Book Review of Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges

A few years ago my life was in major transition moving from a vocation in which I had worked for 40 years into a slowdown vocation for the last 5 or 6 years moving toward my retirement. I wish I had knowledge and access to William Bridges book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life Changes (2004, DeCapo Press, a member of the Peresus Book Group.).

 

The book acknowledges that life is a series of transitions whether it is in personal, job, marriage, dreams or physical challenges. A transition involves specific steps that take us from the ending of something, through a period of limbo, to a new beginning.

Bridges refers to the three stages of transition as the ending, the neutral zone and the new beginning.

Each portion of the transition has movements that to understand is to help one know where in the process one might be. When I looked back over the changes vocation of my career I saw a pattern of detachment, a time of limbo, and then a recommitment or attachment to something new. I discovered that an emptiness or void usually occurred as a prelude to a new beginning. This gray area between the old and the new is area of letting go of the past and realigning ourselves to new dreams and goals.

The Neutral Zone is a normal part of human life, disorienting and painful, confusing and frustrating, but necessary for our personal growth.

Bridges noted that frequently we fail “to discover our need for an ending until we have made most of our necessary external changes.”

We get to the new house or new relationship, waking up to find that we have not let go of our old ties. Or we find that maybe the old thing was somehow right for us and the new thing is wrong.

One of the book’s greatest lessons is the necessity of

letting go and saying goodbye

to some part of ourselves or our lives in order for anything new to happen to us, or for real change to occur. Often, we hold onto the past for dear life, refusing to let go of an old self image, a career or dream we no longer love, or a person we no longer want to be with, just because of our dread fear of the unknown future.

Only by learning how to end things can we really learn how to begin things.

This Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition updated and expanded will impact your daily life. Perhaps the outline of the book will encourage you to pick up the book.

• Part one is about The Need for Change. The chapters are: Being in Transition, A lifetime of Transitions, Relationships and Transition, and Transitions in Work Life.
• Part two discusses The Transition Process Itself. The chapters are: Endings, The Neutral Zone, and You Finish with a New Beginning.

Author William Bridges presents us with a powerful plan for understanding the many stages of life a human being is destined to go through, how these changes lead us into new experiences, and how to cope with the endings that are inevitable before we can have these new experiences. With tools and techniques outlined in this book, transitions don’t have to be scary and tentative; rather can be something to anticipate with excitement.

One constant about life is that it will change. This book will help you get ready for it.

What new begininng are you not starting because you are afraid to let go and say goodbye?

Review by Gerard Howell