On Leadership, and Looking the Part

It was probably about 15 years ago and I was a few years out of college trying to navigate my budding career. I came across an article in a magazine that stated that curly hair was unprofessional. I had always quietly feared this would be the case but I had never seen such a statement in print. My heart sank in that moment and I felt betrayed. I was driven, up and coming, hard-working, and in possession of very fierce, curly hair. Thus began a years-long relationship with blowdryers, straightening irons and wresting my hair into a different, more acceptable style.

The investment in this decision required both time and money. Either I would get a professional blowout at a salon eating into my budget and enduring the looks of disappointment when I arrived because the stylist knew they were in for a lot of work. Or I would labor at the task at home, a process which took 90–120 minutes trapped in a humid bathroom staring at what I perceived as my professional liability. I soldiered on this way for some time without examining the choice very closely. I addition to putting on my business clothes, I put on my business hair and I told myself it was just easier this way. I viewed it as a personal choice, my personal aesthetics, my personal career, and I didn’t consider the larger ecosystem around me.

All of this care and effortful maintenance around my hairstyle went on for years until one day I decided to quit the endeavor. Having grown into a more stable conception of myself and my strengths, I began to flirt with the idea that the way my hair naturally grew out of my head might be acceptable to the outside world if it were only acceptable to me.

In the ensuing years that I spent flat-ironing, the culture had also shifted. By the time I started to take tentative steps towards embracing my natural hair, there were many more products dedicated to textured hair and a cottage industry of youtube tutorials on how to use them. Awareness had built around the idea that the boundaries of “professional” or “appropriate” might have been drawn a little too tightly. In 2019 California passed the CROWN act, a law prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle and hair texture, and in the ensuing years 6 states have followed suit.

At the time I made the decision to start wearing my hair curly again, I was much more established in my career but the decision still felt risky. I felt a sense of dread walking into the office the first day. Thankfully, no one commented on the transformation, which helped me feel more at ease.

Negative associations with curly hair have actually been documented via implicit association studies. (Interestingly though, those same studies show less negative bias from millennials and younger age groups and people who have had exposure to friends and colleagues who wear natural hairstyles.)

I realize now that had I looked around with awareness all those years ago, I would have found some evidence to back up that magazine’s assertion. I wouldn’t have been able to look around in my work life and see reflections of myself and certainly not if I looked upwards in any corporate hierarchy I was a part of.

My decision to revert to curls was rooted in a desire to question the assumption I had made so many years ago and that was backed up by popular media. The assumption that success looks a certain way. I came to the conclusion that even though I couldn’t see myself in the successful people around me, that didn’t mean anything about my abilities and potential. I realized that I could leverage my skills and strengths and embrace my natural hair texture and that by doing those two things, I had the opportunity to be what I couldn’t see.

What I know now that I wish someone had told the 25-year-old version of me is that my ability to contribute and to build my career was never dependant on being like everyone else. Turns out, when I have been most successful is when I have allowed myself to be distinctive, to stand out, and offer something that didn’t exist in a given environment but maybe the environment needed more of.

As I widen the lens beyond my personal journey, it strikes me that more people than not have something to contend with in this arena. Whether it’s a visual cue or some invisible aspect, is there something about you that you believe puts you outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable? What are you covering, hiding, altering to blend in? What is it about you that you don’t think you see in the mainstream version of success? Truth be told, the output of what success looks like is dependent on the inputs and the inputs are changing every day, becoming more diverse, and ultimately, those inputs include me and they also include you.

Agency vs. Control: Helping Others Navigate Complexity

It’s no secret that humans like to be in control. Particularly in Western culture, there’s much chatter around empowerment, personal freedom, designing your ideal life and career, but the problem is, we often don’t accurately evaluate what exactly it is we have control over.

Unexpected personal or collective tragedies have a way of knocking us off our game and it’s natural for the first response to be feeling like we’ve lost control. I’d argue that these experiences merely shine a light to show us how our feelings of being in control were always an illusion.

