You are who you are becoming

You are who you are becoming. Your virtue as a human individual is not related to any static, unchanging identity; it is about the person you are turning into—who you are today, as opposed to who you were yesterday, or could be tomorrow. You truly are, in Aristotelian terms, the life story you are writing through your actions and habits; as the historian and philosopher Will Durant summarized Aristotle’s view, “We are what we repeatedly do.” 

Research has consistently shown that when people see themselves as engaged in change and capable of progress, they are happier. You will have a better chance of realizing happiness if you can see yourself as a dynamic agent of your own progress. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Real Beginnings

When we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.

What isn’t finished is the inner realignment and renewal of energy, both of which depend on your being immersed in the chaos of the neutral zone. It is as though the thing that you call “my life” had to return occasionally to a state of pure energy before it could take anew shape and gain new momentum.

William Bridges, Transitions

Letting go of the old life

Change can happen at any time, but transition comes along when one chapter of your life is over and another is waiting in the wings to make its entrance. Transition does not require that you reject or deny the importance of your old life, just that you let go of it. Far from rejecting it, you are likely to do better with the ending if you honor the old life for all that it did for you. It brought you everything you have. But it is time for you to let it go of it. It's time to let it go.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

What to let go of

What it is time to let go of is not so much the relationship or the job itself, but rather the hopes, fears, dreams, and beliefs that we have attached to them. If you let go only of the job or the relationship, you’ll just find another one and attach the same hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs to it. A loss is best seen as the cue that it is time to let go of the inner thing.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Selling the Problem

Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren't in the market for solutions to problems they don't see, acknowledge and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours. Then you won't have to sell it, the solution will be theirs.

William Bridges, Managing Transitions

Using Projects to Avoid Making Changes

If you are having trouble getting motivated to finish a project, consider the possibility that finishing that report (or whatever your project involves) means facing a void. The project is a distraction so that you don't have to see the emptiness outside of it. You slow down the completion until another project emerges to play the role of another distraction. You’re putting off looking at uncomfortable truths about yourself 

While in the midst of a deadline-driven project, you feel like you have a clear identity because your purpose is defined by the project's needs. But if the projects was removed from your life, would you have justification for thinking of yourself as someone of value? Is your worth  bound in the projects?

So it is with serious relationships, where someone provides a sense of purpose, giving definition and a sense of worth.

If you were forced to sit down and write out the definition of who you are without the benefit of a title (manager, employee, project manager) or relationship (wife, girlfriend, mother) would you lack the means to define yourself?

A suggestion: Spend time doing things that allow you to center yourself. Give yourself downtime to listen. Whatever brings you to stillness will put you in a good position to allow the transition to take hold and internalize it so you don’t miss the opportunity to make a paradigm shift toward greater emotional and spiritual health. Allow yourself to just "be" and reconnect with the world around you (its sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and sights).

Stephen Goforth

Allowing for Transitions

It's easy to believe you are in a different place in life than you really are-- it's hard to know when you have passed through a transition. You only know it when you are on the other side of it, and are able to glance back and say, "Look at that! Look what I just went through!" 

The in-between time is what William Bridges calls the "neutral zone."  During this period, you will be in the process of "destroying what used to be."  You will be "dismantling" while undertaking “some new building."

Bridges is most helpful in pointing out that life's changes are driven by the desire to reach a goal, while life's transitions:

"Start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in... although it might be true that you emerge from a time of transition with the clear sense that it is time for you to end a relationship or leave a job, that simply represents the change that your transition has prepared you to make. The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you've always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others." 

It's an internal move of greater significance than any external move.

  Stephen Goforth

You can’t Rush it

When something changes in your life—you leave a job, end a relationship, or lose someone you love—recognize that you’re now in a transition. Transitions take time to move through, and they can’t be rushed. Your identity (as an employee, partner, or friend, perhaps) will have to shift and change, as well. Be kind and accepting, and don’t expect too much of yourself as you struggle through this time.

