The Terrain (or is it Terror?) of Transition

Written by Julie Jungalwala Ed.M., Founder, HumanPossibility.com

I imagine you have experienced many changes in your life – some voluntary, some involuntary. Change is typically an event – it is often an end point of something, but it is also the beginning of something else – and that something else is transition.

In full disclosure, given the choice, I would prefer not to change. I don’t like change because I like control. Change is the opposite of control.

My rational brain knows all of this and still tries to maintain control. Ah, the futility ☺

Why is change so hard? I heard someone say once that change is not “hard”, it’s just uncomfortable. I thought, ‘Maybe for you, but for me – and for a lot of the people in this room - it can be terrifying’.

Our brains are wired to mitigate risk and seek certainty. Compounding the wiring is our conditioning. The majority of us were educated and trained for a predictable world – and find ourselves here - in the middle of the most disruptive decade of our lifetime.

So, I’ve studied it and unpacked my own experience of it and coached others as they do the same. I have become much more familiar with what I call ‘The Terrain of Transition’. While we don’t control it, it can be exceptionally helpful to understand it (hello some semblance of control!) – its predictable phases and how to navigate each one.

The stages are Not Knowing, Letting Go, Exploring and Gathering.

Not Knowing is very disorienting to our Western mind. The worst answer we could give in school was, “I don’t know”. Yet, not knowing is the starting point of discovery, of something new. Something unfamiliar. We don’t what’s next or perhaps even what we want, but we do typically know that something is no longer working, or not working the way it used to.

Which brings us to Letting Go.

For me, this is the terrifying stage. My control freak brain is already upset that it’s ‘Not Knowing’ and now it’s expected to ‘Let Go’? But this is where the magic happens. This is where space is created for something new to come in. It invites us to have faith – faith in our abilities to handle whatever is coming is next, faith that the next step will reveal itself.

The next stage is my favorite – Exploring.

This is where we follow our curiosity and try new things. It’s experimentation. Experimentation requires embracing failure. It’s making the distinction between needing to have a plan with a guaranteed outcome, to designing a bunch of experiments – to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s following the breadcrumbs of our curiosity and having faith in our internal compass.

The final stage is Gathering.

Taking what we’ve learned and building on what fits and what works from the Exploration phase. This may also bring us back to letting go. Gathering the threads of what is next, seeing what’s next begins to emerge – not yet as a whole cloth, but as component parts. Parts that become more visible, more relevant, more integrated over time.

While it rarely feels like it at the time, change and disruption are an opportunity. They typically signal that something is no longer working (or not working as well as it used to) and needs to change.

The depth of change many of us experiencing right now is a wake-up call and an invitation.

It is this invitation we will unpack in my upcoming WIN Summit 2025 workshop, ‘Self Leadership: Navigating Change with Purpose and Power’. We will explore the ‘Terrain of Transition’ in more detail and its application to your life right now. You will reconnect with what is meaningful to you, the life that you are here to live, and the greater possibility that lies within all of us—waiting to be unleashed. You will leave inspired, hopeful – and with a practical roadmap to take action.