Career Management Advice: How To Manage Life Transitions

Over the weekend, I listened to an interview with Bruce Feiler about his new book, “Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age.” I have yet to read the book, but I plan to.

 Bruce’s book discusses how people learn to survive and thrive through life transitions. The timing and subject of his book perfectly capture this moment in time where the entire world is facing a life-altering set of events with an unclear vision on what the future holds.

 What we are going through, according to Bruce, is a massive life disruption or “lifequakes.”

In the interview, Bruce talks about how lifequakes can be:

• Voluntary – leaving a failed marriage
• Involuntary – losing your job or living through a pandemic

No matter whether the lifequake is voluntary or involuntary, what becomes life-changing is how you manage your transition. Emerging from a transition, you can become renewed, or you accept being defeated.  In a recent New York Time article, Bruce outline five tips for how to efficiently manage life transitions. His tips are:

Recognize Where You Are In Your Transition

Transitions are made up of three parts:

• The Long Goodbye – the time it takes for you to accept the change and move past denial and into action
• The Messy Middle – when you start to evaluate your options for the best way to move forward
• The New Beginning – starting your new course in life

Importantly, these three phases do not always happen sequentially. Someone can quickly move on from a significant involuntary lifequake (death of a spouse), but not successfully reach their new beginning because of regret and sorrow.

Identifying Your Emotional State

Successfully getting through transitions means that you need to identify what emotion is holding you back. In the research for Bruce’s book, he interviewed hundreds of people who went through major life-changing events. He then cataloged their responses so that he could begin to see trends.

Bruce’s research showed that these three emotions – fear, sadness, and shame – were the most dominant emotions everyone felt (not surprising).

Having been through several lifequakes myself, I can say that one of my biggest struggles was admitting that emotions were even present. In my “I can handle anything” approach, I tried to think that I was calmly and rationally managing my life. You all know where this story is headed – the denial kept me mired in the Long Goodbye.

Shed Something

To get through the messy middle, you need to shed the things that have held you back – negative behaviors, a fixation on materials things, anything that will block you from becoming your new self. Over the years, I have seen many of our outplacement participants go through the shedding process. Their positive transition accelerates when they can put the past in perspective and begin to focus on a positive mindset for the future.

Try Something Creative

Bruce’s research uncovered an unusual pattern of behavior with the people who were going through their personal lifequakes – they found refuge in doing something creative. Finding a creative pursuit gave them a sense of renewal and control. It gave them an outlet to manage stress. It also gave them the pride of accomplishing something new.

In looking back at my life, it was becoming a part of Special Pops Tennis (as a tennis coach and eventual board member) that gave my life so much more meaning during some dark times. I was able to channel my heart to serve with my love of tennis into something that gave me so much joy.

Rewrite Your Own Story

Here is what Bruce Feiler had to say:

A life transition is fundamentally a meaning-making exercise. It is an autobiographical occasion, in which we are called on to revise and retell our life stories, adding a new chapter in which we find meaning in our lifequake. The lifequake itself may have been positive or negative, but the story we tell about it has an ending that’s upbeat and forward-looking.

And that may be the greatest lesson of all: We control the stories we tell about our transitions. Instead of viewing them as periods, we have to grind our way through, we should see them for what they are: healing periods that take the frightened parts of our lives and begin to repair them.

We can’t keep the wolves from interrupting our fairy tales, and that’s OK. Because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that we all need to be the hero of our own story.

What makes Bruce Feiler’s book “Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age” so compelling me is that we all currently sharing the same life experience. I would call it our global “Messy Middle.” Like the stories Bruce used for his research, we are all going to get through this pandemic differently. Each of us will have our own unique transition – each of us will write our own new story.

 I hope that your story will be great.

About The Author

Patrick Lynch is the Vice President of Global Operations at Careerminds, a provider of affordable, outplacement 2.0 solutions for organizations that are downsizing. Outplacement 2.0 is the convergence of career consulting, e-learning, and online social collaboration as a means to connect unemployed individuals to a new opportunity more efficiently.

Patrick is also the proud President-Elect of SHRM-Atlanta, the premier HR association in Atlanta. SHRM-Atlanta dedicates itself to growing the skills and knowledge of HR professionals, developing business leadership competencies in our members, and leading in the development of best in class workforce and workplaces in the Greater Atlanta area.