Illusion or not, as humans, we conduct much of our mental business in perception and those perceptions can have real physical consequences. Studies have shown that increasing perceived autonomy among elders in nursing homes by increasing choice around daily activities vs the control group resulted in measurable, positive impacts on health metrics and mortality rates.

In our complex, interdependent work environments, seeking and maintaining control can be limiting. We might get stuck on one vision of a perfect outcome and getting locked in rigid thinking. Or, upon the inevitable realization of how little control we have over outcomes, we might decide to disengage and do nothing.

What if we acknowledge that our circle of direct control is much smaller than what we would like to believe, accept that as reality, and embrace agency instead?

Agency is our capacity for action. Agency says we can act independently and make free choices within the structure of our current context. Agency encompasses both what we can directly control and also what we have influence over.

If you find yourself flowing haphazardly down a river in a raft, agency is your ability to pick up the paddle and steer. Will you get knocked over by the rapids? Maybe, but with dedication, over time, you might also develop an ability to successfully navigate bigger and more intense rapids.

One of the greatest gifts you can give if you are a people leader is to help your team dig into the messiness of their current reality and help them see more clearly where their agency lies. Help them identify and list clearly what they have in their control, in their influence and what is left that is entirely uncontrollable. Once those realities are clear in our awareness, only then can we act from a place of empowered agency and let go of all that is not in our control.

Memento Mori: Death As a Teacher and Guide For Navigating Life

At the outset of this year, none of us could have predicted where we’d be sitting in body, mind, and spirit at the end of 2020. We’ve collectively faced a lot; challenge, loss, restriction, transitions, decisions. I know there’s a sense of relief to be turning the calendar page and welcoming in a new year.

At the same time, I have heard throughout the year people acknowledging their own personal silver linings that have appeared in the dark clouds. Things like more time with family, opportunity to change careers, elimination of a commute, increased focus on health, and even in some cases, businesses that are booming.

What really strikes me though, is the frequency with which I hear from clients, family, and friends that they have made a key realization or observation about themselves or their lives. I’m hearing about big aha moments where people have finally come to conclusions that have eluded them for years. I’m also hearing from people who have crystalized a real sense of what’s truly personally meaningful. I have experienced this too. It feels like being in a learning accelerator in the School of Life, albeit an uncomfortable one.

In considering what is the driving force of these revelations, I considered a few options. Perhaps it had to do with the extra time that was uncovered for some, whether that came from working from home or from being out of work entirely. Maybe it was the elimination of distractions from going out to dinner, shopping, large social events. Perhaps extra time with family and close friends spurred conversations, experiences, or challenges that shifted mindsets. It may be all of these things, but I would also offer another option that in my opinion may be a real driving force: we’ve been faced with death.

Contemporary American culture does not have embedded practices around contemplating mortality. It can feel like quite the opposite, youth is obsessively glorified. Our fear of getting older causes us to avoid the inevitable, which is as I once heard someone remark, “we’re all in the queue.”

There are current and historical practices of contemplating mortality and utilizing death as a lens with which to create a meaningful life. The concept of “memento mori” or, remember that you will die, can be traced back at least to the time of Socrates and it is said that in ancient Rome, generals would employ the services of a slave with no other job than in times of peak victory to whisper in the general’s ear “remember thou art mortal.” Stoic philosophers have also written extensively on the subject.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” — Seneca

At the same time, Buddhism developed a similar practice of maranasati or mindfulness of death. In addition to reflecting on broad concepts of impermanence, it is believed that the Buddha encouraged his followers to meditate in or near graveyards. Even today, in Bhutan, there’s a belief that contemplating death five times a day is a secret to contentment.

If 2020 has brought perspective because we’ve been confronted with mortality, what might we gain if we habituated a contemplative practice around the subject?

