Transitions are Hard
some thoughts on switching gears and feeling off
I’ve been thinking a lot about transitions. I recently had one of those really great weeks where everything clicked, my brain was settled, and everything felt great. Then the week ended, and I couldn’t find my rhythm. Nothing was really wrong. I just couldn’t get back into my regular routine, and I noticed it.
Then I took a long-planned two day backpacking trip on the Olympic Peninsula. Two days on a trail, nobody to talk to but myself, and by the time I got back to the trailhead, something had reset. The thing I couldn’t do sitting in my own living room, I did without trying somewhere around mile six.
I’ve known for a long time that transitions are hard. A lot of the time in life, we need to shift gears, or move into a different context, and sometimes that transition just doesn’t land like we want it. I needed a bridge to get me where I needed to be, and I didn’t build one on purpose. The trail just happened to save me.
The Neutral Zone
There’s a name for this, and it comes from William Bridges’ book Transitions. Bridges argues that every real change has three parts: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. Most of us plan for the ending and get excited about the new beginning. Almost nobody plans for the neutral zone, the in-between stretch where the old rhythm is gone and the new one hasn’t kicked in yet. Bridges describes it as “a nowhere between two somewheres.” It’s disorienting on purpose. It’s also, he argues, where the actual psychological work of change happens.
A lot of us forget that even events that seem small need transitions. But that’s exactly what happened. I had a good week with a good ending, but I dropped straight into a new beginning (routine) with no neutral zone in between. No wonder it didn’t take.
This isn’t unfamiliar territory for me, either. I am generally good at starting and stopping things. In fact, I’m often intentional about how things start and stop. I know transitions are hard, and I’m often deliberate about building in buffer and time to reconnect or rest when needed. This time, that follow-through didn’t (or couldn’t) happen on my end, and it was noticeable.
Recovery Isn’t Just for the Hard Weeks
I see leaders make this same mistake constantly, and I’ve made it plenty of times myself. We usually only plan recovery for the bad stretches. Nobody schedules a buffer day after the launch that went great, the offsite everyone loved, or the quarter where we hit every metric. We treat good intensity like it’s free.
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s book The Power of Full Engagement makes the case that this is backwards. Their core argument is that performance runs on oscillation, expending energy and then deliberately recovering it, and that the body doesn’t distinguish between good stress and bad stress the way our calendars do. A win still spends energy. A great time with a friend still spends energy. But when we skip the recovery just because the exertion felt positive, we end up with the same flatness and fog we’d get from skipping recovery after something hard. I didn’t feel bad, I just felt off, and off is what unrecovered energy looks like when nothing is technically wrong.
Build the Bridge
Anyone leading a team, or just leading their own week, should stop treating recovery as a response to difficulty and start treating it as a response to any real intensity, good or bad. After a big win, build in the neutral zone on purpose, a slower day, a walk, an hour with no agenda, before you ask anyone to be sharp again. After the offsite everyone raved about, don’t schedule the hardest meeting of the quarter for the next morning. The team is not being dramatic if they’re off. They just spent energy on something that felt good, and nobody built them a bridge back.
For me, the trail worked, but only by accident. I didn’t plan a neutral zone. I planned it short backpacking trip. The fact that it did double duty as reentry from a good week is luck, not design. Next time, I want to be able to build that bridge on purpose instead of hoping a trailhead shows up right when I need it.
There will be more weeks like that one. That’s the whole point. But I hope I’m done assuming the good ones don’t need a landing strip too.
If you’d like to talk more about this, my calendar is open.
I'm not the hiker you are, but learned long ago that a walk is a great way to reset. A small reset by walking around the office building, or a larger one by walking a few miles around town do wonders!