Welcome to January - Let’s Talk Transitions

Happy 2022!  I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and are ready to start the year off with a bang.  Last month I spent some time talking about goal setting, relating it to setting resolutions. I hope you were able to use that information as we enter this new year. IF you’re lagging a bit and would like some help, go to my website and download a free copy of a SMART Goal Setting worksheet to help you get started.

Starting off the year I have decided to focus specifically on Transition this month.

The beginning of each year is often a time of transition for people – some of that transition even sparked by our goals. Every human being will be required to experience transition, and it is up to you how that transition affects you - whether you make the most of it, or whether it gets the best of you.  As a coach my job is to encourage my clients to discover and tap into their inner resources, so that the challenge is turned into an opportunity for personal growth. 

I find that how resilient we are in the wake of transition is dependent upon our mindset, and how intentionally we transitioned.  

Transition occurs in all parts of life and often is unavoidable.  It usually overlaps into different areas of life, with personal and home life changes overlapping most often, but arguably, work and career may overlap into all areas. When you think about transition, consider what about your home life has changed in content or quality? What has changed in your field of relationships? What type of things are changing at work? How do these changes impact each part of your life?

One of my favorite quotes is by Viktor Frankl,  who was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. He said

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Now this statement holds true regardless of the stimulus – it could be as simple as a waiter interrupting your dinner conversation, really irritating you and influencing your response in a negative way.  That feeling sits with you for awhile and actually ruins your dinner because your whole mood has changed.  Or you take a deep breath while the waiter is talking, choose to blow it off, and continue on with your conversation after he leaves.  We make those types of choices every single day whether we know it or not. 

I relate this quote to transition, and how each and every transition we experience, elicits a response.  It is up to us to decide how that looks, and I would call this “learned mindfulness”. That second example of being able to blow off the annoyance of the interrupting waiter is learned mindfulness. We teach ourselves to respond in a more healthy way that serves us and those around us more positively.

So as we start discussing transition this month and ways to improve the experience through a more mindful approach, start paying more attention to how you respond to stimuli of all types.  Take whatever time you have from when you learn/decide/think about the stimulus to the point of responding to it, to choose how you want to handle the process as well as the outcome.