Some possibilities might be a greater acceptance of life just as is and an enhanced sense of gratitude for every miracle of a day. Acknowledging my own mortality has helped me distill down to the essence of what I feel is truly important and the daily process of remembering death helps me continue to make aligned choices. I fall out of balance all the time but asking myself some questions like the following helps me get back to what’s true to me.

1. At the end of my life, what do I want to look back and say I focused my time and energy on?

2. What kind of legacy do I want to leave?

3. Will I regret this decision (doing or not doing) at the end of my life?

I am hopeful for brighter days ahead but as we turn the page to 2021, there is one thing that I want to take with me from 2020, Memento Mori.

A New View On Stress: How to Turn on Your Capacity for Renewal

Stress is widely understood to be a leading cause of negative health outcomes and if you asked anyone off the street, I’d wager that they would prefer to feel less stress in their lives. It is believed that Americans spend an average of $960 annually on attempts to reduce stress but at the same time, two-thirds say that they’ve never felt more stressed in their lives. When we are running in circles chasing an elusive outcome, I believe, it’s time for a reframe.

Let’s begin by defining what we’re talking about. When people speak of feeling stress or being stressed, they are usually talking about their stress response. A stressor is any stimulus that is threatening to the receiver and the stress response is how the body-mind system reacts. The stress response is actually an adaptive technology. For millions of years of evolutionary history, our species’ survival rested on our ability to detect danger and escape it. Our ancestors that survived those conditions were more likely to have subtle danger detection capacity and robust fight or flight response. That really helped a lot when survival relied on stress hormones dictating a physical response but is not optimal when confronting a full inbox of emails.

There is also a distinction between acute stress and chronic stress. The fight or flight response is designed to deal with short-term stressors that require immediate action. Many of us live in a state of feeling chronically stressed, the morning inbox sets you up for a long day of feeling anxious and clenched, which is at best a drag on your performance and at worst, a drain on your long-term health.

The Opposite of a Thing Is Not a Lack of The Thing

We tend to focus intently on stress reduction but it is often much harder to eliminate something we view as negative than it is to replace it with something else. For example, if I want to eat fewer chips, I can either focus intently on not eating chips or, I can replace my snacks with fruits and vegetables. In this analogy, the opposite of stress is renewal. If our notion of feeling stressed is associated with fight or flight and the sympathetic nervous system, then renewal is associated with the rest and digest or parasympathetic nervous system. If we want to feel less stress, the easier way to alter the state of being is to spend more time in the renewal state. Stress and renewal are two sides of the same spectrum just as the fitness community might talk about activities as being catabolic (to break down) vs. anabolic (to build up). The goal is not to get to zero, it is to build one’s resilience for managing the inevitable.

Make Peace With Stress

What if the word stress didn’t call up negative associations? What if we could see stress and its inverse, renewal, as tools that both have value in different environments. As a first step, I suggest we change the language and refer to the state of being stressed, contraction, and the state of renewal, expansion. Couple that with the acceptance that your stress response evolved to help you, and you might start to see the different use cases for each state. For example, I would rather feel expansive when I’m parenting, brainstorming, or socializing with friends, but when I am up against a deadline and need to activate myself to bring a task to completion, I need to contract. If we can accept that stress is not inherently harmful and the outcome is dose and timing-dependent, we gain the power to thoughtfully direct these energies and intentionally transition in and out of each state.

Master Your Energy States

Here are three things to try in your day-to-day life in order to turn insight into action.

1. Ask yourself, what is in my toolkit that I can use when I need to shift energies. If I am contracted, what actions can I take to promote expansion? If I am too expanded, what actions can I take to promote contraction? What other tools are out there with which I may want to experiment?

2. What does your energetic bank account look like? Everyone has a set point where they would optimally be on the stress-renewal spectrum. Let yours be individual to you and what’s currently going on in your life. Each day you will spend some energy in stress and recoup through renewal, the key question to ask yourself is: where did I come out at the end of the day, am I in the black or the red?

