The world has changed and we are all in transition. As you journey forward while living with confusion, discomfort, anxiety and uncertainty on the one hand, and hope, optimism, and creativity on the other, you can see and seize this opportunity to shape yourself free. The questions becomes, will you transform?
Life and career shifts are happening and some will take longer than others. A quick job change is qualitatively different than a major career transition that results in a more radical transformation. The former is more of a "copy and paste," the latter is a new narrative and "story of me." Transition is a non-linear experience and refers to the higher-order steps and psychological processes for how we go from one place to another. Transformation refers to the shape of the outcome (the caterpillar becomes the butterfly); it refers to what it looks and feels like.
Career journeys are both objective (how what you do looks like from the outside) and subjective, what you experience on the inside, yet when you hear people share what it was like to go from one job to another, or from one career to another, they will share stories about duration, intensity, implications, and insights gained. The more insightful the process, the more likely it is that a personal transformation has occurred. Some insights happen really quickly, and others are slow stewing revelations!
Whether you are looking to find a job similar to your most recent job in another organization, wish to apply your skills in new contexts as a gig worker, or seek to radically alter your vocation, you can build insights that make your journey transformational.
William Bridge’s Transition model, most relevant for how one responds to external changes, explains how humans adapt to these external event triggers. Bridges defines Change as an alteration in ones external circumstances- change most often happens fast (e.g. loss of job). Transitions, on the other hand, are about one's internal experience as one moves through life, often marked by major milestones. Bridges, three phase model for responding to change includes the ending, neutral zone, and beginning.
You can bring about a transition even before you make a change (e.g., decide to leave a job), or seek to reposition oneself to life. Ibarra's transition model describes beginning, middle, and end as the three major phases. In her model, the beginning starts with personal dissatisfaction that mounts where both a push and a pull typically occur prior to finding oneself in the middle where one experiences the "in-between" phase of feeling in "mid-air," and feeling a loss of identity. Her final phase is one of integration and a sense of re-identification with a self that can find an expression in a new way. Both models describe the in-between (neutral or middle) phase similarly. And it is in this phase where transformational insights occur.
By way of illustration the Me-nnovation transformational process model is indexed off of the Bridges model as many people are currently finding themselves having to cope with external changes that have forced them into the neutral zone :
There are primarily two key insights that ensure that a transitional journey results in a rich transformation and identity pivot! These are pre-cursors to Re-Branding; a highly authentic Brand Image emerges through the metamorphosis:
I see me Anew
I see new Venues for Me
While the next blogs will describe these insights and how they are attained in more detail, below is a brief description of each:
I see me anew: To transform insightful self-awareness/perception and appreciation is an essential part of the process. Finding and harvesting talents and appreciating them builds authentic self-esteem and the resolve/resilience to persist to find and materialize the context(s) for their application. These applications are represented as stars in the above diagram.
I see New Venues: The process of appreciating the context(s) for the application of one's yearnings and talents is an exciting and creative one where hypotheses can be tested and new experiences explored. For those who are gig workers, or those who end up working for an organization, there are multiple role sets (stars) for manifestation.
As we are all in one stage or another of adaptation and exploration in response to the drastic changes we are experiencing, we can continue to see how this change can catalyzes us to truly transform with full self ownership, personal mastery, and creative contribution as we strive to make the world a better place.
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