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.