Transitions
Making sense of life’s changes
William Bridges
Having read it
★★★★☆
An illuminating and helpful read.
Personally, not all of it was useful but the general themes and ideas presented made sense and, certainly when assisted by a bit of its reader’s own perspectives, were helpful; it’s one of those book you can return to and read at any time but especially when you’re feeling the need for a bit of anchorage, then potential rehabilitation and progression.
A good passage
[...] 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.
A second good passage
[...] you encounter the neutral zone – that apparently empty in-between time when, under the surface of the organisational structure 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. During your time in the neutral zone, you are receiving signals and cues – if only you could decipher them! – as to what you need to become for the next stage of your working life. And, unless you disrupt it by trying to rush through the neutral zone quickly, you are slowly being transformed into the person you need to be to move forward in your life.
A third good passage
When a person is overwhelmed by a change, the transition – and particularly the ending – is almost impossible to comprehend. That, in turn, reminds us that time not only reconciled us to loss but also helps us to understand the loss so that we can live through it. It is all the more unfortunate that our change-obsessed and transition-ignorant society keeps us trying to make sense of endings in the context of change rather than in the context of transition. For it is only in the context of the transition process that endings hold personal meaning and open the gate to our own transformation.