, external events such as divorce, job changes, moves, and illnesses force this to occur.
Dis-identification:
This is the internal equivalent of disengagement and tends to be very uncomfortable. It’s when we create emotional distance from the old ways of defining ourselves and lose certainty about who we are and what we will become.
Dismantling:
This involves creating distance from, and awareness of, old habits, behaviors, and practices in order to begin processing the parts of your identity that may no longer be useful and need to be let go of.
Disorientation:
This is a time of confusion and emptiness, marked by a loss of structure and benchmarks, unclear plans for the future, and the feeling of being adrift. Try to remember that just because things are up in the air and you feel like you’re back at zero, it doesn’t mean your time has been wasted.
Ending-related exercises:
#1: Reflect on the endings and transition periods — both external and internal — that have occurred in your life. Try to identify the patterns in your method for managing those endings. For instance, how do you handle good-byes? Moves? Job changes?
#2: Reflect on your transition into adulthood — this is, when you were first “on your own.”
#3: What is the chronology of your own experience with transition?
#4: Which of your transition points has been the most important so far?
#5: Compare your chronology with that of each of your parents: Do you see parallels?
#6: What events have led to a change in the past year? What are the areas in your life in which change is evident:
> Changes in relationships
> Changes in home life
> Changes in your health or lifestyle
> Changes with work or finances
> Changes in identity
#7: What are the indications that your life is in transition?
#8: Describe, as much as possible, what your current transition feels like?
#9: There comes a time when certain attitudes, beliefs, goals, and strategies no longer serve you and must be let go of. Ask yourself:
> What is it time to let go of in my life right now?
> What habits and opinions don’t fit my life anymore?
> What idea, assumption, self-image, or dream do you have to let go of?
The neutral zone:
You must go through a period in which you are utterly alone, without allies, without structure, without guidelines. The old self must die, and you must allow yourself to be reborn into something that transcends your old fears and expectations of how things are supposed to be.
This is a period in which the old reality looks hollow and transparent and nothing feels solid anymore. It involves surrender — that act in which we stop trying to escape — and then the renewal and repair that comes from distance and perspective.
This emptiness is uncomfortable. Many people either deny or become overwhelmed by this experience and try to fill the void as quickly as possible. But being alone in the emptiness is essential. It’s a by-product of an inner ending, and the neutral zone is a time for inner reorientation.
Accept your need for time in the neutral zone. Recognize why you’re here, why you’re stalled, why you shouldn’t submit to the traps of fast-forward and reverse. If you find yourself in a period of being unproductive and indecisive, make peace with it, accept that you’re in this stage for a reason, inhabit and interrogate how you got there and be open to signs of what should come next.
Take a few days to be alone and reflect. It should be someplace unfamiliar, simple, quiet. Avoid distractions. Journal. Dwell in the emptiness, become comfortable with not producing a result.
Two of the most common paths to a decision are instinct and strategy. People who strategize tend to struggle with the neutral zone because they’re used to controlling their behavior by filtering it through thought experiments. You don’t have to act on things. Just be aware of them.
The neutral zone is the time when people feel the least sure of what’s going to happen and the most sure of who they really are. In this way, they feel both lost and found. The most alone and the most connected with themselves. It is the phase that the modern world values the least and therefore pays the least amount of attention to. But it’s where the most substantial internal shifts take place. Our most important beginnings take place outside of our awareness. It is only after an ending and a fallow period that we can launch ourselves anew.
Neutral-zone-related exercises:
> Find a regular time to be alone.
> Begin a journal of neutral-zone experiences, moods, thoughts, unusual experiences or sensations, questions you have.
> Watch as your mind constructs stories about your life, and then dismantle them and let them go.
> Explore your past through writing, because it defines the possibilities and limitations of your future. The past, upon reflection, changes as you change.
> Consider what would be undone if you died today. Write your obituary with consideration to what you did and didn’t do. “At the time of death, he was…”
> Notice patterns
> Identify what you really want.
Beginnings:
New beginnings are both very possible and very messy.
When things aren’t working, it’s often because you’re not through the neutral zone yet. Genuine beginnings rely on an inner realignment, and the first signs often come as ideas, impressions, images, comments from others, or dreams. Don’t expect the signs to be literal or obvious. Remain open.
Interrogate whether you’ve actually gone through the transition process.
Test with others to make sure what you’re starting is actually new or just a replay of an old pattern.
When we’re truly ready to begin again, we will find an opportunity. It’s a matter of timing.
It takes more than perseverance and will power. We must understand what undermines our resolve, that inner resistance rooted in the stories we tell ourselves about why we don’t deserve the things we want. Time and money are common excuses people give to avoid starting the life they dream of, but the cost of not pursuing it is your life.
