At the very start of a transition

At the very start of a transition, when all we have is a long laundry list of possible selves, it unsettles us that we have no story. We are disturbed to find so many different options appealing, and we worry that the same self who once chose what we no longer want to do, might again make a bad choice. One person in transition out of the finance world put it plainly: “It concerns me that I’ve opened the array of possibilities so broadly. I want to make sure I’m going in the right direction, that whatever I end up doing is really satisfying. But when I see the different types of opportunities I am considering, I wonder if I know what really is my identity. How do I define myself, and how do others define me?” Julio Gonzales, who had been miserable for years as a heart surgeon, worried about making a change that would threaten his family’s financial security. If medicine had been such a misguided choice, how could he know that a different choice would not be equally misguided? To act with assurance—to take a chance on ourselves—we have to make a convincing internal pitch.

Until we have a story, others view us as unfocused. It is harder to get their help. Equally important is having a good story to tell others, putting it into the public sphere even before it is fully formed. By making public declarations about what we seek and what common thread binds our old and new selves, we clarify our intentions and improve our ability to enlist others’ support. Like Roy Holstrom’s elevator pitch, this is partially a problem of self-marketing. We need someone to take a chance on us since, by definition, we are moving into a new and unproven realm. Potential employers or coworkers come to know (and therefore, trust) us when they know our story and can accept it as legitimate. Sometimes it takes many rehearsals before it comes out just right. What happens in the retelling is not just a more polished story; we finally settle on a narrative that can inform the next step.

When stuck in the morass of the transition period, we hope desperately for a defining moment that will impel us to quick and decisive action. We wait for an epiphany when the clouds part and everything clarifies. But the causal sequence is really the other way around: Insight is an effect, not a cause; our diffuse hopes and dissatisfactions jell when we are getting close, the result of having struggled and floundered in the transition. There is not much we can do to manufacture the turning points that lend dramatic form to our stories. But when events happen that serve our purposes, we can weave them into the fabric of our reinvention narratives to use them to explain—to ourselves as much as to others—why we are changing.