The Liminal Space: Where Identity Rebuilds During Career Transition

Where You Go Between Who You Were and Who You're Becoming

When I first wrote about this, more than 500,000 people had been laid off in the previous six months. The number moved through the news cycle the way numbers do. What stayed with me was the part almost no one was talking about. What happens inside you when this kind of ending hits.

This can be a physiological and psychological disruption as much as a professional one. When you’re cut off from a team, a title, or a daily routine that once gave you identity, your nervous system may register the loss as a threat, especially when it disrupts your sense of safety, belonging, or control. 

In fact, social separation and physical pain can engage some overlapping regions of the brain, although their neural patterns aren’t completely identical. The brain treats social safety as deeply consequential. Your body knows you’ve been severed from something that mattered.

I wrote about this in 2024 and again in 2025, during a season when a great many people were being separated from work they’d built their lives around. I’m bringing it forward again because so many of the people I work with, and so many people in my community, remain in it. Others can feel the next transition approaching.

The conversation moved on. The experience didn’t.

What’s the Liminal Space?

The liminal space in this context describes the period during a major life transition when your old identity has loosened and your new identity hasn’t yet taken form. Organizational consultant and author William Bridges called this the “neutral zone.” It’s the disorienting gap between who you were and who you’re becoming. You no longer fit inside the life you knew, and you can’t yet see the full shape of what comes next.

Your brain built countless associations around the life you were living. Logging in, leading a team, checking your calendar, and walking into familiar rooms all reinforced patterns that helped you know what to expect and how to respond. 

During a transition, however, those routines and cues change. They’re no longer being reinforced in the same way. Your brain has to adapt to a changed environment while you’re still trying to function inside it. 

That’s one reason this space can feel so uncomfortable. You see, you’re becoming, and becoming rarely feels orderly from the inside.

Why Does Losing a Job Feel Like Losing Yourself?

Work often carries far more than a paycheck. It can provide belonging, structure, purpose, relationships, status, and daily evidence of competence. Your title, team, calendar, and role in the room may all become part of the way you understand yourself.

When those disappear at once, your nervous system may register threats to your security, belonging, and identity. Your attention can narrow as your body prepares to protect you. You may become intensely focused on finding the next role, struggle to act at all, or move between the two.

Here’s where nervous system work becomes essential. When your system’s highly activated, creativity, cognitive flexibility, and access to a wider range of options may become harder. In fact, a protective response can make reactive and familiar patterns easier to access than flexible, deliberative thinking. 

Regulation helps create the internal conditions for your attention to widen so you can imagine and evaluate something new.

Your body’s responding to a rupture that matters. Direction may remain difficult to access until you have enough internal steadiness to see beyond the immediate threat.

Sitting With the Discomfort

When life shifts unexpectedly, most of us feel pressure to find answers or fix everything quickly. Maybe you’ve lost a job, a home, a relationship, or a deal. Something felt solid, certain, and safe. Suddenly, it’s gone.

Then people rush in with advice, eager to help and often carrying their own anxiety about the unknown.

What’s next? What’s your plan? You should do this. You should avoid that.

I’ve felt that pressure too, most certainly through the experience of the Palisades fire. Over the years, and especially through that upheaval, I’ve learned that other people’s fear isn’t mine to carry. It isn’t yours to carry either.

Moments like these may ask you to surrender to the unknown, release what’s ended, and create room for something new to emerge. 

The liminal space between what was and what’s ahead is where transformation takes shape. A few practices can help you stay present within it.

Let go. Purge, declutter, grieve, and feel your feelings, but don’t BEcome them. There’s a difference between feeling anxious and BEing anxious.

Say, “I don’t know.” Then watch what, or who, shows up. Magic thrives in uncertainty. Uncertainty makes room for possibilities you couldn’t have planned.

Trust the process. You’re not “doing nothing” when you surrender. Surrender can be deeply intentional. It gives you space to align your actions with what matters before urgency makes the decision for you.

Be Like Water

Traditional ideals tell us success requires control, clarity, and a linear path. But think of water. It’s fluid, boundless, and yielding, yet it shapes mountains. It holds infinite possibilities. Those possibilities come from its capacity to move without holding a fixed form.

So I ask you: How often do you let yourself be in the unknown? To sit with discomfort, to embrace the in-between, to trust that the next chapter is already unfolding, even if you can’t see it yet?

Remaining unstructured for a while allows something true to form. Without that space, it’s easy to reach for an identity that looks familiar, earns approval, or eases the anxiety of the people around you.

So sit with it. I’ll be here…for a while. 

Performance and Embodiment Aren’t The Same Thing

There’s a particular trap waiting in the liminal space. It deserves attention because it can look so much like progress.

Performance is externally calibrated. It depends on feedback, approval, metrics, and visibility. It asks, “How am I doing?” and “How am I being seen?”

Embodiment is internally anchored. It’s the experience of acting in alignment with what you value, what you sense, and what feels true in your body and nervous system. It asks, “Does this feel coherent?” and “Is this sustainable for me?”

When identity feels unsettled, performance often steps in to fill the gap. Approval begins to feel like belonging. Progress begins to carry the weight of worth. They’re adaptive strategies, ways human beings orient themselves when their internal signals feel faint or unreliable. They can also take us farther from the information we most need.

