EDITION 1: THE TRANSITION EDITION

One topic: Transition in the Air

It’s all change in our household as one child finishes primary school, another leaves secondary school and This Moment begins to take off as a business. Transitions can be exciting and daunting at the same time for those directly involved and those around them. Read on to find some tips and food for thought, whether you’re experiencing a transition in your family, in your career or in your own perspectives.

Two Top Tips For Transition

Do: Make a plan and execute it. Find the right way to plan for you. Consider the level of flex to build in.

Don't: Make a plan and stare at it. Find ways to hold yourself to account. Don’t beat yourself up if you need some flexibility.

Three Things I've Found Out From Amazing If:

Amazing If is an organisation founded by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis, focused on supporting people with the skills to succeed in what they describe as squiggly careers. They run programmes, produce the Amazing If Podcast and have written a number of books, including the book, The Squiggly Career. Though the key focus is on career development, below are three principles which I think are helpful no matter the transition you’re living through.

Live by your values: Understand what you value in life, how it motivates you, brings you happiness and fulfilment.
Use your strengths: Uncover your strengths and build on them to develop your resilience through achieving success.
Draw on your network: Unpick who and what you can rely on to support you and to hold yourself to account.

Four Further Reads:

Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

The classic Heath brothers exploration of change - how it’s unsettling, time-consuming, and easy to give up on. They argue that we need only understand how our minds function in order to unlock shortcuts to switches in behaviour.

How to Change your life by Jake Humphries and Prof Damian Hughes

The writers introduce five steps to transforming from who you are to who you want to be, drawing on cutting-edge psychological research to explain why these tools would work.

Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges

In this book, we’re taken step by step through three stages of transition which the writer names: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and The New Beginning. The book explains that each stage can be understood and embraced, leading to a hopeful future.

Tales from Ovid - Adapted by Ted Hughes

Something for poetry lovers to escape the challenging changes in their own lives by exploring someone else’s instead. Hughes translates and adapts Ovid’s poetic tales of mythological transformation: births, deaths and all the metamorphosis in between.

Friday Five Tunes Linked To Transitions: