Welcome to Limbo

Are you between identities? Have you decided to leave a role but not left yet?

Welcome to limbo.

Limbo gets a bad reputation. We treat it as dead space. The waiting room. The part to rush through.

But limbo is not nothing. It is the most honest part of any transition.

The old arena no longer fits. The new one has not formed yet. Your competence is intact. The conditions that made it visible are gone.

That is what makes the gap so disorienting. You feel excluded before you are even out. You do not belong there anymore. You do not belong yet to what is next. Detachment. Unbelonging. Floating. The opposite of fun.

It is the founder still in the building during the earnout, no longer the one who decides. The executive whose team is quietly routing around them. The pregnant employee written out of the next quarter. The service member in a uniform that is counting down. The spouse still legally bound to a life already over.

I have been in limbo many times. I know it from the inside, not just from the research.

Here is what I learned. Limbo is not wasted time.

It is where Transition Agility™ gets stronger. Where all decisions become values-based, because nothing else is holding you up. Forward motion stalls, and real work still happens. Quiet work. The kind you do in survival mode without seeing it, and without a witness.

Then the anchor gets pulled, the rope gets dropped. The last grip of the old arena lets go. Forward motion returns. Limbo ends. Transformation begins.

The mistake is believing limbo is a problem to solve.

At HumanWorks™, we believe it is a capacity to build.

We build the architecture for what most change models skip: the human.

Sara B. McNamara, MSOD Founder, HumanWorks™ Solutions