You are not behind. You are not broken. And you are not, despite what the quiet voice at 2 a.m. keeps insisting, the only person your age who hasn’t figured it out yet. What you are is between stories. And that space, as uncomfortable as it feels, is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of growth. That is what career transition is all about.
Here is the confusion that trips up so many young professionals in this phase: they mistake identity confusion for incompetence. They sit with a résumé that no longer feels right, or a job title that never quite fit, or a vague sense that they are capable of more than their current role is asking of them. Instead of reading these signals as useful information, they read them as proof that something is wrong with them. There is not. The discomfort you are feeling is not a verdict on your potential. It is a signal that you have outgrown one version of yourself and have not yet fully inhabited the next one.
That in-between place has a name in the research on adult development: psychologist William Bridges called it the “neutral zone”. It is the disorienting but essential passage between an ending and a new beginning. Bridges spent decades studying how people navigate major life and career transitions, and his central finding was this: the neutral zone is not a problem to solve quickly. It is a phase to move through intentionally.
The people who rush through it and grab the first available job to end the uncertainty often find themselves back in the same uncomfortable place eighteen months later since they did not dothe underlying work. The people who sit in the neutral zone for awhile wisely come out the other side with something the others lack: a direction that is actually theirs.
The In-Between Can Feel Shameful
Part of what makes this phase so hard is structural. We are surrounded by professional and social contexts that reward certainty. LinkedIn asks what you do. Family dinners ask where you are headed. Performance reviews ask about your five-year plan. All of these questions assume a stable, legible professional identity and when you are in transition, you do not have one yet. That absence can feel like shameful incompleteness rather than what it actually is: a temporary and necessary state of becoming.
Cognitively, human beings are wired for narrative coherence: we feel most settled when our past, present, and future connect into a story that makes sense. During a career transition, that story is genuinely unresolved. Living in that narrative gap is genuinely uncomfortable because unresolved stories are, by design, uncomfortable.
Just Start Moving!
Harvard Business School professor Herminia Ibarra, whose research on career reinvention is among the most rigorous available, found something that runs counter to most career advice: people do not think their way into a new identity and then act on it. They act first in small, exploratory, sometimes clumsy ways — and the clarity assembles itself from the evidence of what worked and what didn’t. Clarity is a product of experimentation, not a prerequisite to it. You do not have to have the answer before you start moving. You have to start moving in order to find the answer.
Cut Out “I Don’t Know”; Add “Here’s What I’m Exploring”
When coming to clarity, you will find tThere is a meaningful difference when having — in networking conversations, in interviews, in the quiet of your own thinking — between “I don’t know what I want” and “Here is what I am exploring, and here is why.” The first sentence is stuck. The second is in motion. Both are honest, but only one is useful.
That sentence does not require you to have the answer. It requires you to have done the work of getting to know yourself honestly. That willingness is most of what “figuring it out” actually requires. Not a fully formed plan. Not a five-year trajectory. Just the courage to stop hiding behind “I don’t know” and start articulating what you are actually striving towards.
Relax and Discover
When you treat the in-between as a crisis, you make decisions under the duress of uncertainty: you apply broadly, accept the first offer that arrives, and end up in a new version of the same mismatch. When you treat it as a discovery period, you slow down enough to actually learn something — about what energizes you, what you are genuinely good at, and what kind of work you want to build your life around.
This is not a call to do nothing for six months while you find yourself. Life still has rent and momentum still matters. It is a call to bring intention to the exploration rather than treating it as a temporary inconvenience to be ended as quickly as possible. Here are some suggestions:
- Have informational conversations with people in fields or roles that interest you, not because you are asking for a job but because you are gathering genuine information about what those paths feel like from the inside.
- Take on a freelance project or a volunteer role in an adjacent area to test a hypothesis about fit.
- Pay careful attention to the moments in your current or recent work when you felt most alive, most useful, most like yourself and ask what was actually present in those moments.
This is the raw material of clarity. It does not arrive as a revelation. It accumulates as evidence.
The Decision Filter Exercise
Most career exploration tools focus on skills: what are you good at? Skills tell you what you can do, but values tell you what you will care about doing over time. And, it is misaligned values, not skill gaps,that produce most career dissatisfaction.
Here’s a quick exercise:
Step one: Map your energy.
Think back over your work, volunteer roles, and side projects, in any context where you were contributing to something.
- Identify 3-5 specific moments when you felt genuinely energized and alive in the doing of it.
- Write each one down in a sentence or two. Be specific. “I felt energized while facilitating the team retrospective in [project X] ” is more useful than “I like working with people.”
Step two: Find the ingredient.
- For each of those five moments, ask: what was actually present that made it feel that way? For example:
- Was it autonomy?
- Creative problem-solving?
- Direct contact with the person you were helping?
- The feeling of making something from nothing?
- Being in a context where your expertise was recognized?
- Write the condition, not the job.
Step three: Map the inverse.
Now do the same exercise in reverse.
- Identify 3-5 moments from the same period when you felt genuinely depleted: resentful, invisible, or like you were performing a version of yourself you did not recognize. What was present then?
Often you will find the absence of what energized you in step two.
Step four: Build your filter.
Look at both lists together. What you are looking at is not your dream job it is your decision filter: the set of conditions that any future role needs to include (or exclude) in order to give you a reasonable chance of thriving in it. It is a great start and an enormously useful thing to know.
The decision filter exercise brings clarity such as: “I’ve realized I do my best work when I have ownership of a project and can see the direct impact on the people I’m helping, so I’m exploring roles in client-facing strategy and coaching adjacent work — and here is what I have been learning about those fields.” The Chapter Is Still Being Written
Aristotle wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living. There is a gentler version of that insight that seems more useful here: the unexamined career tends to be someone else’s idea of what your life should look like. The in-between phase, uncomfortable as it is, is the interruption of that borrowed story — and the beginning of a chance to write your own.
You are not lost. You are between stories. That is not a deficiency. It is simply where you are. Give yourself the grace to be in that space without rushing the ending — and give yourself the structure to use it well.
If you are in the thick of this and want a thinking partner who has helped many people navigate this exact terrain, I would love to talk to you. Reach out we are here for exactly this kind of work.
Update Your Story
If the in-between phase is where you are right now uncertain about direction, unsure what the next chapter looks like, and tired of feeling stuck between a story that no longer fits and one you haven’t yet been able to name, Phyllis Lehman’s Career Clarity Compass was designed for exactly this moment. It is an 8-week coaching program built around the work that actually produces clarity: self-discovery exercises, personalized coaching, values and strengths exploration, and a practical career roadmap you build together with Phyllis’s guidance. You do not need to have it all figured out before you start. That is precisely the point. Book your free discovery call to take the first step.