3. After a period of experimentation, you can build a practice of intentional design. Based on your individual circumstances you may decide what it is you need at any given season (your set point) and make decisions based on that which is in your control (your toolkit). Once you have had the chance to evaluate over time where your reality is showing up against your ideal, you can then adjust accordingly.
   

Who Tells Your Story? Cognitive Behavior Theory and the Power of Choice

Humans are effective and efficient storytellers. We’ve understood our mysterious world through stories for millennia. We use stories to teach and entertain, to hold history and culture, and to relate to each other. Neuroscientists have studied the impact of stories’ ability to release oxytocin on the brain which plays into building relationships, a critical component of our nature as social creatures.

Based on their constructive power, it should be no surprise that stories persist in plain sight as well as whispering quietly in the background of our consciousness. Our brains rely on storytelling to take shortcuts which helps efficient learning but can also create cognitive bias and a propensity to exclude new data. When running quietly in the background, old stories can quickly turn into limiting beliefs without awareness.

Cognitive Behavior Theory took root in the field of psychology in the 1950s and is first attributed to Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). Ellis posited an ABC model of A- Activating Event, B- Belief, C-Consequences. The breakthrough concept here was that it is not the activating event that necessarily causes the emotional consequences but there is a step in between, the belief one holds about the event, which then causes either a positive, negative or neutral emotion.

I imagine I’m not alone in that if I look back at my life I’ve spent the majority of it careening from stimulus to response without much awareness of that potential for space in between. As I have slowly built up a meditation practice over the years, I now understand that the space between stimulus and response is the seat of much power.

Let’s pretend that you, like me, still often miss that golden opportunity between stimulus and response, and you find yourself landed squarely in the consequence zone. There is still a way to work backward in this technique. It’s easy to know where to start because all you must do is wait until you feel emotionally triggered and then do a little digging. The strong emotion is your cue to ask with genuine curiosity, what stories am I telling myself here? There may be one or several that you might identify. Once you have them clear in your mind the next step is to ask yourself, is this true? Some stories will collapse right there like a house of cards but if not, you can take it further by pursuing one of two directions.

1. You might ask yourself what evidence to I have for and against this belief and write it down. Sometimes one can find that what feels true emotionally doesn’t hold up against observed evidence. This can be the difference between understanding a situation with the limbic brain vs. the prefrontal cortex.

2. The other strategy is effective even in the absence of evidence and involves asking ourselves what else could be true? Perhaps there’s no way of discerning one universal truth and there are simply possibilities. Can you think of some possibilities that might be at least as true as the original belief? Can you play around and think of one or two that is positive?

Once you are in a place of either observed evidence, alternate possibilities, or both, is when you shift into the driver’s seat. Not only do you get to choose whether or not you bring your old beliefs into your new life, but you also get to decide which story to live out. You get to tell your own story.

How the Pandemic Forced Me To Hack My To-Do List and We Both Came Away Stronger

2020 is pushing us to reimagine, reframe and retool just about everything. This is a story about how the pandemic impacted something I truly love and care about, my to-do list. I’ll admit that I am someone with a deep need for feeling productive. It takes a bit more effort for me to intentionally unplug and relax than it does to fall into a flow of activity. Shamefully, I admit that I have been known to write down small items on my to do list right after completing them just to get the dopamine hit of crossing them off. Am I the only one? I didn’t think so.

This year has had a way of putting everything under a microscope so we can see better what’s working and not working. Since I was always described as efficient and responsible, I just assumed my system was running smoothly. Pre-pandemic, I was setting yearly goals that I would check in on roughly quarterly. Each day in the morning, I would write down everything I needed to get done in the day. As the day wore on, I would add to the list, cross off accomplishments, and transfer today’s leftovers to the top of tomorrow’s to-dos.

