Here is the full transcript of Bruce Feiler’s talk titled “Need a Fresh Start? How to Master a Life Transition” at TEDxIEMadrid conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Life-Changing Phone Call
I used to have a saying that “phone calls don’t change your life”, until one day I got a phone call that did. It was from my mother. “Your father is trying to kill himself.” “He’s what?” My dad was a son of the American South, a Navy veteran, and civic leader. He was never depressed a minute, until he got Parkinson’s. Six times in 12 weeks, my dad attempted to end his life. We tried every solution imaginable, until one day I had a thought.
Maybe my dad needed a spark to restart his life story. One morning, I sent him a question: “Tell me about the toys you played with as a child.” What happened next changed not only him but everyone around him and led me to rethink how we all achieve meaning, balance, and joy in our lives. This is the story of what happened next, and what we all can learn from it.
The Story We Tell Ourselves
I want you to stop for a second and listen to the story going on in your head. It’s there, somewhere in the background. It’s the story you tell others when you first meet them. It’s the story you tell yourself every day. It’s the story of who you are, where you came from, where you’re going. It’s the story of your life.
What we’ve learned from a generation of brain research is that story isn’t just part of you, it is you in a fundamental way. Life is the story we tell ourselves. But there’s a question that research hasn’t much answered.
What happens when we misplace the plot of that story? When we feel sidetracked by a pitfall, a pothole, a pandemic? What happens when we feel burned out and want a fresh start? What happens when our fairy tales go awry? That’s what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another. We get stuck in the woods and can’t get out. This time, though, I wanted to learn how to get unstuck.
Like my dad, I was born in the American South. For years, I had what I now think of as a linear life. I went to college. I started writing. I did it for no money for a while. I had some success. I got married and had children. But then, in my 40s, I was just walloped by life.
First, I got cancer as a new dad of identical twin daughters. Then, I almost went bankrupt. Then my dad had that suicide spree. For a long time, I felt shame and fear about these events. I didn’t know how to tell that story and didn’t want to. When I did, I discovered that everyone feels their life has been upended in some way. That their life is somehow off schedule, off track, off kilter. That the life they’re living is not the life they expected. They’re living life is out of order.
The Life Story Project
I wanted to do something to help. Over three years, I crisscrossed the country, collecting what became hundreds of life stories of Americans in all 50 states. People who lost limbs, lost homes, changed careers, changed genders, got sober, got out of bad marriages. In the end, I had 1,000 hours of interviews, 6,000 pages of transcripts.
With a team of 12, I then spent a year coding these stories for 57 different variables, looking for patterns that could help all of us in times of change. I called this the Life Story Project. And here’s what I learned.
Lesson number one, the linear life is dead. The idea that we’re going to have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness from adolescence to assisted living is hopelessly outdated. What’s more, even that idea itself turns out to be a historical anomaly. Though we don’t talk about it enough, the way we look at the world affects how we look at our lives.
In the ancient world, they didn’t have linear time. They thought life was a cycle because agriculture was a cycle. In the Middle Ages, they thought life was a staircase up to Middle Age, then down. No new love at 60, no retiring and opening an Airbnb at 70. Not until the birth of science, 150 years ago, did we adopt the idea that life proceeds in a series of stages, like an industrial factory.
Freud’s psychosexual stages, Erikson’s eight stages of moral development, the five stages of grief, these are all linear constructs. This model reaches its peak in the 1970s with the idea that everyone does the same thing in their 20s, the same thing in their 30s, then has a midlife crisis between 39 and 44 and a half. It’s hard to overstate how powerful this idea was. There’s only one problem. It’s not true.
Mastering Life Transitions
Today, we’ve updated how we look at the world. We understand there’s chaos and complexity and networks, but we haven’t updated how we look at our lives, which leads to lesson number two. The nonlinear life involves many more life transitions. I went through every interview I conducted and created a master list of all the ways our lives can get redirected. I called these events disruptors. The total was 52, so I created the deck of disruptors.
Some of them are small, like breaking your ankle or a fender bender. Some of them are large, losing your job, moving. The average person goes through three dozen disruptors in the course of their lives. That’s one every 12 to 18 months. Now most of these we get through with relative ease, but one in 10 becomes what I call a light-quake, a massive burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.
The average person goes through three to five of these events in the course of their lives, their average duration, five years. Do the math. That means we spend 25 years, half our adult lives, in transition. And make no mistake, these do not clump exclusively in middle age. Some of us are born into life quakes. Some of us have them in our 20s, our 60s. Forget the mid-life crisis. We all face the whenever life crisis.
The pandemic has made this only worse. I graphed all life quakes on two poles, voluntary, involuntary, personal, collective. A mere 8% were collective involuntary life quakes. A collective involuntary life quake is a natural disaster, a recession. What’s unique about this moment in time? The pandemic is the first time in a century that the entire planet is going through a collective involuntary life quake at the same time.
Every single one of us is in transition. And yet, no one is teaching us how to navigate these times. Which leads to lesson number three. Life transitions are a skill we can and must master. What I’d like to do for you today is to give you five tips based on my research for how to master a life transition.
Tip number one, begin with your transition superpower. One way to think about a life quake is as a physical blow. Life puts us on our heels. The life transition puts us back on our toes. And yet, when most of us enter one, we feel completely overwhelmed. Either we make a 212-item to-do list and say we’ll get through it in a weekend, or we lie in a fetal position and say we’ll never get through it. Both of them are wrong.
