Life Is in the Transitions Book Summary - Life Is in the Transitions Book explained in key points

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Life Is in the Transitions summary

Name: Life Is in the Transitions
Rating: 4.5 (224 reviews)
Author: Bruce Feiler

Bruce Feiler

Mastering Change at Any Age

4.5 (224 ratings)

27 mins

Brief summary

Life Is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler is a guide to navigating life's unpredictable transitions. It offers practical advice on how to manage change, find meaning in difficult times, and create a roadmap for the future.

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Table of Contents

Life Is in the Transitions
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Become a master at dealing with change.

“Transitions are coming. Be prepared!” This is how author Bruce Feiler prefaces his book. At the time, he couldn’t have known how prophetic those words would be. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, all of us have experienced disruptions to our lives, be they minor adaptations like working from home, or major crises like bearing up against a serious illness or losing a loved one.

Whether you’re grappling with the fallout from the pandemic, or dealing with other personal or professional changes, these blinks provide an essential guide to mastering major transitions. You’ll discover that while change can be disorienting and scary, it also provides valuable opportunities to reevaluate what makes life meaningful.

By applying several key tools, you’ll learn to embrace fear and uncertainty and be equipped to stay grounded in any transition.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why getting a crazy haircut after a divorce is actually a good idea;
how storytelling can make your life more meaningful; and
why the myth of a linear life is so harmful.

Storytelling is a lifeline in a crisis.

What are the stories that you tell about your life? And how do you respond when the “plot” of your life takes a sudden turn that you never chose, and couldn’t have predicted?

Bruce Feiler was faced with those questions when his otherwise regular life was walloped by a series of personal crises. He was diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of bone cancer. He almost went bankrupt. And to make matters much, much worse, he learned that his father who was battling Parkinson’s disease had repeatedly attempted to kill himself.

The key message here is: Storytelling is a lifeline in a crisis.

Bruce had made a successful career out of writing, but suddenly he felt like he’d lost control of his own story. His father was having the same experience: having Parkinson’s made him feel like his life no longer had any value. Bruce realized that as much as anything, what he and his father were experiencing was a narrative problem: their lives had swerved off course, and they no longer knew how to make sense of their life stories.

Bruce set out to find what he termed a narrative solution and began interviewing his father. He started by asking simple questions like, “What were your favorite toys when you were a child?” When his father responded eagerly, Bruce advanced to more complex questions like, “What is your biggest regret?”

The process transformed his father’s life – by the end of four years he had written an autobiography and regained the will to live. For Bruce, the exercise was just as transformational. He realized that he’d stumbled upon a much bigger problem: people don’t know how to handle major life transitions because they don’t know how to include them in their life stories.

Bruce decided that he needed to support his hunch by doing more research. Over the following three years, he traveled across the United States doing interviews for what he called the Life Story Project. By the end of the project, he’d completed 225 interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds. They all had one thing in common: their lives were shaken by unexpected changes, and they were struggling to find a way to make sense of them. In the following blinks, you’ll hear some of their extraordinary tales and learn how stories can guide us through change.

We need to stop thinking of our lives as being linear.

What shape has your life story taken? That might seem like an odd question. How can a life have a shape? If we look more closely though, it becomes clear that we tend to think that our lives follow a specific pattern.

Usually, we think of our lives as being linear. We’re born, we get old, and we have various stages in between. This way of thinking is so entrenched in our culture that it seems completely normal. But in the past, people thought about the structure of life in a completely different way.

Disruptors affect every area of our lives.

Imagine getting married to someone of the opposite sex only to realize that you’re gay. Or imagine discovering that the gender you were assigned at birth doesn’t match who you really are.

As he collected stories of transition, Bruce heard about these kinds of transformations all the time. In fact, he identified 52 kinds of life changes that people experienced time and again. He called them disruptors, and categorized them into five key themes: the body, love, work, identity, and beliefs.

Lifequakes shake the foundations of our existence.

One day, Lisa – a marketing executive – joined a conference call a few minutes early, and heard her colleagues gossiping about her ruthless ambition and sour disposition. The next day, she walked into her boss’s office and quit the corporate job that had been making her miserable for years. She changed careers and became a life coach and then a hypnotherapist, helping other people recover from the trauma she’d experienced for so long.

That conference call was a turning point that spurred Lisa into action. It created a lifequake: a transition that fundamentally transforms how we perceive ourselves and our lives.

