5 Tips for Mastering a Life Transition
Highlights from My Just-Released TED Talk
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Today marks two important milestones. First, I’m thrilled to report that my latest TED Talk is featured on TED.com today. This moment has been a long-time coming, and I’m grateful to the many people who helped make it happen.
Second, today is the five-year anniversary of when I first had the idea to collect and analyze life stories. In honor of this confluence, I thought I would share the backstory of the Life Story Project and offer five tips for anyone going through a life transition.
For most of my adult life, I had a conventional, linear life. I worked hard; had some success; got married; had children. But then, in my forties, I had a back-to-back-to-back set of disruptive life experiences. First, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer; then I suffered financial setbacks; then my father tried to take his own life six times in twelve weeks.
As all of these events were ricocheting across my life, I attended my 30th college reunion. I made the two-hour drive with my friend David, thinking we would catch up. But David turned out to be closing a multimillion-dollar real estate deal and spent the entire car ride toggling between phone calls with ebullient lawyers and phone calls with distraught colleagues. The day before, the nine-month-old baby of one of David's partners went down for a nap and never woke up. David was both on top of the world and completely flattened.
I was moderating a panel of prominent classmates that afternoon. I was so shaken, I ripped up their résumés. “I don’t care about your successes,” I said. “I want to hear about your struggles, your challenges, what keeps you awake at night.”
That night, dozens of people came up to me and shared heartbreaking stories.
My wife went into the hospital with a headache and died the next morning.
My thirteen-year-old slashed her wrists.
My mother’s an alcoholic.
My boss is a crook.
I’m afraid.
What everybody was saying, in one way or the other, was: My dream has been shattered, my confidence punctured. The life I’m living is not the life I expected.
I’m living life out of order.
That night I called my wife. “Something’s going on. No one knows how to tell their story anymore. I’ve got to figure out how to help.”
What I did was create The Life Story Project. I crisscrossed the country, collecting hundreds of life stories from Americans in all 50 states. People who lost homes, lost limbs, changed careers, changed genders, got sober, got out of bad marriages. In the end, I had a thousand hours of interviews; 6,000 pages of transcripts. With a team of 12, I then spent a year coding these stories for 57 different variables, looking for patterns that could help all of us thrive in times of change.
And here’s what I learned:
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Lesson # 1: The linear life is dead.
The idea that we’re going to have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness from adolescence to assisted living is hopelessly outdated.
Lesson #2: The nonlinear life involves many more life transitions.
My data show we go through three dozen disruptors in the course of our lives—that’s one every 12 to 18 months. Most of these we get through with relative ease. But one in ten becomes what I call a lifequake, a massive burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.
The average person experiences three to five lifequakes; their average length: five years. Do the math, and that means we spend 25 years—half our adult lives—in transition.
But here’s what causes so much anxiety: We’re all haunted by the ghost of linearity. We expect life is going to be linear and are unnerved when it’s not. We’re comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.
The pandemic has made this problem only worse. For the first time in a century, the entire planet is going through the same lifequake at the same time. As a result, we’re all going through a transition right now. And yet: No one is teaching us how to master them.
Which leads to my final takeaway:
Lesson #3: Transitions are a skill we can – and must – master.
What I’d like to do today is give you five tips, based on my research, to help you get through a life transition.
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BEGIN WITH YOUR TRANSITION SUPERPOWER
One way to think about a lifequake is as a physical blow: Life puts you on your heels. The life transition puts you back on your toes. Yet once most people enter one, they feel overwhelmed.
The good news: Transitions have a natural structure to them. For starters, they involve three phases. I call them the long goodbye, in which you mourn the old you; the messy middle, in which you shed habits and create new ones; and the new beginning, in which you unveil your fresh self. But here’s the key: Counter to a century of thinking, these phases do not happen in order. Just as life is nonlinear, life transitions are nonlinear.
Where should you begin? With your transition superpower. If you’re good at walking away and not looking back, great! Start start with the long goodbye. If you’re good at making lists and weighing alternatives, perfect! Start with the messy middle. If you’re good at turning the page and embracing change, couldn't be better! Start with the new beginning.
Fair warning, you will still finding yourself going back and confronting the parts of the transition that are your kryptonite, but the point is: Transitions are hard. Start with your superpower; build confidence; go from there.
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2. ACCEPT YOUR EMOTIONS
In addition to three phases, I identified seven tools people use to navigate life transitions. The first: Accept that transitions are emotional. I looked hundreds of people in the eye and asked, “What’s the biggest emotion you struggled with in your time of change?”
The most popular answer: fear. How can I get through?
The second most popular answer: sadness. I miss my old life.
The third most popular answer: shame. I’m ashamed I need help.
Some people cope with these feelings by writing them down; others, like me, by buckling down and going to work. But eight in 10 turn to rituals. We sing, dance, hug, jump out of planes, get tattoos.
Rituals like these are especially effective as they’re statements — to ourselves and others — that we’ve gone through a change and are ready for what comes next.
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3. TRY SOMETHING NEW
The messy middle is messy. It’s scary and disorienting. Now what?
My data show we do two things during our time in the wilderness. First, we shed things: mindsets, habits, routines. That shedding allows us to make room for what comes next: astonishing acts of creativity. At the bottom of our lives, we dance, cook, garden, take up ukulele.
Army sergeant Zach Herrick got his face shot off by the Taliban – 31 surgeries between his nose and chin. He experienced suicide ideation. But then, he started to cook, then write poetry, then paint. “I used to get out my hostility by splattering the enemy with bullets; now, I splatter the canvas with paint.”
The simple act of writing a poem or baking a loaf of bread allows us to imagine a better future.
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4. SEEK WISDOM FROM OTHERS
Perhaps the most painful part of a life transition is that we feel alone, which is why it’s essential that you don’t go through your transitions by yourself. Share your experience with others—a friend; a loved one, a colleague, a stranger.
And yet: Not everyone craves the same type of response.
A third of us like comforters—I love you! I believe in you! A quarter like nudgers—I love you, but why don’t you try this? One in six of us likes slappers—I love you but get over yourself. Go do this!
The most important thing: Don’t assume the person you’re helping – or asking for help – knows the type of support you respond to. Ask before you advise.
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5. REWRITE YOUR LIFE STORY
A life transition is fundamentally a meaning-making exercise. It’s what I call an autobiographical occasion, in which we’re called on to revise and retell our life stories, adding a new chapter in which we find meaning in our lifequake. These new chapters help us take the wounded parts of our lives and begin to repair them.
The Italians have a wonderful expression for this process: lupus in fabula—the wolf in the fairy tale. Just when life is going swimmingly, along comes a demon, a dragon, a diagnosis, a pandemic. Just when our fairy tale seems poised to come true, a wolf shows up and threatens to destroy it.
And that’s OK. Because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned: We all need to be the hero of our own story. That’s why we have fairy tales, after all. And why we tell them night after night, bedtime after bedtime.
They turn our nightmares into dreams.
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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
How to Talk to Kids About School Shootings
I Analyzed 100 Commencement Speeches: These Are the 4 Tips They All Share
I Thought I Was Prepared for Grief. Then I Lost My Dad.
Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families. Or a unique service I started to gather family stories from a loved one.
Or, you can contact me directly.
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