What's the Hardest Part of a Life Transition?

Going Through a Difficult Time Requires Three Stages. The Order You Do Them Doesn't Matter.

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A few weeks ago I received an email from a former professional football player with the Green Bay Packers who had recently retired (no, not THAT player with the Green Bay Packers). This gentleman was starting his own business and had just finished reading my book, Life Is in the Transitions. After thanking me for the interviews and research I had done, then saying some nice words about the book, he made a comment that’s stuck with me:

One particular part that stood out to me was the long goodbye, messy middle, and new beginning. The topic was so impactful and representative of my present stage in life. What I hadn’t fully realized is that while I had tried to move on with my life, I had never really mourned the passing of my old life. I had neglected the long goodbye.

When I started collecting and coding life stories six years ago, a process that now includes 400 people, a TED Talk, a TED Course, and new book, The Search, about finding meaningful work in a post-career world, I wasn’t looking for ways to master life transitions. I wasn’t even focused on the idea of personal change.

I just sat down to ask people how they got through difficult times.

But what quickly became apparent over the course of thousands of hours of conversations is that people were performing the same steps and going through the same experiences in roughly the same order. I set out to identify what that process looked like in more detail. What I found surprised me.

Let’s take a step back and consider how little we understand the process of personal transformation. Considering how ubiquitous the idea of transitions are in contemporary life, there’s been surprisingly little academic research into how they work. The person who did more than any other to focus attention on these times of life was Arnold van Gennep.

Born in Germany 1873, van Gennep moved to France when he was six, was kicked out of school for misbehavior; went through multiple jobs; and ultimately learned 18 languages as a diplomat and the father of French folklore. Perhaps it was this life on the margins that led van Gennep, in 1909, to come up with the insight that all of us regularly go through periods of change in our lives—from becoming an adult to having children to losing loved ones.

Van Gennep called these moments rites of passage, which his translator said should more accurately be called rites of transition.

In effect, Arnold van Gennep invented the idea of a life transition.

Van Gennep also did one more thing. He introduced a structure for transitions that quickly became the consensus. The person going through the transition leaves one world, passes through a hinterland, then enters a new world. He likened the process to walking out of one room, proceeding down a hallway, then entering another room.

One of the clearest findings of my work is that van Gennep is absolutely correct that we all go through multiple transitions.

But an equally clear finding in my work is that van Gennep’s insistence that these transitions always follow the same linear structure is profoundly misleading.

Just as life is nonlinear; life transitions are nonlinear.

But it’s precisely this nonlinearity that allows these transitions to be so effective in helping each of us move from being stuck to being unstuck.

So what exactly is a life transition?

Van Gennep called them bridges that connect different periods of our lives. The English professor William Bridges, in his 1980 book Transitions, called them inner reorientations.

I like these definitions, but to me they miss a number of ingredients.

First, while transitions clearly involve challenging periods of bewilderment and turmoil, they also involve vibrant periods of exploration and reconnection. 

Second, transitions also are remarkably inventive periods. We don’t just bury the old; we also give birth to the new. 

Finally, transitions are deeply personal times when we revisit the values we hold most dear and rebalance how we spend our time. 

My definition: A transition is a vital period of adjustment, creativity, and rebirth that helps one find meaning after a major life disruption.

In my experience, we do one of two things when we enter a transition: Either we make a 212-item to-do list and say, I’ll get through it in a weekend and be the best ever! Or we lie in a fetal position under the covers with a cat and say, I’ll never get through this.

Neither is all that effective. Instead, look at enough of these times, and certain patterns become clear.

For starters, van Gennep was right: Transitions 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. 

Where previous scholars were off is that these phases don’t necessarily happen in order. Bridges, for example, insisted that these three stages of a life transition “must happen in chronological sequence.”

That idea may sound good on paper, but it’s not how we live in real life. Take a simple transition that everyone understands, like a divorce. Under van Gennep’s model, you would first have to leave your marriage, then go through a period of being lost, then enter a new relationship. But we all know that’s not how it always works.

Some people start a new relationship before they’ve left the old one, meaning they’re in the new room before they’ve left the old. Even people who leave their relationship first, if they have children, often have to go back into that old room to be a parent.

Simply put, there is no single way to go through a life transition. 

Just as people live life out of order, they go through transitions out of order.

So where should you begin? 

Wherever you want.  

As a rule, I found that each person is especially good at one of the three phases and especially bad at another. I call them our transition superpower and our transition kryptonite. 

Four in ten people say they’re bad at the long goodbye. Maybe you’re a people pleaser or are prone to denial. OK, this phase is hard for you. But others excel at turning the page. If that’s your superpower, perfect! Start with the long goodbye.

Half don’t like the messy middle. They find all the stops and starts exhausting and frustrating. But others thrive during this time. I spoke with a consultant who took a new job, moved his family across the country, then started a few days after the Great Recession. Sales cratered and soon he was out of a job. 

But this man was a consultant. He loved making to-do lists, reaching out to his network, analyzing options. Within months, he moved to Africa to take a job running a nonprofit.

The point is: Transitions are hard. Start with whatever skills you already have, build confidence, and go from there.

But one warning: As my former Green Bay Packer noted, you will have to go through all three of the phases. Even people who try to ignore their emotions during a transition will eventually have to confront them. Even people who fear getting bogged down in the messy middle, will eventually have to go through that period of betwixt and between.

If there’s encouraging news, it’s that most of us find starting over to be a relatively easy by comparison.

So fear not: Everyone finds part of going through a life transition difficult. But nearly everyone – more than 90 percent in my interviews – believes they did get through their difficult time. Which is why perhaps the most powerful fact of life transitions is that they work. They are the mechanism of human renewal – and the secret superpower of personal salvation that we summon at exactly the moment we most need them.

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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. If you'd like to do a storytelling project with a loved one similar to the one I did with my father, click here to learn more.

You might enjoy reading these posts:

The Stories That Bind Us: My Most Popular Piece Ever

Why Are Fathers Suddenly Doing More Housework?

The One Thing You Need to Be Happy at Work

Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families. Or my new book, The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World.

Or, you can contact me directly.