THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION
Meaning-Centred Coaching and Mentoring
Have you ever been told that you must first endure your difficulty, emerge from it, and then begin to live again?
Has that sequence corresponded to the life you have actually been living?
Do you think it’s possible that meaning is forged within suffering?
Or do you think that meaning is only found when the suffering ends?
Suffering and transformation are not sequential. Endurance, emergence, and living happen all at the same time across every area of life. This ‘forging meaning within suffering’ happens simultaneously, imperfectly, and often at great cost. This process is known as ‘concurrent meaning-making’. And you’ve probably, unknowingly, been doing it already.
William Bridges, author, speaker, and organisational consultant, is best known for pioneering the Bridges Transition Model. Bridges posits that transition happens in three distinct phases - endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. The theory isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete.
In a life under siege on multiple fronts, there is no clean ending before the neutral zone, no settled neutral zone before the new beginning.
The experience of concurrent, simultaneously overlapping transitions across every area of life chaotically and desperately draws on the same rapidly depleting reserves. Concurrent meaning-making makes sense of this chaos.
But what Intellectual Lineage created the foundation for concurrent meaning?