3 More Strategies To Manage Transition
We’ve shared strategies to manage transitions during the new year, but guess what else is a common period of transition for folks? You guessed it - moving from summer to fall! Though our calendar year starts in January, many people see September as the biggest shift in their lives. This is when the school academic calendar begins, which is a huge transition both for students and caretakers of students; when many apartment and housing leases begin and end, which may be a major transition for those who are moving to different housing arrangements or even city/region/country; organizations move out of their summer-time pace and tend to ramp up workload and projects for workers; and many more. This is an excellent time to have a refresher on strategies that can help us through a stressful time of transition, and add a few more to our toolbox.
Find A Transition Buddy
If you’re going through a transition in life, chances are there is somebody else in your sphere or network who is going through something similar. It may be an obvious person - for example, you may be moving to a new apartment with a partner - or it could be an acquaintance or family member who mentioned a similar shift in their lives. Whoever it is, connecting with them is a great opportunity to move out of the isolation that may come with the newness and uncertainty you may be experiencing. Ask them if they’d be open to checking in once a week or so about how things are going, and possibly bouncing ideas off of each other about how to make things easier or to problem solve when challenges come up. It’s always easier to stay accountable to reflecting on what’s coming up for you and working towards positive change when you have a buddy!
2. Keep Something The Same
Yes, transition is all about embracing newness. Too much newness all at once, however, may just be too much for you - and that is totally OK! Don’t force yourself to rid your life of all things pre-transition. It may feel important or helpful to you to keep at least one aspect of your life the same throughout this transition. If you’re moving to a new city, for example, this could mean bringing something from your old house or apartment and centering it in your new place. Or, if you’re starting a new program in school and your weekdays look totally different, this could mean keeping part of your usual Saturday morning walk with a friend constant in your calendar. These may feel like small details of a big picture, but allowing yourself to retain some familiarity in this new phase can serve as a way to ground and regulate yourself, and make all the newness more manageable.
3. Focus On The Best Possible Outcome
When making a big decision or beginning on a new era or journey in life, it is SO easy to focus on your fears. You may start to ruminate over all of the ways that things could go wrong, or how you could fail in this new endeavor. In other words, you may focus most of your energy on thinking about the worst possible outcome, and perhaps how to avoid it. This is, unfortunately, a way that our brains can lead us in the wrong direction. When we focus too much on the possible negative outcomes, we then start to look for signs of those challenges and interpret them as failures - when it reality, any new experience is going to come with moments, days, weeks, or months that feel really difficult. This does not mean that you, or the new experience or life phase, is a failure - it just means you’re a human going through a human experience! But, when we do this, and focus on the worst possible outcomes, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure simply because we’re hyper-fixated on identifying the signs and moments that we see as failure.
Instead of focusing on your fears about the situation, try to push yourself to imagine the best possible outcome of this transition. What did you want out of this change; what were you hoping to gain? If you could wave a magic wand that made your transition go as smoothly as you can imagine, what would that look like? Paint that picture in your mind. Then, try to catch yourself when you’re starting to ruminate over the possible failures in the transition, and redirect to this picture. The key question here is: what if it all worked out? By doing this, we can redirect our energy to noticing when we take steps towards our best possible outcome, and celebrating those wins!
You got this!