Articulate

Half a tiny eggshell. Blue on the outside, white on the inside and smaller than my thumbnail.

Thinking about successful transition is something I’m doing in my professional work at the moment; in particular students’ moving into university. The research and practice in this area indicates that part of the process is about getting information about where things are and how we do things here. Part is developing the skills necessary to navigate and succeed. And part is about becoming someone different. It seems to me this is true of all the transitions we make. It also occurs to me that doing something new, no matter how exciting, as an individual or as a group means things will be different and some aspects of the past may need to break. Even if they were as perfect as an egg.

In organisations we rush to the next new project. We often pay insufficient regard to what was good but is no longer needed and we don’t acknowledge what people are leaving behind in order to move forward.

Transitions from school to university, from worker to student and back again, into or out of relationships, between illness and health, growing up and growing older, or from egg to nest are complicated. Successful transition includes recognising what is changing, being left behind, or breaking as well as what is new.