The vocabulary of life transitions.

Change is the external event that happens to you. A new job, a move, a divorce, an empty nest. Change is situational and observable. Other people can see it. It is what most organisations and most strategy decks mean when they talk about change. It is only half the picture.

Transition is the internal psychological process that accompanies a change. Where change is the event, transition is the inner work of letting go and becoming someone new on the other side of change. William Bridges drew this distinction in his 1980 book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Most people skip the transition work and wonder why the new chapter feels off.

The first phase of a transition. An ending is the part where you let go of the role, identity, or future you expected. William Bridges emphasised that every transition starts with an ending, even when the change looks like an arrival. Skipping the ending is the most common reason a new chapter never quite settles.

The middle phase of a transition. The neutral zone is the disorienting in-between, after the ending and before the new beginning. Time feels suspended. Old habits don’t fit. New ones haven’t formed. William Bridges called this the place where growth and renewal happens, but only if you stay in it long enough for re-orientation to take place.

The third phase of a transition. New beginnings start when a different identity feels true rather than performed. They are quieter than people expect. The new beginning is not the moment you announce the new role; it is the moment the new role stops feeling like a costume. William Bridges’ framework calls this the integration phase.

A term coined by Bruce Feiler in his 2020 book Life Is in the Transitions. A lifequake is a major life disruption that de-stabilizes us and can trigger a multi-year reinvention. Feiler’s research on 225 life stories found people experience three to five lifequakes across a lifetime, lasting an average of about five years each, with three phases similar to William Bridges’ framework.

The threshold between an old identity and a new one. The word comes from anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on rites of passage. Liminal space overlaps directly with William Bridges’ neutral zone. It feels disorienting because it is, by design, the place where the old self has been suspended and the new self has not yet arrived.

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is someone who spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ passport culture. The term was coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s and developed by Ruth Van Reken and David Pollock. TCKs build relationships across cultures without full ownership of any single one, which shapes how they handle later life transitions.

A midlife transition is the period in your forties or fifties when old answers stop working and bigger questions surface.It can arrive through a triggering event (loss, illness, empty nest), or a quiet realisation that you are seeking more purpose and meaning from your life outside of the bottom line. But the underlying work is identity, not circumstance. The cultural “midlife crisis” frame is reactive. The midlife transition frame is reflective and identity-rebuilding.