Transition is Always a Part of Our Lives
I never read “Alice in Wonderland” when I was a child. Over the years I learned the premise of the story of a young girl’s journey into a fantasy world, a world much different than what she had previously experienced. As life moves forward for me coming out of February and into the month of March, it has become obvious to me that I’m experiencing a “transition” as it relates to my coaching practice. Up to this point, my coaching experiences have been almost exclusively with one to one clients. Those clients have come to me from a variety of sources, (referrals from previous clients, networking groups, people coming to my website then reaching out, etc.). As I entered 2013, a few other opportunities were making themselves known to expand the reach of my coaching so as to be able to offer it to groups, work in collaboration with other alliance partners, and even offer some additional approaches in working with my one to one clients.
My coaching practice has focused on the areas of career and life coaching. As such, I am just about always working with clients that are in transition in one form or another. Perhaps they are contemplating a new career path. Others are deciding how to balance their life now that the circumstances of their life are different from several years before. And, although I work to facilitate the advancement of others with transition through my coaching, it does not mean I have a patent on the steps one takes or the feelings one has as they go through that process.
In planning my March writings, both my blogs and my newsletter, I determined I wanted their focus to be on various perspectives of transition. I find that the easiest writings for me to compose are when I am able to share what I am personally experiencing. In trying to find a quote for the month to tie the entire theme together, I was inspired to research Alice in Wonderland quotes. I had vaguely remembered a quote from it about if “you do not know where you are going then any road you take should get you there”. So, I set out to google Alice in Wonderland quotes and came upon a website that identified 86 such quotes. And, while I did find the one about any road taking you there, I found several others that appealed to me at a far greater level. I have chosen one in particular which best supports my website’s theme for March 2013, and in turn actually supports all my writings this month to come.
The quote I have chosen comes from Lewis Carroll’s novel and is as follows: “How puzzling all these changes are! I never know what I’m going to be from one minute to another.” Isn’t that what we feel like when transition is occurring in our lives? Whether the transition is one which is thrust on us suddenly by life’s circumstances, or if it is of our own choosing, once in transition we don’t always know what will happen next. Is that a bad thing? It can be if we choose to let the changes overwhelm us. If we choose to not take charge of what we want the next action steps to be, then we can often become very resistant to the transition of which we are part. However, if we’re making our decisions with the understanding that we have a choice we can make, and action we can take in a particular moment, and then assess what has happened, before making our next set of choices, then transition can truly be a journey of discovery.
Alice in Wonderland was written over 150 years ago. However, its lessons and messages are very applicable in today’s world. As each of us move through our life’s journey through the month of March, I look forward to sharing with you some of the thoughts and perspectives to which I have been exposed as it relates to life transitions. I in turn, encourage you to share with me some of the lessons you have learned as you move through the transitions of your life.