A straightforward plan that incorporated both short and long range goals and responsibilities, right? I’ll admit that it took a global crisis for me to understand how and why this system was lacking. There were two major outcome problems. First, I struggled talking about my long term dreams and vision which made it difficult to take advantage of specific help and directed support from mentors. Second, the minute I had a bad day, I was staring at a blank page in the notebook, never wrote down any to-dos, and ended the day feeling incompetent.

In March of this year when lives were turned upside down, every day became that blank sheet of paper and instead of feeling productive and accomplished, I was reeling, running from fire to fire, and struggling mentally and emotionally not being able to put them all out. For context, my little family unit consists of two working parents and two small children 8 and almost 3. I acknowledge that we had and still have a lot of resources and support and for that I’m grateful. Despite that, the status quo in early pandemic days was overwhelm and anxiety. The to-do list that used to bring me joy? That was exposed as a faulty system based on its full and total collapse under pressure so I recognized it was in need of a significant redesign.

As with any redesign, it happened in stages and with iteration, but I will spare you the gory details and explain where I landed and the fundamentals behind why I think it’s working.

On a daily basis I instituted a simple system that’s less of a list and more of an intention setting practice. As soon as I wake up, I decide for myself what is one thing that would make today successful. Sometimes the one thing has its roots in a professional goal, sometimes not. Once I choose that “one thing,” I identify how it connects with one of my core values. Here are a few real life examples stated as “one thing” : personal value.

• Maintain deep presence in my client calls : service, integrity

• Take a 60 minute walk : health, stability

• Play a game with my daughters : family

Once that is anchored in my mind, I go about my day. Occasionally I still pull out a piece of paper if I need to brain dump a few to-dos that I just don’t want to be carrying around so I can make space for remembering the “one thing.” At the end of the day, I reflect briefly on how that “one thing” went.

This is been successful for me, I presume, for a few reasons. Asking myself, what will I do to make today a success instead of what do I have to get done today immediately takes me to a place of choice and options vs. requirements and obligations. Connecting the one thing to my core values reminds me why the goal is meaningful and increases my motivation to fulfill it. Limiting this practice to one thing creates focus and gives me a strong guidepost to return to in the midst of days that sometimes go in completely unexpected and unintended ways. I often do much more than the one thing but reflecting on the intention at the end of the day turns doing something meaningful into the prize instead of crossing off a bunch of things on a list.

As I reflect in the evening and set a new intention the next morning, I build momentum and confidence in the face of overwhelm and I am able to see how each day strings together and is connected to and in service of a larger vision. Viktor Frankl, psychologist and author of the renowned “Man’s Search for Meaning,” suggests that finding a meaningful life is a very personal endeavor. Perhaps there is no grand meaning of life, there is just what is meaningful to you. My daily practice allows me to see more clearly what I’m doing, why, and what does it all mean in the context of my individual life and work.

In order to reframe my longer term goals, I tapped into work by Richard Boyatzis and colleagues in the book “Helping People Change.” What I realized I was doing in my prior annual goal setting, was synthesizing what I thought others either wanted or would be impressed by me achieving. Boyatzis suggests that there are two types of mind-states one can be in when designing vision. He calls them Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) and Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA). A simple way of grasping it is thinking about renewal associated with the parasympathetic nervous system (PEA) and stress associated with the sympathetic nervous system (NEA). The thesis is, in PEA, you invoke curiosity and imagination in order to fully tap into vision and dreams of what’s possible. In the past I was using NEA for my long term goals and letting the “shoulds” take control.

If I were to simplify these concepts even further I would call them expand and contract. I choose that language to neutralize the positive/negative associations because ultimately both states of being, stress and renewal, are essential, they’re just useful at different times. Stress is your friend when you want to buckle down and finish something (contract) and the renewal mode (expand) is what helps us not only survive but also thrive. This framework and understanding helped me intentionally shift out of the land of should and into the wide open field of desire. Now, when I think long range, it’s not about goals, it’s about dreams and the difference is that my face lights up when I get a chance to think or talk about it. I allow myself to adjust and revise my long term vision anytime I like (expand) and when I’m thinking about what my week looks like and what’s the one thing to focus on every day (contract), I remind myself how it’s connected to the vision.

