Transition is the Work That Change Leaves Behind
Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and advisor who guides executives in integrating unexamined inner aspects so their leadership becomes examined rather than reactive. Her work bridges authority, authenticity, and inner transformation, particularly during moments of personal and organizational transition.
Last month, I wrote about the necessity of returning to yourself before attempting to lead others. Before strategy, performance, or response, there must be presence – the capacity to hear yourself beneath the noise of what everyone and everything around you requires. But returning to yourself creates its own challenge. You may discover something you can no longer “unknow.”
The role may no longer fit. The way you have been exercising authority may have reached its limits. An identity that once protected you may now constrain you. An organization may have technically moved beyond a rupture while its people are still living inside it.
This is where returning ends and transition begins. Transition is not the same thing as change: change happens, transition takes something from us.
We often use the words interchangeably, but there is an important distinction. Change is what happens in our circumstances. A role ends. A leader leaves. An organization restructures. A relationship changes. A new opportunity appears. A crisis passes.
Change can often be located on a calendar. There was a before, an event, and an after. Transition does not obey the same timeline.
Transition is the internal process of coming into relationship with what the change has altered within us, between us, and around us. That means something can change long before we have transitioned from it.
I see this often in my work with leaders and organizations. The new leader is in place, but the organization is still oriented around the person who left. The crisis is technically over, but the leader continues operating as though catastrophe is around every corner. Someone has accumulated considerably more authority than they once held, yet still enters rooms prepared to prove that they deserve to be there.
The circumstances changed, something else did not.
We are very good at moving on
Leadership culture has an enormous appetite for what comes next. When disruption happens, leaders are expected to respond. We create the new strategy. Announce the restructure. Fill the vacant role. Establish the priorities. Reassure the team. Develop the plan.
There are, of course, times when decisive action is necessary. But our capacity to continue functioning can obscure something important: moving forward and transitioning are not the same thing. Sometimes what looks like resilience is simply our ability to keep going.
We survived it. We adapted. We made the decision. We got everyone through. Because life continued, we assume the transition did too. But human beings do not transform on the same timeline as circumstances. Neither do organizations.
What we do not transition from, we carry
An incomplete transition does not remain neatly behind us. We carry it forward. We bring the behaviors developed during crisis into seasons that no longer require them. We bring old relationships to power into new positions of authority.
We bring the expectations of the leader who left into our relationship with the leader who arrived. We bring identities built around surviving environments that no longer exist into spaces where those identities may no longer serve us.
Organizations do this collectively, too. A restructure changes the boxes on an organizational chart while leaving the underlying power relationships untouched. A new leader arrives while employees continue organizing themselves around old loyalties, injuries, fears, and expectations. A difficult season ends, but urgency remains embedded in how the organization works.
This is one of the reasons change can sometimes feel strangely disappointing. Everything is different, yet somehow everything feels the same. Change rearranges circumstances, transition changes our relationship to what happened.
Transition asks us to release
Release is a difficult word because we often mistake it for erasure. To release something does not require us to pretend it did not matter. It does not necessarily mean forgiveness. It does not mean forgetting. It certainly does not mean rushing ourselves toward a lesson so that we can make an uncomfortable experience useful.
Release begins with recognition.
What belonged to what was?
What did I become in order to meet that moment?
What protected me there?
What did I learn to expect?
What did I learn to fear?
What am I still carrying because I have never stopped long enough to ask whether I need it here?
This is where transition can become uncomfortable for leaders. Leadership often trains us toward accumulation: more knowledge, more responsibility, more skill, more capacity, more strategy.
Transitions sometimes ask the opposite of us. They ask what we are willing to put down, not because what we carried was wrong, but because it belonged to another terrain.
The middle is not a problem to solve
Once we recognize that something has ended, another impulse tends to arrive quickly: “So, what comes next?” It is an understandable question. It is also sometimes premature.
There is a space between recognizing that something can no longer continue and knowing what should replace it. It is the part of transition many of us would prefer to skip: the middle, the void, the threshold.
The place where the old answer no longer works and the new answer has not yet arrived. For leaders accustomed to providing clarity, this space can feel especially threatening. Not knowing can feel like incompetence. Waiting can feel like avoidance. Uncertainty can feel like a problem demanding immediate resolution.
So we fill the space: we make a plan, choose the next identity, announce a new strategy, or declare the lesson. But sometimes clarity is not yet available because something is still ending. There is intelligence in allowing that process to complete.
Before asking what comes next
Returning to yourself may bring you into contact with a truth you would rather not know. Something has changed. Perhaps it changed yesterday. Perhaps it changed years ago. Perhaps everyone around you has already adjusted to the external reality while some part of you is still organized around what existed before.
The invitation is not to judge yourself for that. Nor is it to manufacture an ending because endings make better stories.
It is simply to notice. What has changed that I have not yet allowed myself to transition from?
A role?
A relationship?
A season of leadership?
A version of yourself?
A way of holding authority?
An organization that no longer exists in the form you remember?
Stay with the question before reaching for the next one. Because the work at every threshold is not immediately to determine what waits on the other side.
Sometimes the work is to recognize what has already ended and become willing to stop carrying it forward.
Only then does another question become possible.
Read more from Carla Madeleine Kupe
Carla Madeleine Kupe, Executive Leadership Advisor
Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and trusted advisor who works with leaders navigating power, responsibility, and transition. With a background in law, executive leadership, and organizational change, she helps individuals identify and integrate unexamined inner patterns that quietly shape decision-making, authority, and trust, particularly during periods of uncertainty, contraction, and reimagination. Carla writes at the intersection of leadership, inner work, and change, offering grounded insight for those shaping the future.
