It has been said that the only constant is change.
We know this intellectually, of course, and we stand on the precipice of transition day in and day out. But how can we handle the never ending barrage of changes we have faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? The political landscape in the years leading up to its global events? Or the bizarre yet crucial current election cycle?
Ask anyone you know right now—anxiety seems to have hit an all-time high out there, and we are all struggling to roll with punches, even if, in any given year, we might change jobs, move or gain and lose love, friends, family, etc. The bottom line is that our lives revolve around change, and at the root of our ability to handle them—or not handle them—lies fear.
Yet, given its presence within our lives, change need not be so terrifying, according to Santa Fe-based consultant and author Rebecca Borland Reynolds, whose forthcoming book Thresholds of Change aims to both demystify our feelings around flux while providing language and tools to better accept the brass tacks reality of our lives: Transition is a fact of existence.
A nomadic sort with roots in Colorado, Reynolds moved to Santa Fe from Italy in the early days of the pandemic, mere weeks before that country descended into some of its darkest days in recent memory (talk about change). Reynolds is a history and opera buff who, across 30 years working as a consultant for countless clients, began to notice patterns in how change plays out. In broad strokes, we might liken them to the seasons, Reynolds tells SFR—or, as an imperfect analogy, think of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief; though, Reynolds posits, the idea that everyone experiences grief in the same ways is outdated. Even so, she says, if we have the tools to identify the onset of transition and/or the ways in which it tends to play out, we might better be equipped to navigate our intellectual and emotional responses in real time.
Thresholds of Change is not your typical self-help book, Reynolds says. In fact, she says, she finds the concept of self-help fraught with idealism and hollow promises. And, she adds, whereas most books she has read on the topic of transition tend to dwell within the aftermath, hers is meant to work like a top-to-bottom companion. With a release date of Oct. 1 and a Sept. 20 author event at the Santa Fe Public Library, we spoke with Reynolds to learn more and include herein an excerpt from Thresholds of Change. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Courtesy Thresholds of Change
SFR: What led you to focus on the idea of change?
Rebecca Borland Reynolds: Just so you know, I moved five times before I was 10 and went to 10 different schools before high school. So I was in training from a young age for change without knowing it. Each year it was new, and I’d be very sad, very lonely, feeling ostracized—and it got worse as I was older. I remember my mother saying, “The first three weeks are always the hardest!” And that told me a couple things. Number one, it taught me that what I was feeling wouldn’t last forever, which is important. We can get really into how we’re feeling, but it passes, it shifts. Number two, that I’d been through it before, so I could rely on those experiences for this one.
My change was…gap years before we had a term for that; different colleges—NYU and Hampshire College; I went abroad. I had two jobs after college, and after those two jobs, I finally realized that that I was kind of a change junkie. I started my consultant firm in 1991, and I realized that I liked change. It took me a longer time to realize that what I was doing with people was helping them navigate change.
The piece around seeing change as a process with its own phases and sequences, I didn’t consciously realize that for another 10 years. I was just doing the work. It was coming to me, and I never called it “change work,” it was whatever the client needed.
If there are patterns to changes, are there patterns to how people address, fight and/or accept them?
Yes. There’s a sequence to change, and the metaphor I use is the seasons. There are four sequential seasons, and they go in the same order every time. They may look different ways in different places in the world, but everybody knows them and everybody knows the words for them. But if we didn’t know what winter was, we’d talk about it over and over and we might not realize we need to wear a heavy coat or scarf. It’s as if we named summer “too hot.” Well, not everybody thinks summer is too hot. We’re in a stage, but we don’t know how to react to change. That’s what I do. First of all, to help people recognize what they’re feeling is fine. When we’re struggling with change, we think there’s something wrong, and that feels terrible. But I say there’s nothing wrong, you’re just getting ready.
There’s that common universal sequence I work with and that I describe in the book, and there are also common responses. And there are different aptitudes for change, just like musicality or sports — there are people who are much more athletic than I am naturally. I can work on my body, but I’m never going to be an athlete, and change is the same way. If you’ve got a higher level of natural aptitude for change, you’re going to change more or you’re going to like it, you’re going to look at it like it’s fun. If your aptitude is lower for change, you’re going to feel more nervous, scared, resistant. That’s natural, but we can get to a point where our identity and what we know about the world starts to impede us.
Courtesy Thresholds of Change
Is it evolutionary? For example, I read that some people are night people because back when we were, like, ancient villages, some would have to stay up to keep an eye out while others slept.
I assume…like why are some people terrified of heights, and why are others not? It’s all in our minds. I do understand there are those human inborn proclivities, but what I am saying is that change is natural to everyone, as is music, as is moving the body—if you want to, you can get better at it.