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

Avoiding the Transitions

Individuals will walk out of relationships, rather than letting go of the approach to the relationships that made them unsuccessful and unsatisfying in the past. Individuals will look for new jobs rather than face the attitudes and behaviors toward work and toward authority-figures that made them unsuccessful in all of their past jobs. They don’t ask what it is time for them to let go of. Instead they say they need to start over. Individuals will decide to move to a new house or a new town, rather than letting go inwardly of the old way of living that lacked meaning. They make a change rather than making the more profound transition, which would put them on a genuinely new life-path.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Inbetween Times

Unexpected solutions to difficult problems and creative ideas in general come out of a murky state where purpose and focus are temporarily suspended. Many of the decisions that change the direction of our lives are made during in-between times, after something has ended but before our lives have taken a definite new shape.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Hiding Endings from Ourselves

We avoid endings whenever possible, and we steer clear whenever we can of the neutral-zone emptiness. Endings feel like failure to us, and at a deeper level. So we use the busyness and structure and status of work and family life to hide ending it from view. Believing in doing so that if we just keep adding and adding to what we have, we’ll end up with something new and will avoid the need to make any endings.

But it is not just endings that we fear. The aloneness and emptiness that are often felt in the neutral zone are just about as fearful for many modern people as endings are. Whenever we can’t see that anything is happening—and you usually can’t in the neutral zone—we doubt that anything can “really” be going on.

We fail to see that real new beginnings, the kind that revitalize and inaugurate a new order of things, come out of that chaotic neutral zone.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Moving out of Your Hometown

Staying somewhere where you are no longer happy, and doing things that you’ve long ago stopped being surprised or fulfilled by, is never a good thing. Yes, there will be a difficult moment or several during the moving process, but it is at least a step towards taking active change in your life and putting it on a path that you want to see it go. I mean, if you’re at a point in your life where you are legitimately saying you are “over” the “drama” of your group — and you’re not on a reality show — there have to be some changes to make.

In any case, choosing to be somewhere because it’s familiar is a short-term fix to what is certainly a much bigger problem. There is a certain degree of charm that your hometown can take on after a long enough separation, and maybe it will end up proving the right place for you at some later point in your life. But don’t we all owe it to ourselves to explore a bit as an adult, and listen to ourselves when we constantly mutter how unhappy we are? A move is never a guarantee of a better life, but it is a guarantee of doing something you actually want to do, even if it means taking a chance.

Chelsea Fagan writing in Thought Catalog

Plan to Adapt

The primary message of (many career) books and countless others is to listen to your heart and follow your passion. Find your true north by filling out worksheets or engaging in deep, thoughtful introspection. Once you’ve got a mission in mind, these books urge, you’re supposed to develop a long-term plan for fulfilling it. You’re supposed to craft detailed, specific goals. You’re urged to figure out who you are and where you want to be in ten years, and then work backward to develop a roadmap for getting there.  

This philosophy has some serious strengths. It’s important to have worthy aspirations. If you are passionate about something, you’ll have fun, stay committed, and achieve more. It’s also right to invest for the long term: to find out whether you’re good at something and whether you like it, you need to stick with it for a meaningful amount of time.  

But it presumes a static world. You will change. The environment around you will change. Your allies and competitors will change. It’s unwise, no matter your stage of life, to try to pinpoint a single dream around which your existence revolves.  

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha from The Startup of You

What you'll be like a decade from now

Why do people get ill-advised tattoos, marry questionable partners, or make financial-planning decisions they come to regret? A new study suggests that part of the reason is that we aren’t very good at predicting how much we’re going to change in the future. We are prone to believe whatever we think and value now will hold true. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert led the study and says, “People really aren’t very good at knowing who they’re going to be and hence what they’re going to want a decade from now.” Gilbert tells LiveScience.com, “At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

The Harvard University study survey of more than 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68. People act as if history shaped them and then ended, leaving them in their final form. The researchers call the effect “the end of history” illusion.

Younger people in the survey did not expect to change as much as their the elders changed within the same time frame. The researchers made an effort to make sure that the people in the survey were not just overestimating past change but rather underestimating future change by comparing the results to predictions made on another survey a decade ago.

Although we aren’t very good at predicting our future selves, most of us are able to see that our values, preferences and personalities are different from a decade ago. We just can’t predict how much change will come looking forward the same length of time.

We may be motivated by the desire to comfort ourselves. We tell ourselves that future change won’t be very dramatic. We know ourselves and the future is predictable. Our present selves are permanent, so this thinking goes.

Other studies show you are less likely to change the older you get, but you will still change more than you expect.

Gilbert offers this advice: Take care when making long-term decisions to include a “margin for escape”. If you are buying a ticket to see your favorite band in ten years, you might want to pause before buying a ticket.

But there is another side of the coin to consider before including a 10 year opt-out clause in your wedding vows: Research shows that when people feel they have the ability to change their minds, they're less happy with the choices they've made.