I don’t suffer under the illusion that this new system will be my last redesign, but I’m fairly certain I have quite a bit more resiliency than I did before. While this is also not a prescription, I’ll leave you with the two concepts that I believe are at the core of its efficacy:

Find meaning in your day to day.

• What is adding meaning to my life and what is draining it?

• How will I choose to orient my actions in alignment with my personal values?

Understand how and why to shift between expanding and contracting states of mind.

• Can I extract the “shoulds” out of my long term goals?

• What are my true personal dreams for my life?

Getting Feedback? Here’s How to Get the Most Out of It.

Most people say they want feedback on their performance and, research suggests, many employees would like it more frequently. So why is there often an accompanying sense of dread associated with receiving feedback? How might one take feedback, filter through the internal and external biases that impact it, to extract the maximum benefit and know exactly how to take an action step forward? I will share step by step process to do just that but first, here are a few reasons why feedback can be so difficult in the first place.

Our brain functions with a built in mechanism known as negativity bias. The brain’s natural state is to gravitate towards negative information at the expense of positive information. This “flaw” is simply a byproduct of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution during much of which, it was quite helpful to be hyper aware of potential dangers and threats (i.e. saber-toothed tigers). While this development ensured the survival of our species, it has its downsides in the modern work environment.

Negative feedback can trigger us emotionally and cause us to obsess over it instead of figuring out how to turn insight into action. Positive feedback suffers as well when we brush our strengths under the rug, chalk them up to luck or just miss them all together when praise is delivered at the same time as criticism.

Further complicating matters, we may not all receive the same quality of feedback. Evidence suggests that women are apt to get less actionable and more personality based feedback. A 2014 study, drawing its data from the tech industry, indicated that irrespective of the gender of the manager, women employees were significantly more likely to receive critical, personality based feedback, much of it under the umbrella of “abrasiveness.” Men on the other hand, were more likely to receive critical feedback along with specific suggestions about skills to develop.

Regardless of statistical generalization, no individual is immune from receiving feedback from which it is unclear how to move forward productively. This is why I created a step by step Feedback Filter that anyone can use to bypass the amygdala with its negativity bias, and use the rational neocortex to process the information and translate it into action.

The Feedback Filter Method:

Step 1: What was said?

It’s critical to start from a place of what was actually said without your own interpretation and spin. If possible, isolate the feedback into two parts, the behavior referenced and the impact of that behavior. This helps separate the objective information (behavior) with the subjective information (impact). For example, you hear “when you interrupted me in the meeting I felt that you devalued my ideas.” Objective behavior: I interrupted someone, subjective impact: they felt devalued. If my colleagues feeling empowered is important to me, I can then choose to modify what is in my control, my behavior.

Step 2: What does this tell me about how I’m currently showing up in the world?

The important piece of this step is that it sits squarely in the present. While it’s very important to acknowledge honestly where we are today, recognize that today is just a moment in time and does not need to define us forever. Embrace growth mindset and realize that yesterday’s interrupters can become tomorrow’s greatest listeners.

Step 3: What does this tell me about the other person or the organization at large?

Since feedback is a human to human endeavor, it is inherently subjective. One person’s “abrasive” might be another person’s “determined.” Acknowledge what, if anything, the feedback tells you about the deliverer. Over time, you may also start seeing a pattern that will illuminate the implicit values of the organization of which you are a part. With this knowledge, you empower yourself to make decisions about your long term fit in any given environment.

Step 4: What stories is my mind telling me about this? Are they true?

Humans are powerful meaning makers. The brain creates narratives around situations and when you receive feedback, it might trigger one that’s not particularly helpful. These stories can run on a loop so quietly in the background that they’re easy to miss. When you train your brain to pick up on them you find they fall apart quite quickly upon examination. Just the simple exercise of asking is this true, often strips their power.