Lifequakes force us to reevaluate what makes our lives meaningful.

Lifequakes are so disorientating because they shatter the stories we’ve always told ourselves about our lives. People who pride themselves on being a part of a happy family are left at a loss when their partners file for divorce. Career professionals who get their sense of pride from accomplishments at work are left reeling when fired from their jobs.

To cope with a lifequake, we need to be able to craft narratives that can encompass the complexity of these transitions in our lives.

We can’t always control disruptive events, but we do control our response to them.

Crises can happen to any of us. For example, anyone could get into a terrible car accident. But how people respond to a crisis like this varies widely. Some people may become furious and stuck, while others could be motivated to embrace a whole new career campaigning for road safety. An accident is a disruptor that is completely out of our control. No one would choose that particular plot twist in their life story. But we can choose what meaning we assign to it.

The key message here is: We can’t always control disruptive events, but we do control our response to them.

Rituals help us to say goodbye to the lives we’re leaving behind.

How do we come to terms with loss? Part of saying goodbye involves creating our own rituals for commemorating the life that we no longer have.

Rituals are a vital part of marking transitions and assigning meaning to them. They help to speed up acceptance, and they allow us to integrate our pasts into the new futures awaiting us. Some rituals can involve literally marking change on our bodies. For example, an ex-Nazi chose to cover all his fascist tattoos with religious symbols to signify his conversion. Other people choose to get new piercings or a wild new hairstyle after a divorce.

All major transitions involve a messy middle, where we feel very lost.

Just as snakes shed their old skins to allow for shiny new growth, we have to be willing to shed parts of our old selves during a transition and allow for a period of being completely lost and confused.

Every major religious narrative and fairy tale recognizes the value of being lost. Jesus was cast into the desert before he had a major epiphany, and Mohamed gained his wisdom on a mountaintop. The most formative experience of Red Riding Hood’s life would never have been possible if she hadn’t wandered into that forest.

Our creativity can help us to create a new chapter in a transition.

When Henri Matisse was diagnosed with colon cancer and had to undergo grueling surgeries, it seemed to signal the end of his artistic career. He could no longer stand up, never mind hold a paintbrush. While the health crisis did in fact end his painting career, it also opened a whole new chapter in his creative life: while lying in bed he started making the remarkable bright paper cutouts that he’s so well known for today.

Transitions involve loss, but out of the chaos comes the exciting opportunity to build something new. We must allow ourselves to be creative and experimental while exploring these new possibilities.

We need to create new life stories that integrate our transitions.

By the end of his life, Bruce’s father had written 150 stories about his past, which he painstakingly pasted into a book, along with clippings and photographs. While once he’d been so desperate that he’d attempted to kill himself, the sheer act of writing his story gave him the sense of agency that his illness had denied him.

During the Life Story Project, Bruce heard hundreds of stories about how people’s lives had changed. He realized that, like his father, the way people spoke about their experiences had a big impact on how they handled their transitions.

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What is Life Is in the Transitions about?

Life is in the Transitions (2020) is a guidebook to weathering the big changes we may experience in our lives, from getting divorced to starting a new job, from coping with illness to winning the lottery. These major transitions can cause us to feel unstable, uncertain, and overwhelmed. Our lives rarely go as planned, but we can learn to navigate life's changes and better understand what makes them meaningful by changing the stories we tell about ourselves.

Life Is in the Transitions Review

Life Is in the Transitions (2020) by Bruce Feiler offers profound insights on navigating life's inevitable transitions with resilience and purpose. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Feiler's book is a compelling exploration of how transitions, both big and small, can be transformative and opportunities for personal growth.
Through a series of real-life stories and interviews, Feiler provides readers with relatable experiences that inspire and motivate.
What sets this book apart is Feiler's refreshing perspective on viewing transitions as a chance for reinvention rather than a hurdle to overcome, making it a refreshing and thought-provoking read.

Who should read Life Is in the Transitions?

Entrepreneurs who want to become better equipped for sudden work transitions
People who are grieving a loss
Memoir-lovers who are fascinated by how stories give meaning to our lives

About the Author

Bruce Feiler is the author of six New York Times best sellers, including The Secrets of Happy Families and The Council of Dads. He also writes and presents two primetime series on PBS, and his two Ted Talks have been viewed more than two million times.

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