Transitions: A Bridge to Change

The author of Transitions completed his own transition. Dr. William Bridges died on February 17th. He was a pioneer on the work of transitions and transformed the way people think about change. Through his business networks and books (Transitions and Managing Transitions), he had a huge impact on many people, including me. He gave us tools to help us understand and talk about change and he explored how people actually experience change and what they need to get through it.

In 1980 he published Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. In it he proposed that even though change is situational, transition is psychological and something that needs to be better understood, especially in our fast-paced world. He believed that people experience change in three stages: first as an ending, then as a period of confusion and distress, and finally as a new beginning. He observed that people often try to skip from the first stage to the last but he proposed we spend time in the middle step—or as he called it, “the neutral zone.”

In his obituary in The New York Times on Sunday, Jim Kouzes, the author of The Leadership Challenge, was quoted as saying that “Bill’s major contribution was to give us permission to talk about the pain and difficulty of change and acknowledge that it can be very confusing. Americans have shame around pain—success is somehow supposed to be easy. If you are struggling, it’s as if you’ve failed. Bill… said, yes, you can find real meaning in change but only if you are willing to experience the pain.”

Tom Yeomans, founder of The Concord Institute reflected that “Trust informed Bill’s process and trust is the core idea of self-reliance—trusting your instinct, what you know, your potential to be more truly yourself, trusting the process of change and moving with it.”

For me, Bill Bridges was a mentor. I met him twenty years ago at a networking group and we talked all the way down in the elevator. I told him about my work training new entrepreneurs and established business owners and how they struggle with scary transitions in start-up and expansions. He wanted to know more and after a few lunches together was very supportive of what I was trying to do to support small businesses. “This is very key work” he said, “so write a book on it.” I did not write a book but I am so grateful for his support and mentorship as I developed my early consulting practice. It is so often our business friends and mentors that help us through “the neutral zone” on the way to those new beginnings.