Recommendation: Bruce Feiler's 'Life is in the Transitions'

Mastering Change at Any Age. TEDx Talk and Book

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This is one of my favourite TED talks. Highlighting why there is no such thing as the Linear Life anymore. The Concept is outdated. Transitions happen at any age.

After the video and key points, I’ve included Carer Mentor Self-Development journalling prompts that can facilitate more reflection simulated by the video.

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The secret to mastering life's biggest transitions

Over 2 million views. Bruce Feiler at TEDxIEMadrid  June 2022. Bruce Feiler’s Website

Insights and Inspiration

These notes are a mix of

• trigger soundbites to hook key concepts

• takeaway messages and key points

I suggest listening to the video and using the notes below as a transcript guide.

'Maybe my Dad needed a spark to reignite his story' - Bruce Feiler

We need to have Meaning, purpose and joy in our lives.

What is your story? Stuck in the woods? Lost the plot of your own story? Shame Fear? How do you tell your story?

Over 3 years, hundreds of life stories across the US in all 50 states.

Thousands of hours, 6000 pages of transcripts - coding stories using 57 variables. The Life Story Project

1. The Linear life is dead. The idea is outdated and a historical anomaly. In ancient times, they thought life was a cycle, and later concepts were all linear concepts, e.g. Different stages. Today, we have many new ways of how we look at the world but not how we look at our lives.

2. The Life Story Project showed that there are many more life transitions than previously thought.

   • Disrupters: They defined 52 different types of disrupters. The Deck of disrupters. Small or large. The average person goes through three dozen, 36 during the course of their lives, that’s 1 every 12-18 months.

   • 1 in 10 of those disrupters becomes a big life-quake. A massive burst of change, transition and renewal. The average person will have 3-5 of these per life with a duration of 5 years. That's 25 years. Half of our ADULT  lives are in transition. Not clumping at middle age. It can happen at any age.

   • ‘THE whenever life crisis’ - not a midlife crisis. Anxiety because we still expect predictability e.g. around big birthdays but we're haunted by an old ideal of linearity. It doesn’t exist and beating ourselves up when we can’t meet those outdated expectations. We are unnerved when we are not linear.

3. Covid pandemic has made this worse. (2 axes Personal vs collective; voluntary vs involuntary).  Covid means that we are ALL experiencing a major lifequake transition at the same time (involuntary collective) altogether right now, but no one is teaching us how to master these times.

4. Life transitions are a skill we can and must master

3 phases of long transitions

• ‘the long goodbye’ - mourn the past not coming back

• ‘the messy middle ‘- shed old and try to find new

• ‘the new beginning’ - reveal new self

But these are not happening in order.

5 Tips on how to master a life transition:

Think of a lifequake as a physical blow, life transition punches us, puts us on our heels, and we need to get back onto our toes. Yet we feel overwhelmed overdoing a to-do list or recoil shutdown into foetal position

1. Begin with YOUR transition superpower build confidence and move on. We Gravitate to the phase we are good at and avoid the phase we are not good at.

2. Accept your emotions. What you struggle with most -

   • biggest one Fear,

   • sadness

   • shame

   • How do people cope through these? Some write down their thoughts, others buckle down. 80% turn to Rituals - sing, dance. 

     • Rituals are great in ‘the long goodbye’. They are messages to ourselves and others that ‘I’m going through a difficult time, and that I’m ready for what comes next’; creates an intentional path forward.

3. Try something new. Explore something new to get yourself out of messy middle. We shed things routines or part of our character that does not work anymore. Cast off parts that no longer serve us. Make space for what comes next. Astonishing act of creativity. Create.

4. Seek wisdom from others. There is a rise in people feeling isolated. Loneliness is because of the number of life transitions we are experiencing. Share your experience. Connect. But not everyone has the same ‘Phenotype of connecting’. Don’t assume that the other person likes the same kind of response. ASK BEFORE YOU ADVISE! (see my poem ‘We don’t like the Hero-ing’)

• comforters 33% - ‘you’ll get through this, comforting’

• nudgers 25% - ‘I hear you …but have you tried this or that’

• slappers 60% - 'get over yourself do this and get on'

5. Rewrite your life story. ‘Meaning-making experience’. Write and retell our lifestory. An autobiographical moment adding a new life chapter after we go through the lifequake.

Closing remarks

• The power of storytelling, no matter how bleak it gets you cannot give up on the happy ending.

• You control the story you TELL about yourself even the most painful parts.

• It’s important to narrate the transitions in your life. Change the narrative away from grit and grind stories, but see them as healing times. Command the perspective. Take the wounded parts of our lives and heal them.

• Lupus infabula - the wolf in the fairytale. Just when serene, the wolf enters. Just when we think everything is beautiful something happens. We must each be the hero in our own stories. This is why we have fairytales after all and tell them again and again. Fairytales turn our nightmares into dreams.

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Carer Mentor Self-Development Journalling prompts

1. How many disruptions have you had in your life so far? (Freeze-frame the definitions in the talk or buy the book - see below)

2. How many of these disruptions were lifequakes?

3. Can you build your ‘Life story’ hypotheses based on the trends you see in your own story?

4. What were your 2-3 main takeaway messages from Bruce Feiler's talk?

5. Caveats to consider: When I listen to or read something, I believe it’s important to triangulate and test the assumptions and conclusions.

   1. For example, for this video and his book, consider that it is based on large numbers of people based in the US only. Whilst this may span several ethnicities, sociodemographics and age groups there could be biases.

   2. Could there be different definitions and types of disrupters in different countries, but the principles still hold? I wonder how the book was received in Asian countries.

   3. What other caveats, or considerations would you raise in a discussion about the book?

6. Would you recommend the talk to a friend - why?

This Timeline Exercise can help facilitate a review of your disruptions and lifequakes.

Carer Mentor Journey:

I have had 37 disruptions in my life so far, 9 of which have been Lifequakes. These disruptions included 10 countries and 18 relocations. Interestingly, I realised only 1 of the lifequakes was also a relocation. It was my 8th relocation and my 5th lifequake; subsequent relocations were not lifequakes. Interesting.

I hypothesised that relocations became easier or perhaps normalised, even if one of these included Russia. True, because my most recent relocation despite the stress felt very familiar. Even if it included orchestrating furniture being transported from 2 different places one of which was Brussels and putting it all into storage.

However, it’s also true that in hindsight, I’ve experienced more difficult times since that 8th relocation. 4 lifequakes have had a deeper impact than that of relocation.

What hypotheses can you draw from your Life Story of disrupters and lifequakes?

Published 10 August 2021. Click on the image to go to my affiliate Bookshop.

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