So we can assume that, like most things, fear is the root cause for resistance to change or trouble addressing it?
There are many people who are not afraid of change, and this book speaks to them as well. Every single stage has outputs and indicators that are positive and joyous, because change is not always bad. Sometimes it’s love. Think of when people are getting married or having a baby, and they’re so excited, right?
There’s fear, yes. And there are many challenges to change, but I’m saying to live your life—don’t live your obligations. We have become very obligated in the world and very guilt-ridden by what other people want and need from us to such a degree that we can get trapped in a place that doesn’t serve us anymore. We have to find a way to have those conversations. We need to honor when our interior place is calling for change, too, and we don’t need to understand it or defend it. People either want to change or they don’t, and if they don’t, it’s usually fear of one of two things: what will they have to let go of, and what in the world is coming?
I don’t want to belabor it, but my mind goes to the dreaded pandemic and the change that came from that. People struggled with that level of change.
One of the reasons the pandemic for me wasn’t so terribly traumatic is because I see the cycle and the stages. I mean, it was terrible no question, but it was interesting for me to see almost the entire world go into The Liminal stage together. It was -remarkable. People couldn’t live their normal lives and everything got smaller, and that’s The Liminal—where nothing happens externally, but everything is happening internally. There is always suffering in The Liminal, but it’s a generative space. I used it to help me understand my book better. I don’t mean there wasn’t awful grief, but The Liminal is about letting go of what was. Change always involves letting go, and every human was letting go of their normal lives and routines.
But change can be so good. In some ways the pandemic activated some beautiful things. We were cooking for each other again. We were sitting outside under the stars and telling stories. We weren’t allowed to do all the restaurant and music and entertainment, but it was a time for going inward. Now, we’ve come through The Liminal, and we’re still metabolizing what that change is about. I don’t think we’re finished.
Courtesy Thresholds of Change
Can we talk about the self-help thing? Because usually I see those books and think, “Oh, God. Ugh.”
I find them kind of tedious, frankly, because if I get it in the first 10 pages and now they’re saying it over and over and over...I mean, I don’t have anything against them, but I never wanted to call this book a self-help book, I wanted to call it a “big think” book. Thresholds of Change is saying, “it doesn’t matter if you want or like or don’t want or don’t like change—it’s happening.” It’s got it’s own breadth, and if you don’t know what that is, you’re likely going to struggle more than you need to struggle. And there isn’t anything out there like it—I looked.
You break down change into four recurring phases. Tell us about those phases?
Because I wasn’t so arrogant to assume I’d invented this concept, but every model I could find on change was built around our emotional and/or behavioral response to change. And the problem with that is that the response is as varied as there are people and situations. Look, the five stages of grief thing helped whole generations deal with the hardest change we face, which is death, and I thought about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model—which absolutely helped me when my father passed away suddenly—but I realized her critics said that, because not everyone experiences these changes in the same sequence…I needed to talk about what’s happening with change itself as opposed to how we are experiencing it.
So we have number one—Instigation. Something that was working or existed no longer does, or something starts to destabilize. Somebody dies, gets sick, gets fired. But usually there are signs earlier on that change is afoot. What we want to be doing is looking for what’s happening in our life. As much as we can prepare, we can never prepare ourselves out of the situation.
Number two is The Liminal. This is where the change is being wrought without us doing anything, and that’s the hardest part. The body is trying to get you to stop so it can do the work. When you feel like lying on the couch? Lie on the couch! Change doesn’t get figured out, it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s about growing. How long does The Liminal last? Well, how long does it take you to let go of your “I know” mind? How long are you going to Google answers? I want to be clear that change happens at different scales. When I got divorced, when my father died, times I fell flat—I did understand where I was and I knew not to avoid grieving. I knew I needed to bring it on.
Number three is Metabolization, when the change is wrought in the body and we begin to feel that spark. It means maybe a new behavior, a new idea or things that surprise us or seem ridiculous or we feel giddy about. I recognize it as a sign that the change has happened and now we need to bring it into form. Metabolization is the playful stage. People are so glad to be out of The Liminal, and we start to feel excited about life again. But the worst thing we can do is grab onto the first thing that comes. Think about the rebound relationship, for example.
Then number four is Manifestation. Often you don’t even notice because the fit is so perfect, and what I mean by fit is the new form—maybe a job, car, house, person—is so good with that internal shift that you’re able to express your being in a whole new way, and that is so energizing.
Courtesy Thresholds of Change
Have you taught these concepts?
