William Bridges Quotes

Change is an event but a transition is the process that you go through in response to the change.

Treating ourselves like appliances that can be unplugged and plugged in again at will or cars that stop and start with the twist of a key, we have forgotten the importance of fallow time and winter and rests in music. We have abandoned a whole system of dealing with the neutral zone through ritual, and we have tried to deal with personal change as though it were a matter of some kind of readjustment.

All transitions are composed of an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning

It is when we are in transition that we are most completely alive.

It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions.

It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal

Transition is the natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points in the path of growth...transitions are key times in the natural process of self-renewal

Before people can begin something new, they have to end what used to be and unlearn the old way.

Faith is the soul's adventure.

Nothing so undermines organizational change as the failure to think through the losses people face.

Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step toward disaster.

Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won't work, because it doesn't 'take'.

We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can't accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed.

Change comes more from managing the journey than from announcing the destination