How (Not) To Deal With Transitions Constructively

👷🏻‍♀️Transitions are like remodels. It gets uglier before it gets better. 

Transitions make frequent appearances in my coaching practice as leaders take on significant new roles. These new roles often require some internal reconstruction to match the external professional changes. 

Like with remodels, there must be a teardown of existing structures to make way to build something new. This demolition can result in feeling exposed, vulnerable, or lost.

This is a personal piece for people who have felt the reckoning, remoteness, and messiness of transitions. Know someone going through a transition? Help spread the word by sharing the Inner Radio Newsletter with your communities❣️

1. How (Not) To Deal With Transitions Constructively

It’s time to share some news. I am growing a human inside me!

I naively entered this experience thinking, “I’ll have about 9 months of my normal life to get my ducks in a row before the baby comes,” not realizing that 5 ½ weeks in, the transition taking place was going to make itself very known to me and things would feel very NOT NORMAL.

I’ve only recently emerged from a fog of sickness and fatigue to reflect on the experience to share with you. My hope is, even if you aren’t going through my exact experience of growing a human, that the feelings, questions, and observations might sound familiar as you reflect on your own transitions from the past or encounter them in the future.

I experienced such a rollercoaster of emotions - confusion, resistance, overwhelm, loneliness, anticipation, and of course nausea (more of a sensation than an emotion). What ended up helping me most through this time was a book by William Bridges called, fittingly, Transitions. Bridges parses transitions into Endings, The Neutral Zone, and A New Beginning. His framing helped me make sense of what was happening. My hope is it might help you, too.

Endings: Whose Sick Joke Is This?

For someone who spends a lot of time thinking and talking about the virtues of listening, I was terrible at listening to my own body. 

“We find ourselves being disengaged willingly or unwillingly from the activities, relationships, settings, roles that have been important to us.” - Transitions

I fell squarely into the UNWILLING category for a couple reasons:

First, the physical discomforts of pregnancy. The closest thing I can equate morning sickness to is food poisoning. Imagine having food poisoning for four months. Straight. I didn’t even have it as bad as many women do. How does anyone do anything in this phase? I would slap my legs trying to distract myself from the nausea. Food, a passion of mine, became a nemesis. Pregnancy gave a whole new meaning to the term Leaky Cauldron (for fellow Harry Potter fans). I was a leaky cauldron, bubbling in a quite unsettled way.

Then there was the emotional discomfort with the hit on my capacity. Previously I could push through anything that came my way. I set the goal, made the plan, did the work, made it happen. This was the first time wasn’t been able to push through. Sickness stopped me in my tracks and challenged my sense of identity. If I can’t push through, make it work, figure it out…who am I? I lost an important part of evaluating myself. 

I started saying no to engagements I was on the fence about. I also started saying no to projects I would have loved to participate in, especially after I refused to postpone a workshop early on that resulted in a pretty weak delivery I left feeling embarrassed about after.

In that embarrassment I was reminded of clients who think “I MUST be in this meeting” or “I CAN’T MISS this presentation” only to find out, once they were sidelined by COVID or another reason, that the show went on. The meeting happened. The presentation waited. It was all fine. It would have been fine if I postponed my workshop, too.

After that lackluster showing I chose to sit out for a bit – anyone who knows me knows how tough that is. I found myself thinking: This can’t be how it’s supposed to work. Whose sick joke is this? 

After pushing forward so much of my life, the experience of releasing and letting go of some important things I identified with was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling. As I’ve told a friend, my grappling with this Ending looked like a raccoon trapped in a trash bag – feisty, fighting, but not getting very far.

The Neutral Zone

“You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence…Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation” - Transitions

Many transformation stories include this period of emptiness and isolation. A protagonist goes into a cave. A caterpillar retreats into its chrysalis. I laid on my couch for what seemed like forever. My sense of time slowed. I was awfully lonely. Trust me, I was not aware of a profound reorientation taking place. I was by myself most of the day feeling bitter about what I couldn’t do. I was frustrated that I couldn’t just ADD growing a human to my list of things I was already doing. 

I’m reminded now how often I share with clients that learning is not additive. We don’t continue to pile on experiences and qualities to ourselves without also letting some go. Yet, it’s tough to let things go without this time-out of the neutral zone. It’s too tempting to respond in our familiar ways if we’re faced with our familiar stimuli. In this period of quiet aloneness we can do the work of transformation through “attentive inactivity” as our sense of reality and what we REALLY WANT expands and deepens.

The Neutral Zone offers the precious opportunity to ponder the question, “What do you really want?” Bridges makes the spot on observation that the way we decide what to eat or drink is similar to the way we decide many parts of our lives. Rather than being present to what we really want:

• We start thinking of things we don’t want

• We turn to history to remember something good we had recently

• We turn to others to check out what we should be eating

• We have an intuitive hit in the moment but then brush it aside because it’s too unhealthy or silly

By implementing a complex strategy to find the “best” answer, we diminish our awareness of what we really want. Part of the Neutral Zone is to start connecting to that deep wanting – maybe it’s a hint of attraction, a fleeting feeling, some draw that you might be barely conscious of. Whatever it is, it’s a signal.

New Beginnings

“You are at a turning point now. The next phase of your life is taking shape. This is an opportunity to do something different with your life, something that expresses you in some significant way. This is a chance to begin a new chapter.” - Transitions

We can think of a new beginning as a clean break, blank canvas, fresh start. Yet, it’s not always clear when the neutral zone ends and a new beginning starts. I’m unsure where I am in that process. I do currently feel a greater sense of fluidity and renewal than in the prior months. My coaching calls with clients got me through the most difficult times. Since, I have reflected on what I really want. I have envisioned myself being the person I want to be and doing the things I want to do. I’m taking things step by step and remembering that dreaming of a return to normality is exactly that – a dream.  Uncertainty and change are not temporary events but a constant, which means that what’s happening right now is actually quite normal. This realization helps relax my tightness, soften my resistance, and allows me to put my attention towards this process of reintegrating a new identity with elements of the old one.

A more personal post than most, I hope it provides more room for others to acknowledge and share the reckoning of endings, the remoteness of the neutral zone, and the messy piecing together of new beginnings in your own worlds.  Ultimately, I think we want to know that we aren’t alone in the process of transition. 

2. Recommendation

Transitions by William Bridges

I’ve shared some snippets that have been meaningful to me. I hope you might discover the snippets that sing for you. Bridges offers exercises, meditations, and oodles more insights to help us understand how transitions take shape and how to deal more constructively with them.

3. The Goings On

Much gratitude to this lovely lady who has been the most energizing marketing partner I could ask for! We met serendipitously in Bali and discovered we live on the same side of the Bay. Not long after, timing would have it that I needed marketing help and Cindy Qiu stepped up. She has led marketing teams at Sequoia Capital, Instagram, Apple, Product Hunt, just to name a few. She’s played a huge role in ensuring that you all will continue to receive this newsletter and regular content over the next few months. So, all together now, THANK YOU CINDY!

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Jennifer Ouyang Altman is the CEO and Founder of Inner Radio, a leadership coaching company working with executives hungry to define their leadership style, build effective interpersonal relationships, and harness the power of team. She facilitates communication and leadership courses with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and is a CEO coach for Berkeley Haas’ CEO program. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice and her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. She believes in the rules of radio: clarity, simplicity, and personality. You can’t speak and listen at the same time.