To act on what you really want is to assert that you are unique and capable of achieving it. It is an act of accepting who you are and taking responsibility for your life.
Beginning-related exercises:
#1: Reflect on the new beginnings — both external and internal — that have occurred in your life, and once again try to identify the patterns. These include new relationships, projects, places, states of mind, self-images, and goals.
These exercises will help you recognize moments when an ending led to something new, as well as times when the process was not done effectively. Consider resolving unresolved transitions.
#2: What is waiting to make its entrance into my life? There’s something internal: an idea, a belief, a principle, an attitude, a strategy, or a situation.
#3: Imagine being 90. How do you look back in the current stage of your life? What did you need to do? What do you regret? What are you proud of?
#4: What is the developmental context of this chapter of your life?
> What would the next chapter be?
> What do you have to do to take the next step in life?
> Consider the books you’re reading, the topics you’re interested in.
> Remain open to signs
> Interrogate whether you’ve actually gone through the transition process.
> Test with others to make sure what you’re starting is actually new or just a replay of an old pattern.
> Start. Getting ready can become an endless task if you allow it to. Starting begins when you stop getting ready to start.
> Identify your new commitments, roles, and responsibilities. Connect yourself with the new beginning, what it feels like to achieve what you’re working on. Visualize it.
> Take things step by step and resist the temptation of other projects.
> Accept that you’re toddling and be gentle with yourself.
> Shift focus from the goal to the process and let go of the outcome.
Beware of planning as a form of avoidance. It’s vital to avoid going on a perpetual quest for an ideal.
Recognize when you’re aiming so high that you’re distancing yourself from accountability or any realistic deadline or pay-off period.
Accept that sometimes when you tell yourself you want a new job or a new relationship, you’re really just want a new sense of self.
Age-related transitions
In youth we learn skills and tactics for achievement, but then we recognize that the skills, strategies, and tactics that get you to a certain stage also tend to trap you in boring and familiar patterns. In that way, the goal of one phase can become the burden of the next.
At a certain age, however, many people experience a general loss of interest in accomplishments because they come to realize that they’re either chasing something they’re never going to achieve or that isn’t worth the stress and anxiety. This shift involves turning focus from demonstrating competence to finding personal meaning, a shift from how to why. It can open the door to new opportunities, and many people finally discover what they were always meant to do.
No vision is particularly wrong. Some are just more or less useful for your next stage in life.
Transition and relationships
Relationships are founded upon unspoken agreements. To enter into a relationship involves implicitly agreeing to play a role in another person’s life, which comes with certain responsibilities. This can lead to a sense of incompleteness as individuals, and whenever a shift occurs with one person, it can feel threatening to the other.
This makes communication essential. Just acknowledging that you’re in transition can provide some acceptance and relief. But every change also requires a renegotiation of roles.
Some of the most difficult transitions that occur within a relationship have to do when power shifts from one member to another.
Whose way did we do things when we first got together? How has this shifted?
Here’s a methodical way to approach the renegotiation process:
> Discuss what each person is experiencing
> Walk through the transition model
> Take your time
> Arrange temporary structures
> Avoid acting for the sake of acting
> Take care of yourself in small ways
> Keep your agreements
> Be aware of your needs
> Don’t force change
> Explore the other side — positive or negative — of your change
> Find someone to talk to so that you can make sense of things
> Think of it as a time to withdraw and then return
Additional notes:
How you handle transitions will determine your future.
Problems are often a signal that something has ended and a transition has begun, that it’s time to stop something and re-connect with yourself.
We often feel threatened by endings and take them too seriously because we can’t see what comes next.
We often try to make external changes before the internal changes and only later discover our need for an ending and that internal changes necessary to move forward. Avoiding inner work will keep you stuck in repetitive and limiting patterns.
The internal changes are difficult because we identify ourselves with our circumstances, roles, responsibilities, and relationships. And often old mind-sets are activated by new events — especially if we haven’t fully processed previous transitions.
Perseverance is important but it can also be a sign that you’re not listening to the lessons life is trying to teach you. One has to do more than simply persevere and put things back together the way they were. They have to evolve.
Those who tailor their situations to their abilities and needs often surpass those who simply try to power through situations.
Most modern organizations are in a constant state of turmoil, which leads to reduced productivity, turnover, fear, gossip, and politicking. Despite our dissatisfaction, we often perpetuate the systems we live within.
Accept that you’re not a machine and that your development is not linear.
One should be cultivating new dreams and relinquishing old ones.
When you’re in transition, you often come back to old activities in new ways.
Each phase of life has a task, and if that is disrupted, then it goes unresolved.
