If you missed it, you can watch the recording here. Chip covered a lot of ground in this conversation, including the concept of liminality, which is defined as a place of ‘in-betweenness.’

All life transitions incorporate a phase of liminality. It’s the ‘messy middle’ where we can feel betwixt and between… at a crossroads that feels simultaneously exciting and full of possibility but also daunting and full of the unknown. In many ways, human transitions parallel the stages of metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Caterpillars, as it turns out, do not just spin a chrysalis and magically start growing pretty wings. They basically meltdown into soupy moosh first, after which their ‘imaginal cells’ take over and organise the other cells to re-form into the butterfly they were born to be. It takes time and effort to become a butterfly. And so it is with human transitions. There’s no magic doorway from an ending to a new beginning. We need to navigate our way through the messy middle and to do this effectively; we need to hone our transitional intelligence or TQ.

Mastering life’s most common transitions and honing your TQ, so that you can navigate transitions more adeptly and with greater resilience, is the key objective of MEA’s 8-week online course, Navigating Midlife Transitions.

You can find out more on our website or click here for access to a recording of one of our information sessions with more detail about the 8-week online course.

Understanding the three stages of transitions is an integral part of learning to navigate them. As Brene Brown said, “the middle is messy, but that’s where the magic happens.”