You can read more about the study in the journal Science.

Stephen Goforth

When to Quit

David Epstein (who wrote the book Range) points to research that has shown that quitting something that’s unrewarding or unfulfilling and moving on to something that’s a better fit makes people happier. For example, when the economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt conducted a study online in which participants who were considering a career change could flip a digital coin, heads for quit and tails for stay, he found that six months later, those who flipped heads and changed jobs were substantially happier. And perhaps more important, they had freed themselves up to try other things and find out what fulfilled them more than their current career. So quitting once it’s clear that the “match quality” between the person and the pursuit is bad, Epstein said, should be seen as more of a success than a failure. Seth Godin, the author of a number of career-advice books, has even endorsed making a list at the start of any endeavor of the conditions under which to quit.

Ashley Fetters writing in The Atlantic

The Ultimate Adventure

Time spent in the neutral zone is an opportunity for inner reorientation. There’s no time limit on your stay and no certainty of what the “goal” is while you remain there. More than a readjustment to the “new you,” it’s where the real business of transitions takes place. Most people don’t recognize it for what it is but will look back later and see there was significant transformation taking place. It is a time of greater sense of self and lesser sense of what’s going on around us, what all the circumstances mean. We become more acutely aware of what’s going on the inside more than on the outside.

Even Jesus needed a retreat into the desert to gain a sense of who he was – and thus, what he was here to do. It is in these “moments of discovery” that we are mostly likely find God because we are "open" in a way we are not when caught up in every day life.

It starts with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in. Some people never fully let go of those ill-fitting parts or else run back to these broken connections. May it never be said of us that we failed to meet this challenge. Here's to transitions that take us into uncharted waters without a map. This is the ultimate adventure.

Stephen Goforth (born April 24)

The Struggle for Social Innovation

Social problem solving is not only slow, it is untidy.  Purposeful social change occurs through a long and disorderly process of trial and error not unlike that of an infant learning to walk. The infant tries, fails, has partial successes, learns, bumps its nose, cries, and tries again. It has many failures before it succeeds. This is why Harlan Cleveland says that “planning is improvisation on a sense of direction.”  No plan for social or institutional Improvement can be put into effect without innumerable in-course corrections.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Can’t we just get this change over with?

People often ask whether there isn't some way to speed up transition, to get it over sooner; when they do, they are usually thinking of the time in the neutral zone when very little seems to be happening. As does any unfolding natural process, the neutral zone takes its own sweet time. "Speeding things up,' hitting the fast forward button, is a tempting idea, but that only stirs things up in ways that disrupt the natural formative processes that are going on. Far from bringing you out of the neurtral zone sooner, such tactics usually set you back and force you to start over again. Frustrating through it is, the best advice is to opt for the turtle and forget the hare.

At the same time, do keep moving. Because the opposite temptation - to try to undo the changes and put things back the way they were before the transition started - is equally misguided. That undoubtedly was an easier time than this nonplace you occupy now! But your life lacks a replay button. The transition that brought you to this place cannot be undone. Even putting things back "the way they were" is a misnomer, because back then, you hadn't had the experience of being plunged into transition. And that experience won't go away.

William Bridges, Transitions

Shrink the Change

A sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

If you’re leading a change effort… rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.  

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. 

If you want a reluctant to get moving, you need to shirk the change.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Disillusioned?

Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition. At such times, we need to consider whether the old view or belief may not have been an enchantment cast on us in the past to keep us from seeing deeper into ourselves and others than we were ready to. For the whole idea of disenchantment is that reality has many layers, none “wrong”  but each appropriate to a particular phase of intellectual and spiritual development. The disenchantment experience is the signal that they time has come to look below the surface of what has been thought to be so. It is the sign that you are ready to see and understand more now. 

Lacking that perspective on such experiences, however, we often miss the point and simply become “disillusioned.” The disenchanted person recognized the old view as sufficient in its time, but insufficient now.

On the other hand, the disillusioned person simply rejects the embodiment of the earlier view; she finds a new husband or he gets a new boss, but both leave unchanged the old enchanted view of relationships. The disenchanted person moves on, but the disillusioned person stops and goes through the play again with new actors. Such a person is on a perpetual quest for a real friend, a true mate, and a trustworthy leader. The quest only goes around in circles, and real movement and real development are arrested. 

William Bridges, Transitions