Do you have a song lyric that influenced your life early on? I suspect many people do. For me, one such lyric appears in the song Tom Sawyer by Rush:
No, his mind is not for rent
To any god or government.
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren’t permanent –
But change is
That last bit blew my young mind: nothing is permanent except impermanence. Of course, the idea didn’t originate with Rush lyricist Neil Peart, but that’s how it got to me. And it’s stuck with me ever since.
Change happens — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. In either case, we can’t avoid it. So it’s never a matter of holding off change; the real question is, how do we deal with change? That is, how can we go through changes skillfully and gracefully?
Harry provided an answer in episode 22 of the Traction Heroes podcast. He read a passage from Rebecca Borland Reynolds and Connolly Fox’s book Thresholds of Change. The book’s eponymous model “gives language for the progression of change, the repeating sequential pattern all change moves through.”
Inspired by the Kübler-Ross “stages of grief” model, Thresholds of Change covers four stages:
- Instigation, the disorienting moment when we realize change is happening.
- The liminal, when we let go of the way things were.
- Metabolization, when the system integrates the new way(s) of being.
- Manifestation, the end of the process, when things stabilize again — for a while.
Change can be destabilizing. Merely knowing these stages exist helps ground us. Perceiving signs of a phase shift also lets us react more effectively to conditions on the ground. It’s become a running theme with the show: to act skillfully, you must first see clearly.
Are you undergoing some kind of change? Yes, you are. It behooves you to check out this episode.