"Transitions" by William Bridges

Summary

I just finished reading this book. The first edition of the book was published in 1980. Bridges edited the book for its second edition that was published twenty four years later in 2004 (or twenty five years after Bridges first wrote the book in 1979). William Bridges did a career transition himself in the 70s. A former professor of English, he started a new career to help others deal with change.

The concept of transition described in the book is simple in that transition comprises three intuitive stages: ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. Bridges tackles transition in its broad sense and does not limit it to career change, but points out that it encompasses many areas of our lives like relationships. Bridges goes into detail in describing each stage. He writes about the challenges and the importance of ending what is old, the often unsupported and confusing neutral zone, and the new beginnings that do not start unless one goes through the internal transformations of the first two phases.

The dominant idea throughout the book is that transition is an internal process. We make the change first psychologically and emotionally, and it is only after this deeper change, that the external changes in our lives (new career, new life partner, etc.) are authentic. Bridges makes a clear distinction between change and transition. Change is superficial and does not involve the deeper shifts on the emotional level. An example of change is when someone gets a new job without much internal search of the new person they want to be, or when someone jumps into a new relationship without having been over their ex partner. Transition, on the other hand, is a deeper state of change, when someone processes the loss of the old situation, goes into a middle phase of void and uncertainty, and finally becomes ready for a new beginning. Transition obviously is a longer process than change.

Bridges also points out that our lives can comprise many transitions. People and their circumstances change over time - aging, change in the organization, change in the family (grown-up children leaving home) prompt us to seek a new transition.

It is interesting that Bridges points out that transitions happen at every age. Adults go through it as well as children and teenagers in the case of the developmental transition from childhood to adolescence, and from adolescence to adulthood. In addition, no transition in itself is perfect and we may be carrying with us unfinished business from an earlier transition, which we may face in our future transitions.

My Thoughts

Personally, I got mostly touched when reading the chapter about endings. I realized myself that I had a vision of who I want to become, but I didn’t realize that vision because I was so scared. Before reading this book, I thought I was scared of the new, but now I feel that all along I have been really scared of leaving my old identity as a software tester. Having invested about ten years of my life working in the software field, I identify myself as the shy techie. It is very difficult for me to break away from this self-image. I do have a deep desire to change. I would like to overcome my shyness, to become a more assertive person. However, all these years nothing happened. It seems to me as though I am my own prison. That by refusing to leave my old self-identity, I have been sabotaging myself from making a transition.

What I would add to this book is that weight loss is also another example of transition. I have been through weight loss myself. I first tried it unsuccessfully many times, then a couple of years ago managed to lose most of the excess weight (60 lbs), which I unfortunately regained. I mention weight loss because it is a problem that many people in our society are touched by. I think the difficulty of losing the weight is because we do not give much attention to the psychological factor. Letting go of the old habits of using food for comfort and self-medication. Letting go of the old self-image of a fat person and replacing it with a new self-image of a healthy and fit person. It is after all who we want to become. However, it seems that the old never goes away entirely, it is perhaps still ingrained somewhere in our brain. As an analogy, many people regain a portion of the weight they worked so hard to lose. A more dramatic analogy is the statistic about how many criminals repeat their crimes once out of prison.

I wonder if relapses are also a problem in the transitions mentioned by Bridges like career transition or divorce. After we go through a transition, do we have a relapse? Or does the relapse happen only because we didn’t do a deep enough transition?

About the Style of the Book

I felt a little bored reading the second part of the book. I think the second part is redundant as there are many repetitions about the fact that the transition needs to be an internal process before it manifests itself externally through a change in our lives.
Also, I find the analogies to stories from the Greek mythology were excessive. This is a book about transition and not Greek mythology. Even for the sake of illustration, the author should have used them only once or twice, but not more.

Excerpts

Here are some excerpts that I found worth quoting.

p. 78 – Finding meaningful work could clash with societal expectations of monetary success and prestige.
“ In our culture, there are forces that stand in the way of this normal, cyclical pattern of development. We place a high value of monetary success and professional prestige, and that encourages people to set (and then keep trying to reach) distant and elevated goals. This emphasis on success often stands in the way of people’s doing what really interests them and makes them happy. The elevated and distant goal of success is often rationalized by the idea that, even if the goal is not reached, its height insures that even falling short of it will lead to substantial achievement. For all but a very few, however, “aiming high” in that guarantees an ultimate day of reckoning (and what a profound transition that is!) in which they will have to come to terms with having “failed.”

p. 99 - The ninety year old version of oneself:
“Imagine that you are really old. Let’s say you’re ninety. From that time in the future, you can look back on yourself now. Then you’ll know what was really going on and even how things turned out. You may also know how they might have turned out if you had taken a different path. From that vantage point, was this present point in your life a time when it was a good idea to keep on in the same direction, or was it a time that cried out for change? And if the latter, what kind of change was called for? Looking back from age ninety, did you notice signs that pointed to the direction you ought to have taken at this point in our life, signs that may have been hard to see but that were there? And looking back from that future, what feelings do you have about your situation now? At ninety, are you sympathetic with your current confusion or impatient with your current blindness? At ninety, are you pleased by how things turned out or troubled by the nagging feeling that you missed a turn in the road back here where you’re standing now? Do you, at ninety, wish you could have encouraged your present self to take more risks? Or do you wish you could have made the present you wake up and see all that you already possessed and not risk it for something that was just ego candy? To give these questions a little more vitality, take a few moments first to imagine the old you that you’ll be at ninety. Shut your eyes and see whether you can picture your ninety-year-old hands. Imagine what your old body will feel like in whatever position you are now in. In your mind, “people” the world that the old you will be living in: Who will be there, and who won’t? Where will you be living? How will you spend your days? When you have let your imagination sketch out that world, try going back to any of the earlier questions that didn’t seem answerable at the time, and let the ninety-year-old person who lives in that world answer the question.”

p. 109 - Endings: How we hang on to our old habits and lifestyle. Letting go of the old is challenging. New beginnings are not possible without closing the old chapter of our life, ending our old identity, and grieving the loss.
“For it wasn’t the new beginning that accounted for the confusions they were experiencing but rather the termination of their old lives.”

p. 135 - Don’t feel bad about the neutral zone, about being uncertain and lost. This period is essential.
“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. The activities of your ordinary life keep you “you” by presenting you with a set of signals that are difficult to respond to in any but the old way. Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation. But you don’t do it as you do ordinary things, for it is in the walking, watching, making coffee, counting the birds on the phone wire, studying the cracks in the plaster ceiling over the bed, dreaming, and waiting for God-knows-what to happen that you are carrying on the basic industry of the neutral zone, which is attentive inactivity and ritualized routine.”