All Change
One of the things I’ve spent a lot of the past few years doing, is coaching people through personal and organisational changes. And I now find myself in the midst of a huge one myself, and have been taking some time to reflect on that.
In my work, my preferred model for talking about change is Bridges’ Transitions Model. Bridges makes the following distinction between change and transition:
Transition is not just a nice way to say change. It is the inner process through which people come to terms with a change, as they let go of the way things used to be and reorient themselves to the way that things are now. Managing transition means helping people to make that difficult process less painful and disruptive.
My ‘change’ is that Thursday was my last day of employment, after fifteen years at the same organisation, choosing to leave to pursue a long held aspiration of working for myself as an independent coach and consultant.
The change was planned, I’d asked for it, I knew it was coming, I had six months to prepare for it happening, and yet two days after it happened, I know I’m only just starting my transition. My inner process of coming to terms with the change, letting go of the way things used to be and reorienting myself to the way that things are now, will I know run to it’s own timetable. Changes can be planned and noted on the calendar, transition takes it’s own time. It has, according to Bridges, three distinct phases, as I’m currently discovering in a way thats such a good lived reminder of a theory I know so well.
Bridges names the three phases as - Ending ; The Neutral Zone ; Beginning
In this blog entry I want to look at the first phase - Ending
I’m sitting wrtiting this looking at a pile of gifts on my coffee table, and a collection of cards on shelves, ‘goodbye’ gifts from colleagues. I’m also thinking about the colleagues I spent time with socially last week, at lunches, over coffee and sharing drinks with on Thursday evening. Each gift, each card, each meeting, each drink a way of formalising an ending.
And I’m thinking of conversations where people have said to me, or I’ve said to them, ‘but it’s not really goodbye, we’re friends, we’ll stay in touch’. That’s true. During the past fifteen years I have met and made good friends at work, people that I know I’ll stay connnected to. And yet, it still really mattered that we formalised the ending of our relationship as colleagues.
It matters because without an ending, we risk staying stuck. T.S Eliot spoke of this beautifully in The Four Quartets:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from
To begin my new life, to start my new narrative, my story of working for myself rather than for one employer, my old story has to end. Ritualising that ending allowed both me and my ex-colleagues a way to honour the times we’ve shared, to speak to each other in a way that we often forgot to do when working together daily (when was the last time you told a co-worker all the special things you appreciate about them? Perhaps in a leaving card?)
A good ending has also given me the energy to make a start on my new beginning. ‘To Do’ items relating to my new enterprise that have been sitting on a list for a while are getting done ; household chores that I hadn’t got round to have got done ; and the blog I’ve been promising myself to start writing for the longest time, seems to be getting written.
It feels true that the only way to begin is to end, that the end is indeed where we start from
If there’s something you want to begin, perhaps the way to start is to look for and ritualise the ending that might enable it.
Certain About Uncertainty
This is the second blog post about my transition from a long career as an employee to a new beginning working for myself.
Last week I took the first step into my new identity by doing a piece of paid work for a client. It's tempting to think that I'm there, that I have a company, I have paid work and so I must have started my new beginning, but I know that's far from true.
In my last blog post I introduced Bridges' work, his definitions of the three phases of transitions: Ending ; The Neutral Zone ; Beginning
I know I'm still processing my Ending, I still feel connected to my previous employer (even typing that phrase feels weird), and I'm also starting to journey through the Neutral Zone.
As a kid I enjoyed Star Trek, so the phrase 'neutral zone' conjured up a very distinct image for me the first time I read it in Bridges work. A dangerous, unknown place. An uncharted territory between the familiar and the foreign.
And right now it feels like I am walking through unchartered, unknown terrain. I don't have a map, can't see any familiar places and am making my way slowly, one step at a time.
I was speaking to a friend last week who asked me if I had a business plan. I don't. That might seem risky in the uncertain, post Brexit world we’re living in, where something known can feel a lot safer than something unknown, but I think I have something more helpful - An aspiration to live into - That I can do good work, where it's needed and take care of those I love whilst doing it.
I also have the opening stanzas of a poem by David Whyte as my ‘process’:
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
And yet, I'm noticing that from time to time even I'm feeling a definite 'pull' to abandon the slow walk of my poetically inspired process and instead to rush for concrete plans, tangible outcomes and more than anything, the illusory comfort of certainty.
Certainty feels good because it doesn't ask us to sit in the discomfort of not knowing. And at the same time it closes off any possibility of discovery and learning. It's a toddler’s orientation to the world, only trying what we know we already like, and being fearful and dismissive of anything new or different.
And yet, as my small personal world, and the much bigger world of which it is a part, becomes less certain and more complex, it feels like feeling certain about being uncertain and exploring that uncertainty one slow step at a time is the most appropriate way of traversing the Neutral Zone and journeying to a new beginning.
Now more than ever it seems important to remember the words of Alvin Toffler the American writer and futurist who died recently -
The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
I think taking as long as necessary to meander through the neutral zone, learning, unlearning and relearning is how this ‘becoming’ will happen for me, not to a timetable, not to a plan, rather as a surprising unfolding of possibility.