Bridges Transition Model
Around the Bend
by Graham Hart, LeaderWise Staff Associate
By the time retirement arrives, a person should be an expert on knowing how to do life’s transitions. However, unlike all the other changes a person has negotiated in life’s journey, retirement seems of a different magnitude. LeaderWise’s offering, Flourishing in Retirement, will explore – with a cohort of colleagues – what flourishing in this season of life might look like.
Over the course of 6 sessions, the group will:
Discover the questions we need to be asking to thrive in retirement;
Find our guiding metaphors for this time of transition;
Discern what those theological and human yearning such as “call” and purpose means in our retirement years;
Study theories that can guide our thinking about retirement;
Learn best practices from others who have managed this transition well;
And most importantly learn from colleagues, who are traveling a similar path, in the season of life called preretirement.
One of the theories we will look at is the Bridges Transition Model.
The Bridges model suggests there are three distinct phases for all transitions: Phase 1 – Ending, Phase 2 – The Neutral Zone, and Phase 3 – A New Beginning.
When something ends, or is about to end, a person experiences a whole cacophony of emotions: loss, grief, anxiety, depression, uncertainty, maybe even some excitement, and hope.
That phase leads to what Bridges calls the Neutral Zone. Phase 2 is very much an in-between place. A person’s former routines and life may still loom large, but the new has not yet emerged. One may feel in limbo, caught between two worlds: what was and what is to come, neither here nor yet there, just in the middle of it all. Transitions and the emotions they evoke, like all grief work, is a process that takes time. In the neutral zone, there is grief work to do as well as the opportunity to imagine something new and different.
Finally, in time, ‘something new’ emerges. Is this a discontinuance change – different from everything that came before? Or does that change to build on the past, yet involve birthing something new?
The contour of this new season only emerges in time, but being thoughtful as we enter the new is a wise stance for all successful transitions. The Bridges Transition model is a helpful tool in successfully moving through all life’s transitions: going away to college, marriage, having a family, changing jobs, facing a significant medical challenge, grieving the death of someone close and significant, and even thinking about retirement.
Flourishing in Retirement is designed to give the time and context to reflect on what’s next and to design and begin building a bridge into one’s imagined future, even as we are walking on that bridge as we build it. The first cohort group will meet on June 21 at 1:00 pm Central via Zoom; LeaderWise plans to begin a second cohort in 2024.
Find registration and more information at LeaderWise.org. If you have questions, feel free to contact Mary Kay DuChene. To add your name to an interest list for 2024, click here.
