New Beginnings: How to Thrive in the New Normal

Notes from a tiny, crowded planet struggling to find its way

As things begin to open slowly, rightly or wrongly, whether or not it’s wise, there’s a critical need to prepare appropriately for the third and final phase in the process of moving through transition.

Over the course of the last few months I published a series of articles on the three primary stages of transition as outlined by William Bridges in his seminal book “Transitions.” It begins with recognizing endings, listing losses and mourning what we no longer have, at least for now. Then we move into the long, broad and massively confusing time of The Neutral Zone, where there is little to no real guidance or understanding of how to function best.

Some of us are heading slowly and inevitably into the third phase, or New Beginning. This article speaks to what might us best prepare us to move forward with confidence, or at least with some idea of what to expect.

This background piece outlines the three phases are and how best to manage your way through them:

A reminder, and a key one. If you have not done the hard work of naming what has ended for you and what those endings have caused you in terms of losses, moving forward could be exceedingly difficult. Every phase of a huge transition involves significant losses. Every loss creates pain of some kind, and if we don’t give them the honor and time they deserve, they might become rocks in your backpack going forward. That can make starting over very challenging, if we’ve not let go of the past and made room for what’s coming next.

Every ending has its own unique transition process. That’s in part because not all endings are created equal. A job loss isn’t the same as ending school life, which isn’t the same as burying a beloved dog, which isn’t the same as having your business burn to the ground. That’s why honoring each ending as it occurs allows us to respect the emotional demand that a particular ending has for us, the process of mourning, and then moving through grief to find that New Beginning.

That said, the process of getting ready for a new beginning has both considerable promise as well as challenges, again depending very much on our preference for or aversion to risk.

Here is what to keep in mind for New Beginnings, as well as how to think about yours:

1. New energy in a new direction. Right now you and I can’t know what that means, even as states begin opening up. However, there is going to be a New Reality, and in the context of that New Reality you and I are going to have roles. Some of us will go back to what we were doing, possibly in a new form. Some of us may have remade ourselves, or had to make very different decisions about what to do next or how to pay the bills. Whatever your landscape looks like there may well be some rebuilding to do. Your age, your finances, your responsibilities will all affect what you need to do next.
2. New identities and new directions. For some of us, this could mean very good news. Some may have been able to shed things that didn’t work- aspects of ourselves that we simply couldn’t see before. Time in close contact or isolation may well have offered a chance to observe and learn about aspects of ourselves which deserve our full attention. We might have found out the hard way that our partners weren’t, in fact, a good fit. Tough times make for a tough go if love is strictly superficial, but better to learn now than later on.
3. Assess Your New Skills. What did you learn about yourself, your friends, your family? What new insights did you gain from this time, which a possible second resurgence in fall may (or may not) require that we repeat? There will also be those around us who are firmly entrenched in the past, who cannot move forward, who may well need our help. Or not, as the case may be. For many of us, and I can personally attest to this, the skills that we hammer into place during the roughest times not only remake us, but they forge abilities that make us far less susceptible to tough times in the future. You may well have remade your work life, and found out that the new version offers you a completely retooled existence that better fits who you wish to be going forward. Or not. It depends.
4. Renewal. You can find great hope in a redefined way of being. It may not be what we planned or hoped for, but how we couch our circumstances drives how well we thrive. Optimism and continued hope even in the face of great loss rebuild people, communities, cities and countries.
5. Preparedness. There is no time, especially in a world affected by climate change, when things will ever “get back to normal.” Normal now is constant change. How you and I learn to deal with those conditions, how we teach our kids to be resilient in a rapidly-changing world, are part of what’s available right here, right now. There is no better proving ground than what is gripping this small blue marble. We need very much to be adaptable. How we learn to tap into our resources, find humor in the human condition, and refuse to be defeated by circumstances, nay-sayers and professional victims will speak a great deal to the quality of that New Beginning. It’s all about choice, not finding blame, and refocusing on what’s possible going forward vs. what we lost.
6. Gains and Losses (again): As I outlined in the linked article above, certain folks thrive in the unknown. They love the relative lawlessness that happens during a massive breakdown. Those people can also naturally use this time to be immensely creative. So when it’s time to re-establish a measure of order and predictability, those folks may not welcome a return to normalcy. For them the party’s over. However, if they were smart about how they used their time, they may well have created new companies, new coping techniques, come up with highly creative ideas to help move the world forward. So while moving into The New Beginning for them feels like another loss (and for some it is), the truth is that these folks may well hold the keys to what works going forward. On the other hand, those who suffered during The Neutral Zone (and many are and will remain there for a long time yet) will welcome normalcy of any kind. Order, predictability, schedules and a sense of calm are mother’s milk to these folks. As soon as they’ve sorted out the New Order, such as it is, they will hew to it hard. That provides the structure that the creative folks need to be able to build whatever dreams they created. Neither is right, neither is wrong. They are simply different, and both are critical going forward.

I was taken hard to task some months ago by a fellow writer who accused me, quite wrongly, of writing a business piece that she claimed stated that things would be just the way they were again. Not. Even. Close. We are at least two or three years in working through this pandemic, for we still have little clue what we’re dealing with. We don’t really know what the symptoms look like because they vary so much and present so differently. We’re learning that two weeks is just a start of how long the virus hangs out in some of us. And we have no real understanding of whether a vaccine is coming soon, whether it will work, and on whom. Nobody knows much of anything, really. Nothing you can hang your hat upon so that you can plan a future based on how we used to think.

That terrifies a lot of people, with good reason. For my part, being someone who likes being hung out in mid-air, I like the view. Because from where I am up in the clouds, I’m happy to trust that when some kind of New Beginning gets underway in earnest (and working on that now, negotiating a price on a house in Eugene as I write) I’m going to land how and where I belong, as my buddy Ann Litts said the other day.

New Beginnings require faith, just as the whole transition process asks that we trust Forces far larger and wiser than we are. We are where we need to be as individuals and as a species. Trusting that process is what transitions teach us, if we are available for the lesson.

It really is all about the journey, and taking joy in all the steps along the way, even the toughest ones.