Two Common Ways People Lose Their Center

When they’re out of alignment with themselves, people tend to fall into familiar patterns.

Some get louder, push harder, or overcommit. They optimize every corner of their lives in an effort to feel secure, capable, and chosen. Productivity becomes a stand-in for direction.

Others make themselves smaller. They hesitate to take up space or name what they want. They wait for external permission before moving at all.

These responses look very different on the surface, yet both orient decision-making from the outside in. One seeks safety through action and visibility. The other seeks it through restraint and approval. Either pattern can leave you exhausted before the next chapter has even begun.

Direction Doesn’t Come From Out There

True direction becomes easier to sense when you have enough internal steadiness to notice subtler signals. Louder input won’t produce it.

When your nervous system’s under strain, your attention can narrow toward what feels urgent, evaluative, or familiar. Intuition, creativity, and discernment may become harder to access. 

From that state, it can be incredibly difficult to sense what actually matters to you. Regulation and cognition continually influence each other, which means more analysis may not produce clarity while your system remains under intense strain.

Your north star offers an internal orientation. It’s a guidance system that generates a felt sense of what’s true, sustaining, and worth moving toward. Often, it’s something you remember after roles, expectations, and responsibilities have pulled your attention elsewhere.

Yet, that remembering requires space. It requires enough safety and presence to listen inward rather than scan outward.

Remember Your Worth, Then Build From There

Transition culture often skips an essential step. It moves straight to improvement without first anchoring in worth.

You do not need to prove your value before you are allowed to build a meaningful life. Your worth is not something you earn through reinvention. Rather, it is something you reconnect with so that what you build does not collapse under pressure later. Reconnecting with your worth gives you a steadier foundation for whatever you choose to build next.

When people build from disconnection, even meaningful goals can become brittle. They require constant effort and external reinforcement to stay intact. Over time, this can lead to burnout, resentment, or the unsettling realization that success doesn’t feel the way you expected.

Building from alignment allows your values to guide your decisions and your capacity to shape the pace. It creates consistency because your choices fit together. Whew, this one’s hard for me too! Some days, I still find myself asking, “Are we there yet?!”

But this aspect is crucial, as it allows values to guide decisions rather than urgency. It creates consistency because it’s rooted in coherence, not force.

Questions to Reorient Yourself

Instead of beginning with who you should become, begin by noticing where you already feel most like yourself.

• Where does your energy settle rather than spike?
• What drains you even when it looks successful?
• Where are you performing rather than participating?
• What feels steady instead of impressive?
• What truth are you already living?

These questions invite you back into relationship with yourself, and with your highest self, before you ask yourself to move. They help you notice where coherence already exists and where you may be abandoning your own signals to meet an external expectation.

This Isn’t the End

The disorientation you’re feeling can be part of redesign. Familiar patterns may loosen before new ones become established, and an ending can create space for renewal.

If you’re in that in-between space right now, remember that you’re more than your job, title, or most recent achievement. You still carry your knowledge, relationships, values, and capacity to create meaning. You’re the author of what comes next.

Regulate your nervous system. Expand your thinking. Rewrite your story.

The liminal space can become the birthplace of your next evolution. You’re reorienting, and that’s where meaningful direction begins.

Where to Begin

If you want insight and orientation, start with a Profile & Strategy Session. It’s for the person who can feel something shifting and wants to understand their patterns, what’s driving them, and where their energy wants to go before committing to a direction. We look at what’s true for you in this season so your next decision comes from within rather than from the pressure around you.

If you’re ready to go deep, the LUP Intensive offers one-on-one support for exactly this work. It was originally designed for leaders operating under pressure inside an organization, and it’s become equally valuable for leaders in transition. You may be between roles, considering a move, or rebuilding after an ending. A full-time role isn’t a prerequisite. The Intensive creates the time and depth this identity work requires.

I’ll be here. You belong. We’re Alchemizers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the liminal space?

The liminal space describes the in-between period during a major transition when your old identity has loosened and your new identity hasn’t yet formed. William Bridges called it the neutral zone. It can feel disorienting because the routines, relationships, and roles that once helped organize your life are changing.

Why does a layoff feel like an identity crisis?

Work can provide belonging, structure, purpose, status, and a sense of identity. When you lose a title, a team, and a daily routine, the disruption may affect all of these at once. Social separation and physical pain can engage some overlapping regions of the brain. Your nervous system may also register the loss as a threat to security, belonging, or control.

How long does a career transition take?

There’s no universal timeline. Your circumstances, support system, the nature of the ending, and your nervous system all shape the experience. Direction becomes more accessible as your system settles enough for your attention to widen again. Rushing yourself may add another layer of pressure to a process that already asks a great deal of you.

What should I do in the in-between if I don’t know what’s next?

Slow down, regulate, and reconnect with your body before making large decisions when your circumstances allow. Release what you can’t control, practice saying “I don’t know,” and pay attention to what feels alive and what consistently drains you. Clarity begins to form from that ground.

How do I know whether I’m performing or embodying?

Performance asks how you’re doing and how you’re being seen. Embodiment asks whether something feels coherent and sustainable for you. If your decisions depend on external feedback to feel valid, you may be performing. Embodiment allows feedback to inform you without letting it become your only source of permission or direction.