Step 5. What actions do I choose to take?

Here is where the rubber meets the road. You’ve shifted from operating in your fight or flight default mode into your rational processing capacity and you’ve got clarity around the what’s happening at present. Now you get to ask yourself, what do I want to be different? Since you are in the driver’s seat around behavior, actions, choices and even thoughts, you get to decide what exactly, concretely you will do differently. What you cannot control is the outcome of those behaviors so be open to experimentation in terms of what you will try in order to iterate into the results you’re looking for.

Step 6. How are these actions aligned with my overall purpose?

One could complete steps 1–5 and walk away with a great plan of action so why this last step? Research indicates that for any change to be sustainable one must be self-motivated and the easiest way to increase motivation is to define and connect with meaning or purpose. Once you know what action you are taking moving forward, ask yourself how does this align with my overall purpose and values? When the action is clarified and the purpose is defined, only then are you able to take what was at first just simple feedback and alchemize it into meaningful, aligned action in service of becoming your best self.

Why Change Is So Hard and What to Do About It

Everyone I know has experienced change lately. Working from home, schooling at home, businesses closing, jobs eliminated, there have been countless changes we’ve been asked to endure and with that, comes a separate and important process: transition.

William Bridges in his book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, introduces the distinction between transition and change. Change is something that happens outside of you and transition is the messy and often difficult internal process that one goes through to integrate that change. Bridges proposes there are three stages to transitions:

1. Ending — where you say goodbye to the old way of being and potentially grieve what is no longer.

2. Neutral Zone — When you can no longer rely on the old but have not fully settled into the new, you are in a potentially disorienting “in-between” space.

3. Beginning — When you are able to take your first tentative steps into the new way of being.

I use the phrase “way of being” because in my observations, what makes transitions so complicated is how they relate to identity.

In a personal example, I recently made a career shift out of a corporate role at a large retailer and into running my own independent coaching practice. As I was transitioning out of a career that I had made a 15 year investment in, my processes was years long. My ending occurred when I reached a point where I could no longer identify a next step on my current path. My identity was wrapped up in being an achiever with a string of promotions and moves within the business. Once I realized there wasn’t another promotion or move that I was desiring, I began exploring my options if I were to make a change. No transition is one size fits all and individuals move through the stages at different speeds. I spent most of my time in the ending phase mired in self inquiry. What would make me happy to do next? What are my strengths that if I leverage further, I could be of greatest service? What decisions for my professional life would best integrate my family’s well-being? Ultimately, I had to try on a few different options to see what would stick. Even after I found coaching and began my formal training, I still had trouble envisioning a life different than what I had grown accustomed to. It wasn’t until I was talking to a fellow coach familiar with this work and I was describing the feeling of losing my old identity but not having anything to replace it with she said, “Ah! you’re in the neutral zone.” That observation freed me up to embrace the discomfort I was feeling as a natural part of the process. The actual change, for me, happened in that neutral zone when I eventually did part ways with my old company and I was able to jump whole-heartedly into the beginning of my new venture.

My “change” happened in the middle of my transition but for many people, it happens at the start. Any change, large, small, personal or professional can potentially set off this process of internal transition. I found it helpful to understand the process so that I could give myself grace as I moved through it. Understanding the path of transition also empowers leaders to understand and support what is often uncomfortable. Some questions you might ask yourself:

If you are leading change in your organization, what will you do to support the people who will have to go through this transition?

If you have personally just experienced a change, how might you reflect on how it triggers your concept of your identity?

If there is a change that you know you want to make, what will you do to plan your transition step by step to best prepare yourself?

If you find yourself in the neutral zone, what will you do to support yourself or get support from others?

When we understand what the phases of transition look like, we are empowered to embrace the unknown and step boldly into a life’s work of growth and development for ourselves and our organizations.