The three most important questions to ask yourself when going through a transition

Congratulations on your birthday! Does that make you 40 years old now?
I heard about your brother’s sudden illness. Everything is alright?
You got the job, it’s amazing! How does it feel to leave your position of ten years in your old office?

What do all these situations have in common? Each marks an important transition in a person’s life. A transition is anything from moving into a new career to an anniversary, birthday, divorce, marriage, letting go of a loved one, or anything else that marks the move from one phase of your life to another.

While these periods can sometimes be very joyful or beautiful like a birthday, or difficult like leaving a job or getting divorced, transitions affect us on a deep level because they signify a change or innovative movement both on an internal and external level.

Aside from all the joys or challenges that come with it, a time of transition is also an opportunity to create new beginnings and harness the energy of change to really move forward in meaningful ways.

Whenever I work with women going through a transition in their lives, we spend time examining what it means. One of the places I like to start, to help you understand and deal with transition, as well as honor and move forward in your life, is to ask you to answer the following three questions:

1. What are you willing to let go of?

This question is about being very clear about what is no longer useful to you from the past. However, more to the point: What are the things you don’t want to take with you to a future experience? For example, approaching the age of 40, the question you would ask yourself is: what about events, attitudes, relationships, etc.? of my 39 years (or, of my 30s) no longer serve me? What do I want to consciously choose not to take with me into the next year and the next decade?

Ask and answer this question at the time of a transition gives you the opportunity to consciously release what you need to let go of so that you do not carry unnecessary baggage or obstacles in your new stage of life.

It also gives you the opportunity to really learn and fully process some of the more difficult lessons you need to learn before moving forward. For example: Let’s say the transition you’re going through is leaving a long-term relationship. When you reflect on it, you realize that you really let your partner dictate where the relationship went, as well as what the two of you did throughout the relationship, despite your best interest. As you transition from this relationship, you have the opportunity to fully acknowledge this dynamic in the relationship that did not serve you, to let it go, and to resolve that you want your next relationship to be more of a partnership.

Or, for another example, suppose a birthday is coming up and you wonder:What am I willing to let go? – You realize that in the last year you didn’t take very good care of yourself. Now is your chance to break free of that habit and commit to taking better care of yourself in the coming year.

2. What are the opportunities and experiences from the past that I really want to honor, hold sacred, and take with me?

This question is about being able to recognize the positive in the past experience you are coming out of. It allows you to hold on to those positive aspects and make them your own.

It is very important to reflect on the things you want to honor, especially if you are anxious to get out of what was in the past. Let’s say you are going to get divorced after 25 years and the last few years are marked by fighting and yelling – there is so much in that relationship that you just want to leave! Still, it is very important to honor the positive things in the relationship at the same time. For example, maybe it made you a more educated person because your husband was very involved in the arts, or maybe it allowed you to individualize and separate from your parents to become an independent person.

Even if you’re ready to leave a situation it is important to honor what was positive so you don’t feel like you wasted all that time.

3. What is my intention for the next phase?

Answering this question is like making a New Year’s Resolution, but it can be done during any transition: a birthday, an anniversary, changing jobs, moving apartments, etc.

Basically you are asking yourself: What is my intention internally and externally for the next phase of my life? What are my spiritual and material goals for the future as a result of what I have learned from the past?

This question allows you to draw on the wisdom gained from the first two transition questions and Create a powerful intention or plan for how you want to move into the next phase of your life.