Gaining, losing, and doing things differently

To move successfully through transitions, you need to be able to
• understand the importance of “necessary losses”;
• know the value of flexibility;
• assess and use your transferable skills and understanding.

All change means letting go of something. Sometimes this is in order to gain the next good thing – letting go of the single life in order to be married, letting go of first-hand practitioner experience in order to become a manager, letting go of one’s idea about one’s figure in order to get pregnant.
At other times, the change seems to include more letting go and less of gain. These situations are harder to get used to, and may demand quite a lot of emotional work.

When things start moving
We seem to be born with the need to think of the world as stable and predictable in one way or another, and sometimes find it hard to cope with the fact that nothing is permanent, and even the most “solid” things can turn out to be ephemeral
Fears about impermanence are referred to by Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, where he says:

The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, something in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Flexibility
Carl Rogers tells a story about watching tiny seaweed plants fixed onto rocks, being pounded by Pacific breakers. He says,

“When the wave crunched down upon it, the little stalk bent almost flat, the leaves were whipped into a straight line by the torrent of the water, yet the moment the wave had passed, here was the plant again, erect, tough, resilient”

I have always considered that the message from that moment is that the key this is to be able to “go flat”. It may not be a problem to be knocked flat by change, as the seaweed was. It means that you are less damaged and more able to revive and start again.

In his book "Transitions", William Bridges talks of the ability to stay still and then change into something completely different
"things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to change – until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird moults, the hibernation begins. With us it is the same".
He considers that periods of disorientation and reorientation are a natural and healthy process for us.

Healthy grief
Grief is the normal emotional response to loss, even little losses. Grief is essential for good mental and physical health. It allows us to cope with the loss gradually and to accept it as part of reality. It’s worth thinking about any little grief you are feeling about the current change you are in, and any losses.
(You may also be coping with a major loss, in which case you know as much as anyone about the process.
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/csa/leaflets/loss.htm has a useful summary of grief processes)

At times grief can be painful and exhausting. You might decide to seek extra help if you get stuck. Think about talking to someone if you:
• feel numb and empty after the change
• cannot sleep or suffer nightmares
• have intense feelings that seem hard to handle
• have more than usual exhaustion, confusion, anxiety or tension
• want to share your experience and need someone external
•drown yourself in constant activity
• find you are drinking or taking drugs to a level unusual for you
• feel that you "can't go on"
• feel afraid that those around you are vulnerable and not coping
It makes sense to talk about what you're experiencing with a skilled and experienced practitioner. It can give you a framework and the resources to help yourself through the process in a healthy way that in the end leaves you stronger.

Transferable skills and understanding

It’s useful to do a stock-take of your current and past experience, your skills and know how, to help you through the transition. If the change is to do with your working life, this is particularly important, but you may find that it’s relevant for all the many other areas of change that we can be caught up in.

Some reasons that it’s important to do this stock-take -
• it maintains and builds your self-esteem (which may have taken a knock)
• it helps you to see what you are already able to do, and what you need to develop quickly
• it helps you to develop a useful language for talking about yourself to the new people you may meet at this time