Transition takes place for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes it is due to being removed from your position due to a merger or a company needing to close because of a changing market or a changed economy. At times it is happily due to a desire to uplevel an organization with additional services or simply recognizing the opportunity for additional revenue streams. Those are very logical and based on pragmatic business sense.
At other times, however, transition comes about because of shifts and changes in our personal life. As someone who worked and taught in healthcare for decades even indirectly currently as a business/life coach, I have seen numerous folks affected by cancer or other life-threatening diseases who, after recovery, find their calling and become advocates supporting others going through a similar experience. Some founded companies to do so full time.
This week I received two separate referrals of women who were highly successful in their careers and yet upon losing loved ones decided to change their lives significantly. Their old ways no longer fit. Upon losing a son to suicide, one left her highly successful position in her industry and now travels the world speaking to high school and college students about finding purpose, passion, and meaning in their lives. Another lost her husband, and then decided to sell her large practice to form a company specializing in servicing widows in how to gain financial freedom.
Regardless of the cause, transition is always a call to become more, to do more, and to live more.
It is an opportunity to reassess our lives, our lifestyle, and our values. Does your current lifestyle reflect who you are? Is your life at all what you want it to be? Are you simply doing what you have always done simply because you are there? It doesn’t necessarily require a trauma, or significant change that was out of your control.
Transition can occur because, upon looking objectively and from a great distance, you realize you have outgrown your way of life. It is now simply a way of playing it safe and serving the status quo. There is nothing wrong with taking a period of time, while raising the kids, while getting established, or while caring for a loved one, to thoroughly enjoy a life of pure routine and simplicity. At some point however you will inevitably feel a call to grow, to expand, and to experience more of who you are and more of what the world has to offer. At that point, change is a calling.
Taking risks, coming alive in a new way, and seeing life through a new lens, offers a freedom, a time of discovery that makes life new again. Do so in a way that is not reactionary but chosen with a clear view of where you want to go and who you want to become. How to get there always unfolds when those two directives are in place.
