Have you ever wanted to reinvent yourself and start all over? I know when I was back in my corporate days and feeling totally stuck, I wanted a brand new life and I needed to stop thinking some things that were holding me back. I was also going through some personal issues at the time and the prospect of reinventing myself was something I needed like yesterday. But the truth is reinventing yourself and transitioning your life and career does not happen overnight. It’s tough and that’s why I wanted to make sure I got this interview I did with Linda Rossetti, author of Women and Transition on the podcast today.

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Get ready for a special Career Transition Workshop where you’ll find the necessary tools you need to successfully progress from one transition to the next. Our special guest this week, Linda Rossetti, Harvard MBA, tech start-up CEO, and author of the book, Women and Transition: Reinventing Work and Life, offers a fresh and provocative view of transitions over the arc of women’s lives.

To make transitions, we have to really evaluate what we value. Transition is process oriented more than a change. The pattern goes through 3 changes.

3 Transition Stages

Stage #1: This starts with a trigger. Linda’s trigger was her crazy job didn’t hold much meaning for her. It could be a job loss, a marriage or a birth. This is where you start envisioning what the future might hold for you. What could captivate you and keep you interested?

Stage #2: A decision that someone needs to make with what you are going to do with this information. This is the validation stage of testing and creating cycles to gain confidence around this new future vision that you are going to work towards.

Stage #3:  The act of transitioning.

Transition begins to happen where there is a shift in what value means to you. The trigger is different but the pattern happens in the  exact same way.

3 Things You Need to Stop Thinking Right Now

1. I feel like a failure.

Transition is misused with the word change.  Transition is wildly misunderstood and the skills women need to navigate this are often underdeveloped. The most shocking thing Linda learned is that very often without a baseline knowledge of transition, women misinterpret the early stages of transition as a failure instead of recognizing it as early stages of a growth opportunity. Sometimes it can lead to more feelings of self-doubt. At that moment women can retreat from living lives that they imagined.

2. I don’t like change. It’s too hard.

Transitions happen very frequently over a woman’s life. 90% of women Linda interviewed expected to transition again in a five-year period. Transition is an opportunity to re-assess what holds value and meaning to us and integrate it into how we express ourselves every single day.

Transitions require us to re-examine our assumptions about our identity and force us to really evaluate what is important to us. Many of us realize that what we were doing no longer holds the meaning that it once did so we need some tools to navigate the transitions in front of us.

3. I need to stop dreaming.

Linda also found that women wanted to shortchange the step of dreaming. Because of the demands on our time, women want to go to the “do” loop. It’s important to see if you can invest the time to take the vision step and make sure you take time to reach beyond some of the things you thought were at the edge of your capacity. Because, you are all capable of doing incredible things.

In Linda’s work with women over the past several years, she observed that too often women are reluctant to reach when setting goals for themselves. She heard this repeatedly as I interviewed more than 200 women in writing her book. You have to ask yourself how can you reach higher. How can you contribute your greatest potential to this world?

So we challenge you to reach higher, determine what truly is important to you in your work and to get comfortable with transition in your life. Don’t let it hold you back from the life you are meant to have.

Note: If you are ready to make your next transition and turn it into a growth opportunity, make sure you sign-up for our Fall in Love With Your Work and Life Challenge starting on September 9th.