With help from William Bridges, PhD and author of Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
“…endings and beginnings, with emptiness and germination in between. That basic shape is so essential to growth that we must learn to recognize it in our lives.”
Bridges, 180
For the past several years, I seem to find myself constantly in a state of change and sometimes even transition. It’s possible I may be addicted to it. Perhaps it’s the military background; I find change both exciting and a comfortable. Monotony is my true fear.
Shortly before moving to Washington, DC back in 2021, I attended a transitioning service member virtual workshop focused on women veterans by Command Purpose. Among other things, the major objective of the course was to build our personal mission statements. When you’re active duty, your mission statement is issued to you from every level of command. Not so on the outside.
As part of the program, they recommended the book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, by William Bridges and it was a great resource. One of his major themes is the difference between change and transition.
Change is external, environmental—and can often happen to us from one moment to the next, without or without our active participation.
Transitions, by contrast, is internal, it’s a longer journey which requires deliberate choice. It’s the internal reckoning as we move between old lives and new.
I’ve heard story after story of fellow veterans who separated from the military–full of hope and excitement at their soon-found freedom–only be devastated by the crippling emptiness and isolation of humdrum, American civilian life. Despite their active decision to make a change, it seems they never experienced the internal transformation they sought by separating. Instead, they are more empty than ever.
I am grateful my transition from active duty to civilian was not nearly as fraught as some others, and I think it’s because I was at least a little prepared for the real challenge of change: transition. My transition was neither effortless nor aesthetic but it was at least structured and purposeful thanks to my recently learned skills.
Phase One: The Ending
As Bridges says, every transition begins with the end. This is sometimes the hardest part, not the change itself, but letting go of the old. Goodbyes suck. Even though we’ve usually left the military for a reason, there are still good memories, good experiences, and good friends that we’re leaving behind.
In the military, so much of your identity is issued to you: your mission, your purpose, your values, your standards of behavior, your career and education goals, even your friends. If you embrace these standards and conditions, your community will not only accept you, they will literally defend you with their lives. That’s belonging—when you feel a kinship with a perfect stranger just because you share this one thing in common.
It’s not like that on the civilian side. In some ways, it can be nicer. No one is telling you where to live, what job to do, what to wear, or how many times a week to do cardio versus strength training. You get to decide, but you have to now decide everything. You also lose all those other things, that community, that common mission, those shared values, that instant belonging. Now unless you take action, you’re a random person, with a random job, in a random town. You come to the end of a plot line.
For me, the moments before the end are always harder than the change itself. Once the change is complete, I can focus on what’s ahead. But the days and weeks before the change is complete, when I know it’s about to happen, all I can do is focus on what’s ending. I can’t celebrate the change yet; I don’t even know exactly what it’s going to look like. All I can do is mourn the good parts that are about to end.
“Endings are, let’s remember, experiences of dying…Even though we are likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also—and it is too bad that we don’t have better ways of reminding ourselves of this—the initiation of a process. We have it backward. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play” (Bridges, 135).
Phase Two: The Neutral Zone
Too often, we think we can just jump from one side of change to another. That our ability to bounce back between scenes of our lives is revered as “resilience,” as if the goal is to spend the least amount of time in transition as possible.
The reality for major change is much longer and at least a little painful. For real transition to occur, instead of just the external change, there must be that empty in between space, when the end is over but the new beginning is still pending, and everything seems unsettled. As Bridges calls it, the neutral zone.
The neutral zone is the part when you’re both mourning the end and uncertain for the future, when we fear the grief might be telling us we’ve made a terrible mistake. As Bridges describes it, it’s the period of lostness, that sense of being untethered from our lives and afraid this state of emptiness and loneliness are not just a phase, but our new life.
This is not the beginning, this is just the preparatory phase. The risk, the space. Great things don’t suddenly appear—they must not only be built one agonizing piece at a time, but they must also have the space.
But it is temporary. I am in the neutral zone now. I’ve been on sabbatical six weeks already and my doubt has only modestly lessened. There is still that emptiness, some loneliness, and a fear of purposelessness, as if I am now a little useless. I’m cut off from the action. It doesn’t matter that I’m still busy, just far more relaxed, I still miss the privileges of my old life. I’m still uncertain about not working full time. What if it’s all a waste?
I’ve been through enough transitions now that I know this doubt is normal. This is all temporary. It’s part of the transition itself and it’s scary because it’s always unknown how long it will last.
For my fellow military folks in transition, I suspect this is the hardest part because no matter how many times we’ve been through transition, we are always surprised by this phase, surprised by this emptiness, and suddenly unsure if it will always feel this way. We’re trained on how to adapt to change, attack a new challenge, operate in the gray, but we’re not trained so much on how to manage the crippling emptiness of the neutral zone. No one is there is teach how to use this time to let ourselves mourn, reflect, and make sense of the future.
Despite the sense of worthlessness, this is a necessary part for real transition to occur. There must be space for the new life to root.
Phase Three: The New Beginning
“Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.”
Bridges, 173
The final phase is the new beginning, when the preparation ends, we have underwent the work and patience of renewal, and now it’s time to act. It’s not always clear when the the new beginning is supposed to actually begin.
