Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes
William Bridges
Making sense of life's transitions is not always easy. Okay, let's be honest. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult!
We can often experience a range of emotions - hurt, anger, anxiety, fear and many more. Mix in a dose of confusion and disorientation and trying to discover that illusive ‘next step’ can be a little daunting.
Bridges helps you navigate through life's transitions. Practical, and enormously insightful (and even inspiring in places), he helps the reader understand the difference between 'change' and 'transition' to ultimately appreciate that the end of one chapter is actually the beginning of another.
His ability to confront the questions we all ask when we find ourselves in a transition is remarkable; questions such as “Why is letting go so difficult?” and “Why is this happening to me?” or “What do I do now?”.
He speaks to the key transition stages of:
He argues it is not just the pace of change causing us to feel disoriented, but the fact that many have lost faith that the transitions they are going through are really taking them somewhere. This is just one of the problems he addresses in regards to the many people who find endings difficult.
Endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness and the third phase is when life resumes an intelligible pattern and direction, putting our life on a whole new trajectory.
It is no wonder this book has had 41 printings!
[1] William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Transitions (Cambridge: Lifelong Books, 2004).
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