Make the Most of Life Transitions
Seems we’re constantly in flux. Among the more common changes we undergo:
Our job role shifts
A co-worker departs
A new person joins the team
New tech tools change how we work
We decide to move to a new job, retire or start a consultancy
Less frequent, thankfully, are seismic shifts — a serious medical diagnosis or a personal tragedy — that up-end everything.
A New York Times bestseller, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age is a fascinating and helpful book. With stories from a wide swath of Americans, the book describes the full spectrum of changes we undergo throughout our lives -- from relatively minor disruptions to major “lifequakes.”
A personal crisis prompted NYT best-selling author Bruce Feiler to reflect on how he was thinking and talking about the crisis and its impact on his life. He got curious about the narratives we tell ourselves and that we share with others.
Feiler set out to learn more. He interviewed 225 Americans around the country who’d been through major life changes, asking about their experiences and what shape they viewed their life so far.
After he finished gathering the stories, he coded them and found patterns among both the voluntary and involuntary changes. He also developed recommended strategies for managing our big life changes. Among the key takeaways:
This generation is undergoing more frequent lifequakes than any previous generation
Major shifts generally last about five years
Our lives are anything but linear in nature
What Shape Is Your Life?
Feiler observed that most of us find our the source of our life's meaning in one of three ways:
Agency: These are people who view themselves as the captain of their ship, steering their lives with goals and a drive for self-fulfillment; this was the largest group of people in his research
Belonging: People who see their connection and commitment to family or another close-knit group as the main source of their meaning; this was the second largest group in his research
Calling: People who feel called, beyond personal needs, to focus their lives on service to their community, to protect the environment and to combat social injustice
Feiler found that the shapes people drew of their life trajectories to date could be grouped according to the “ABCs” of meaning:
People who found meaning primarily through Agency drew some form of line – a road, a river, a path through the woods or other linear imagery
People who sourced their meaning primarily through Belonging drew a heart or similar shape
People with a powerful Calling as their primary purpose in life drew all kinds of shapes, from water wells to Christian crosses; he grouped them into a star-like life shape
He and his team at the Life Story Project developed a toolkit to guide us through these major transitions.
In a nutshell, the toolkit consists of six steps and three phases. We can learn to say our “Long Goodbye” with acceptance by feeling our feelings, reframing the change as positive in some way, then shedding aspects of our former life that no long suit us. As we move through the “Messing Middle,” we eventually begin to see glimmers of something new and likely better. We then share the news of our “New Beginning” with others and ultimately, launch our new life with personally meaningful rituals. .
Chock-full of wildly diverse true stories, the book is engrossing, deeply inspiring and full of hope. I’d love to hear what your reactions were if you read it.