Change Lives on the Edge of Two Spaces
Zig Zagging Over The Edge
Jane is leaving her job. Friday is her last day. As she sits in the weekly team meeting on Tuesday, the same one she's joined for what feels like a lifetime, she notices a strange tension in her body. She'd normally be engaging in the conversation, challenging some assumptions, raising her hand to offer help to her teammates, instead today, she sits quietly instead, and thinks: "I'm straddling two worlds. I’m ping ponging between the past and the future. I don't belong here anymore, and yet these are my people. I should be more present..”
As Jane processes these thoughts, she's also struck by how she finds herself watching the people around her, their nuances and interpersonal dynamics, from an arm's length she's never had before. She likes it, actually. It's refreshing to be an anthropologist in a room she thought she knew. And yet she also knows it won't last. She is about to cross an edge- the boundary between that which is familiar, and that which is new.
She's sad about today, nervous about next week, and altogether feeling misplaced.
There's also nothing wrong with her…. Jane is simply in the space between - she’s living in liminality.
In Between The Past And The Future
Liminality gets talked about a lot in the context of organizational change, but it isn't a phenomenon that belongs exclusively to the workplace. You know this state when the home you're packing up is still the one you're waking up in. Your routines still take place because they have to. You still cook in the kitchen but realize you're reaching for fewer dishes, or different ones. You walk into the rooms that have become like a backdrop in your life and see them with fresh eyes.
The experience of being between two worlds shows up wherever we are in transition, and in that sense it's a deeply human experience. At home, at work, and within organizations - liminal spaces are plentiful.
When you choose to move homes or take a new job, the liminality is yours. You are the change agent in your life, determining what you set in motion, when and how. Organizational change however it different. It is frequently thrust upon people without asking for their consent, without considering the individual timelines or contexts, and in this way, everything that is already hard in about living in between becomes more fraught.
What is actually happening underneath the surface
In change, personal, professional or organizational - identity is destabilized before belonging to the new is established. Our brains work hard to protect us, and that protection produces behaviors that, from the outside, can look like disengagement or- in other cases- resistance. We can’t say that they’re never any of those things - they might be - but they might also be the nervous system doing its job in an environment that has suspended its usual signals.
Think about what happens in the lead-up to a job change for instance. Even before anything has officially changed, you can feel your value in the room shifting in real time, while the new place hasn't formed enough yet to offer anything to replace what's receding.
Belonging requires reciprocity, and in liminality, both sides of that exchange are temporarily suspended.
Your brain is noticing things even when you can't quite articulate what you're noticing, and identity is doing its own work underneath as well. There is grief in sensing that the role that shaped how you understood your own competence and how you defined yourself is disappearing. While grief is a normal state of processing and is necessary in helping us integrate the loss of something we cared about into our life, it’s not easy.
The work our brains are doing when we are in a liminal space is constant sensemaking. Your brain is negotiating and integrating the flowing between worlds and while actively trying to construct meaning from a situation that is no longer clear. It’s all of Identity disruption, belonging uncertainty, sensemaking, and grief colliding all at the same time, and like most things in life - aren’t linear.
Choosing vs. Being Told
Even if you chose the change, you can expect the grief to arrive anyway. Just because you’ve chosen to leave something does not mean it won’t feel like a loss. Jane chose her new job, she is both excited about her new future, but she’s also sad that in that meeting, she feels like she's watching strangers. When this happens, the work is actually in holding both truths. It’s wanting new while grieving the loss of the known. The sooner they can be held together without one being asked to cancel the other out, the less exhausting the in-between becomes.
For people onto whom change has been imposed, the liminal state carries a different weight. There is no internal narrative of having wanted this and also, no chosen new state to lean on. The path forward belongs to someone else's plan, and so the identity question changes to an identity threat. There is both sharper belonging uncertainty and heavier sensemaking because the signals from grief can come with anger, numbness or fear. When this happens, more information about the change isn’t what we need. Instead, leaders who are navigating this space with their people can acknowledge the challenge and uncertainty, recognize the legitiamacy of these feelings, and sit with both truths that the feelings won’t stop the change from taking place.
If you are leading people through change, the instinct is to do something to resolve the discomfort that exists in the liminal space, but the move that actually most serves people is doing none of that. There’s no fixing, cajoling or advising - the role of the leader in this space is to just be with, and offer whatever support the team might need to help them along the path. As a leader, we need to separate our discomfort of seeing the difficult emotions of others from a perception that we need to do something about them.
Nothing is broken, and so nothing needs resolving. It is a normal human response to an abnormal amount of uncertainty, and it needs to be honored. Trust that people do not need to be accelerated through their own experience of change. They need to be seen in it.
The Fire is The Change
Regardless of which side of that line you're on, whether you instigated the change or the change surprised you - there is value to learning to hold multiple truths at the same time without asking one to supercede the other.
We can be grateful for what's coming and grieve what is ending. We can show up for the work we're leaving behind, while feeling less attached to it. We can be moving toward the new place while holding anxiety around whether we'll belong once we get there.
The story of the phoenix rising from the ashes is often used to signal rebirth, endings and beginnings. Like the Phoenix who sets fire to it’s nest of cinnamon twigs and aromatic herbs to rise again - we have to endure endings to welcome beginnings. And in this story, I wonder if we haven’t misconstrued the end state of rebirth, with the transformation. What if the change is what happens when the phoenix is burning? What if the fire is the edge we need to cross, the space between — what is the fire is the change?
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end
Jane finishes the meeting. She has said less than usual but noticed more than she ever before. She doesn't know yet what next week will ask of her, whether she'll be good at it or whether she'll belong, —but for now, she knows she is in between, and for now - that's enough to work with.
Sources:
ORSC (CRR Global, Fridjhon & Fuller) based on Arnold Mindell Process Work.
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Broadway Books, 2010.
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Phoenix (mythology). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 12, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(mythology)