Taking Charge of Your Career (HBR Women at Work Series)

20

Learn to Get Better at Transitions

by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

There is a small, disheveled baby robin taking its very first steps in my garden today. It looks a bit dazed and exhausted, its lovely yellow down all awry. I know exactly what it feels like. The young bird looks like a lot of people I know right now. At almost every age, everyone seems to be on the cusp of a similar transition: taking their first steps into an uncertain and illegible new world. As I write this, World War II planes fly overhead to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday. Like my own mother, who shares her birthday, she is turning 93. They are both remarkably well and not finished with transitions.

At just shy of 57, I feel poised between these two ends of the ...