William Bridges has helped organizations & individuals deal more effectively with change
Program Titles
- Following Your Own Way
- Managing People in Transition
- Dealing Successfully with Personal Transition
- Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
- The Character of Organizations: Using Jungian Type in Organizational Development
William Bridges: Following Your Own Way. Every individual has an inner guide that provides far more reliable guidance through the difficulties of a fast-changing world than do the ordinary strategies and tactics of life-planning. This presentation shows you how to get in touch with that guide and to follow its lead to a future that really fits you—to your very own destiny, in fact. It is only when the person is living out this personal destiny that life has the meaning and energy that it is supposed to have. And it is only by embracing this destiny that you can grow older with the sense that you have done what it was that you were meant to do with your one and only life.
Change and transition are not the same. Change is the event and transition is the process that individuals and groups go through in dealing with the event. Without going through transition, people come out of change little different from how they went in. And the results that the change was supposed to produce fail to materialize. Most leaders understand change, but they do not understand transition or the three processes that make it up: letting go of the old way, making the most of the time of re-patterning in “the neutral zone,” and making a real new beginning. People in transition need leadership, a particular kind of guidance, which makes the difference between a successful change and one that is just a “rearrangement of the furniture”.
Managing People in Transition
This presentation parallels the one above, which is intended for executives, while this one is for the managers who are charged with implementing the plans made by the leaders. This presentation is designed to give managers the knowledge and tools they need to bring their people through mergers, reorganizations, technological shifts, and other big changes without a loss of productivity and without the communication problems, the loss of morale, and the declines in productivity that so often compromise the effectiveness of the organization and undermine the very improvements that the changes were meant to bring about.
Dealing Successfully with Personal Transition
Whether it is a change in a person’s work life, in his or her relationships, finances, health, or spiritual life, the person will go through transition. As noted in the two previous descriptions, being in transition is a difficult situation both for an individual and for his or her family. Most people try to deal with that situation by focusing on the change rather than the transition. And most of the help that they can find is likewise focused on the situation and the event rather than the inner process. This process is the source of both the difficulties that they encounter and the personal development and renewal that transition can produce. This presentation will give people the tools and understandings that they need to make transition a rewarding experience and to minimize the difficulties that are so often found there.
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Most people find themselves running out of steam or encountering confusing problems during the mid-life years of their forties and fifties. And if they do not do anything about it, they find the final decades of their lives—which last far longer than they used to—a time of discouragement and meaninglessness. This presentation, which is meant for people in their middle years and beyond, will show you why that happens and what you can do to avoid it. Drawing on both modern research and ancient wisdom, it shows you how you can turn these years into a time of renewed energy and new meaning. Whether you spend these years exploring the possibilities of leisure or finding new ways to contribute to the world through work, you will need to reorient yourself in your middle years to make your later years pay off for you. This presentation will show you how to do that.
Books by William Bridges
- Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
- Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
- The Way of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments
- Creating You & Co.: Learn to Think Like the CEO of Your Own Career
- On Leading Change: A Leader to Leader Guide
- JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs
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