We are in challenging times. Inspite of uncertainty, worries and unknown we can put in place a few manageable steps to gain control and keep sanity, as we go along.

Change is happening already. It is external, landed on us with a full blast. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team role, made redundant, retired, a new country. Now we are experiencing a worldwide pandemic situation. There can be a number of changes, but unless there are transitions, nothing will be different when the dust clears.

Transition is internal. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation.

Three Stages of Transition.

1. Ending

Transition starts with ending – paradoxical but true. Test this fact in your own experience. Think of a big change in your life: your first managerial job, or the birth of your child, the move to a new house, new city, new country.

With the job, you may have had to let go of your old peer group. They weren’t peers anymore, and the kind of work you really liked may have come to the end. Perhaps you had to give up the feeling of competence that came from doing that work, and the habit of leaving your work at the office may have stopped when you took on the round-the-clock responsibility of a managerial job.

With the move, a whole network of relationships ended. Even if you kept in touch, it was never the same again.

Even with these “good” changes, there are transitions that begin with having to let go of something. 

There are endings. There are losses. Once you understand that transition begins with letting go of something, you have taken the first step in the task of transition management.

2. Neutral Zone.

The second step is understanding what comes after the letting go: the neutral zone. This is the no-man’s land between the old reality and the new.

When you got the promotion or moved to a new country, the change probably happened pretty fast. But that is just the external situational change. Inwardly the psychological transition happened much more slowly because instead of becoming a new person as fast as you changed outwardly, you actually struggled for a time in a state that was neither the old nor the new. It was a kind of emotional wilderness, a time when it wasn’t clear who you were or what was real.

It is very confusing state. Sometimes you feel empty, dead, flat, inert. Everyone’s experience in the neutral zone is personal to them. These feelings are not easy to talk about, so it’s easy to assume that they are not “normal”. The fact to remember is that they are normal.

The neutral zone is thus both a dangerous and an opportune place, and it is the very core of the transition process. Painful though it often is, that neutral zone is the individual’s and the organization’s best chance for creativity, renewal, and development.

We are learning new skills, discovering new talents and opportunities, reflecting and searching in this emotional wilderness. The situation now feels surreal and it is ok to feel lost. The whole world learns how to live differently now.

The positive aspect of the neutral zone – the gap between the old and the new is the time when innovation is the most possible and when revitalization begins.

3. New Beginning

Like any organic process, beginnings cannot be made to happen by a word or act. They happen when the timing of the transition process allows them to happen, just as flowers and fruit appear on a schedule that is natural and not subject to anyone’s will. That is why it is so important to understand the transition process and where people are in it.

When you have worked through the previous two stages, you are entering a New Beginning more empowered, more confident, bringing new practices, ideas, and energy of excitement.

This time is not going to be lost.

This time is the chance of new discoveries and opportunities.

“If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.” – C.S.Lewis

To work through transition stages together, get in touch for coaching support: info@kogancoaching.com