This is why it’s helpful to spend the neutral zone visualizing our desired future, so we may recognize it when an opportunity finally presents itself. Therefore, Bridges recommends looking for internal signs, akin to feeling attracted to something again like a new idea or activity. This is why, he says, we need the neutral zone, so we will recognize this attraction against the backdrop of neutrality when it occurs. The new beginning begins when we become realigned with a genuine value, interest, or objective.
When I first moved to Washington, DC, it was for a term position (one year), during COVID, and I took a significant pay cut for it. I knew there was opportunity here, but I was uncertain where I would go next or how I could be able to afford a comfortable life in a city where a modest, one bedroom apartment is $2,000 a month. So, my empty nesting aunt and uncle in Arlington let me move in for a bit. Except then it was six months later, I got a little too comfortable, and two of their daughters started to move back in as they were each undergoing their own life transitions.
It was time for me to move out, I knew it. I was in my late twenties. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I could certainly afford to live on my own. But I was scared. I had just left the military, I was on my own, and I had only a temporary job. Their home became this pillar of comfort, stability, and a tiny community in my life.
Eventually my aunt had to sit me down and tell me directly I had to move out within the next 3-4 weeks. I cried. I was embarrassed to have overstayed my welcome, embarrassed I seemed lack the strength to be on my own without external motivators, and terribly afraid once I lived on my own again, I might realize this life I deliberately built for myself, without the military, would never fill me with the same sense of fulfillment that serving had. Even though the logistics and culture of my active duty job were unbearable, I was still proud every day to serve.
Could I ever feel that pride again on the outside? On my own?
Despite the discomfort of the situation, it was absolutely the push I needed. It was the signal that told me to close that chapter’s neutral zone and act. It was time to embrace the new beginning of my life after active duty. I immediately sought out a realtor and within about a month, I closed and was moving into my own single bedroom condo which ever since, has felt like my little dream home.
The new beginning is the turning point. Our friend Bridges has three rules to beginnings:
Rule #1 – “Stop getting ready and act” (Bridges, 174).
The is the cornerstone of the new beginning, when we notice that signal, and we decide we have completed what needed to be done during the neutral state. As much as we’d like to, we can’t skip the neutral zone, but once it’s time, we must actively decide to move forward.
Rule # 2 – Begin to identify yourself with the final result, the type of person you want to be. Experience yourself as the one who does this sort of thing (Bridges, 174).
This is a bit of a mind trick we play on ourselves to motivate us to act, but in my experience, it has been remarkably effective.
This is the act of not only deciding to move forward, it is also deciding we already are the person we want to become. We already are the kind of person that would accomplish what we want to accomplish. We are the type of person that would thrive in that world we want to be in. Confidence does not always have to grow organically. Confidence can be a decision.
I am going to do this terribly hard thing because I’ve decided I am the person who would succeed doing this hard thing.
Rule # 3 – “Take things step by step, and resist the siren song that sings about some other route where everything goes smoothly and events are always exciting and meaningful” (Bridges, 176).
As they say, it’s the journey, not the destination. While it’s important to decide who we want to be, what we want to achieve, we also need to decide the very act of striving for that goal (even when the goal is still a long way off) is as rewarding as if we had already achieved the goal. As Bridges says, a successful new beginning is about shifting “your purpose from the goal to the process of reaching that goal” (177).
We must embrace every agonizing step, because they prepare us to achieve that goal. If we hadn’t experienced each dull moment, each set back, each tiny step, we would never have been able to achieve it anyway. In embracing the painful process, achieving that objective will be so much sweeter because we knew exactly what it took to achieve it and we did it.
On one hand, it seemed so overwhelming this idea that I might buy a place and live on my own in Washington, DC, but actually all I had to do was the simple and dull task of asking for a realtor referral from a coworker. Everything else would follow from there because I was the type of person that would buy a little condo I lived in alone in this city. The task was not buying a condo (that’s the objective). The tasks of buying a condo are actually sending emails, using my web browser, and scheduling a date and time. By themselves, these tasks are quite mundane. What gives them purpose is the overarching objective.
All great things are the culmination of a lot of boring little tasks, so embrace them.
Summary
Transition is not the act of changing, it’s the decision (and process) to be reborn in the wake of that change. Our internal world cannot be renewed by an external change. Humans are not machines, you cannot change a setting and suddenly be a different person. Transition, internal transformation, takes time and deliberate work. So a map might be helpful.
This is why I love Bridge’s ideas on transition, he shifts the process from something that happens to you, to something you decide to do. I think successful transition must be a series of active decisions, and I don’t mean the decision to get out, probably move, and apply for work. These are all external changes. It’s the decision to allow yourself to be scared, mournful, lost, and lonely (rather than pretending it’s not so). It’s the decision to keep going despite your doubts. It’s the decision to invent your purpose (rather than search for it as if your future is pre-determined and if you don’t fulfill it, you will be empty and miserable forever). It’s the decision to be the kind of person who does the sort of thing you want to do. Finally, it’s the decision to let big dreams be a series of simple and menial tasks and take pride in doing them anyway.
How much more powerful (and and meaningful) can we be if we decide transition is not something we must “get through,” but rather the opportunity to decide who we want to be on the other side?
Leave a Reply