Look at enough of these periods and certain patterns become clear. For starters, life transitions involve three phases. I call them the long goodbye, when you mourn the past that’s not coming back, the messy middle in which you shed certain habits and create new ones, the new beginning in which you unveil your new self. But let’s be clear. These phases do not happen in order. Just as life is nonlinear, life transitions are nonlinear too.
Instead, each of us gravitates to the phase we’re best at, our transition superpower, and gets bogged down in the phase we’re weakest at, our transition kryptonite. Half of us don’t like the messy middle, but others excel at it. Maybe you’re good at making lists and analyzing your options. Perfect. Start there. One in four of us don’t like the long goodbye. Maybe we’re people pleasers or we are uncomfortable leaving difficult situations. Others excel at that. Perfect. Start there.
Embracing Transitions
The point is, transitions are hard. Begin with your superpower, gain confidence, move on from there. Tip number two, accept your emotions. In addition to three phases, I identified the seven tools we use to navigate a life transition. The first, accept that the transition is an emotional experience. I looked hundreds of people in the eye and asked, “What’s the biggest emotion you struggled with in your time of change?” Number one answer, fear. “How am I going to get through this? How am I going to pay my bills?”
Number two answer, sadness. “I miss my loved one. I miss being able to walk.” Number three, shame. “I’m ashamed I have to ask for help. I’m ashamed of what I did when I drank too much.” Now, some of us cope with these emotions by writing them down. Others, like me, buckle down and try to push through. But 80% of us—8-0—use rituals. We sing, dance, hug. After Maillard Howell left his job in Big Pharma to open a gym, he tattooed “breathe” on his right hand and “happy” on his left. “I knew I couldn’t go back to my corporate job once I did that.”
Lisa Rae Rosenberg had a horrible year in which she lost her job, had a falling out with her mother, and went on 52 first dates. “Something has to change,” she said. Her biggest fear? Heights. So, she jumped out of an airplane. A year later, she was married with a child. Rituals like these are especially effective in the long goodbye because they’re statements to ourselves and those around us that “I’m going through a difficult time and I’m ready for what comes next.”
The Power of New Beginnings
Tip number three, try something new. The messy middle is messy. It’s disorienting and destabilizing. “Now what?” My data show we do two things during our time in the wilderness. First, we shed things—mindsets, routines, habits. Like animals who molt, we cast off parts of our personality. Jeff Sparr, who has OCD, had to shed his reliance on a paycheck when he left his family’s business to open a non-profit that uses art therapy.
Lee Wintz, an executive who went through cancer, career change, and divorce all at the same time, had to shed her habit that the minute she walked in the door, she opened the fridge. She lost 60 pounds. Shedding allows us to make room for what comes next, which is astonishing acts of creativity. At the bottom of our lives, we dance, cook, garden, take up ukulele.
Army Sergeant Zach Herrick had his face blown off by the Taliban, 31 surgeries between his nose and his chin. He experienced suicide ideation. But then, at his mom’s suggestion, he started to cook, then write poetry, then paint. “I used to get out my hostility by splattering the enemy with bullets,” he told me. “Now I get out my hostility by splattering the canvas with paint.”
What was the biggest cliché at the start of the pandemic? Baking! “We’re going to sourdough our way through it!” I may have been the least surprised person because the simple act of imagining that loaf of bread, or that poem, or that painting, allows us to imagine a new self.
Number four: Seek wisdom from others. Perhaps the most painful part of a life transition is that we feel isolated and alone. In fact, one under-discussed reason for the rise of loneliness is the rise in the number of life transitions we all face, which is why it’s essential that you not be alone, that you find a way to share your experience with someone else. It could be a friend, a neighbor, a loved one, even a stranger.
But here’s the key: not everyone craves the same kind of response. Each of us has what I call a phenotype of feedback. A third of us like comforters. “I love you, Susie. I believe in you. You’ll get through it!” A quarter of us like nudgers. “I love you, John, but maybe you should try this, or maybe you should do that.” But one in six of us likes slappers. “I love you, Anna, but get over yourself. It’s time to do this.”
The important thing is, don’t assume that the person you’re asking advice or giving advice to likes the same type of response. Ask before you advise. And that leads to tip number five, rewrite your life story.
Rewriting Your Life Story
A life transition is fundamentally a meaning-making exercise. It’s what I like to call an autobiographical occasion, in which we are called on to revisit, rethink, and retell our life story, adding a new chapter for what we learned during the life quake. That’s what happened with my dad.
After I sent that first story about the toys he played with, he wrote a story about model airplanes I had never heard before, even though he couldn’t even move his fingers at the time. I sent another, ‘Tell me about the house you grew up in.’ Then another, ‘How’d you join the Navy? How’d you meet mom?’ Until just this week, eight years after that first question, my dad, who had never written anything longer than a memo, completed a 65,000-word memoir.
One question, one story, one life-affirming memory at a time. That is the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that no matter how bleak your story gets, you cannot give up on the happy ending. You control the story you tell about your life, even the most painful parts of your life, which is why it’s so critical that we reimagine life transitions, that we see them not as miserable times we have to grit and grind our way through, but we see them for what they are: healing times that allow us to take the wounded parts of ourselves and begin to repair them.
The Italians have a wonderful expression for this, lupus in fabula, the wolf in the fairy tale. Just when life is going swimmingly, along comes a demon, a dragon, a downsizing, a pandemic. Just when our fairy tale seems poised to come true, a wolf shows up and threatens to destroy it. And that’s okay because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there’s one thing I learned, we all need to be the hero of our life story, which is why we have fairy tales after all, and why we tell them year after year, bedtime after bedtime. They turn our nightmares into dreams. Thank you.