I did teach it to a small group to test it, like a pilot to see if it made sense and if I could explain it, or if it was just my internal weirdness. That was back in 2017, and what was cool was that the people in that workshop were applying the model to completely different changes like climate change, a dying father, a business transformation. They were bringing every single kind of change, which is exactly my point. The change process doesn’t care what it is. That workshop gave me the sense that I could help people.
Without giving away the farm, is there some big takeaway?
What is the big takeaway? Change is happening. It’s got its own process and we’ve forgotten that. This book is about bringing it back to conscious awareness. It’s perfect for the “I know” mind. We can begin to see a pattern we can get more comfortable with, and we’re not in any one stage at any one time—we’re in all of them. We’re dealing with an election, you’ve got a situation at work, I don’t know what’s happening with anyone’s home life, but it’s all at once. If we can see that process happening, where we are with each of those? It helps.
Thresholds of change author talk with Rebecca Borland Reynolds: 4 pm Friday, Sept. 20. Free with registration. Santa Fe Public Library (Main Branch), 145 Washington Ave., (505) 955-678
Mollusk as Metaphor
Given that change is constant and ubiquitous, with infinite faces based on each person’s change ability and perception (as well as the change’s scale), the process common to all change can be challenging to perceive. In fact, the aspects of the change and our emotional reactions create such a compelling narrative that the underlying change process may as well be invisible. To bring greater awareness to this undertide of change, let’s look at how another life form changes. Its change process is instructive in revealing something about our own.
The nautilus, a 500-million-year-old sea mollusk, is an enduring emblem of change. It’s one of the oldest living species on the planet, arriving on earth 200 million years before the dinosaurs. Clearly, such amazing resilience means that the nautilus is adept at its change process. When we think of a nautilus, its stunning spiral shell comes to mind. However, the nautilus is actually a mollusk, a soft rubbery creature that lives inside its protective shell. As the nautilus grows, it creates a new chamber within the shell, sealing off the old, too-small one behind it. These chambers form the nautilus’s captivating shell. The old chambers are air-filled, and with each new one created, the nautilus gives itself space to grow and increases its buoyancy. The nautilus doesn’t leave its past behind; it weaves from the past the vessel of its life, using it for sustenance, protection, and an enhanced ability to maneuver through deeper waters.
In carrying all the old chambers through its life span, the nautilus’ change process mirrors our own. With each new change cycle, we create more experiences and gain knowledge, enhancing our ability to navigate our world. We, too, can see our past as a spiraling structure of wisdom to elevate, guide, and propel us through life. The nautilus shell represents the way each life expands, prompting the need for a new, larger chamber to contain that life. Like the nautilus, we outgrow our old chambers and create new ones as long as we’re alive.
Another aspect of the nautilus’s change process involves something called the siphuncle. As the nautilus makes each new chamber, the siphuncle, a continuous strand of tissue that runs between chambers, connects the mollusk to all its former ones. Through the siphuncle, the nautilus adeptly regulates gas and fluid levels in each chamber, even as it moves from one to the next. In this way, the nautilus manages its equilibrium throughout the process, adapting to its watery environment. We can liken the siphuncle to some part of us that is essential and stays with us always. A core life-giving line that provides ballast as it connects us to all parts of our life, even to those we’ve left behind.
Form is integrally involved in change. As we change out our old forms (houses, relationships, jobs, business models, offices, products), just as the nautilus does its chambers, we can see that the form of what is changing is akin to the nautilus’s shell. The shell expands in a spiral, as old chambers are left behind and new ones are created. However, it’s the mollusk that grows and causes the changes in the shell. It’s the same with us. We’re here to grow and learn, to develop our capacity for living and become our completely unique version of being human. The forms of our lives, like the nautilus’s chambers, come and go. But they shift and morph and expand because we do. As each new chamber is created, the nautilus shell expands, wrapping around its center in the shape as determined by the golden ratio found repeatedly in nature—in ferns, storm clouds, galaxies, flocks of birds taking flight, and on and on. The nautilus chambers symbolize our changing life circumstances—whatever they may be and however we may recognize and define them. Our changing circumstances create and reflect our expanding human experience. The number of new chambers we as individuals, groups, or a species will make during our life spans will differ, but all life moves in this spiraling journey. This spiral pattern is symbolic of human change and growth over time: we come around to the same issues time and again, but at larger and larger scales to match our growing awareness and capability.
The nautilus symbolizes the continual expansion of life in a spiral path and models the ease with which it moves from chamber to chamber as it grows. It’s not forced to move, expelled from the old chamber, kicking and screaming. Rather, it senses that it’s time to begin creating a new space and does so with efficiency and ease. Accomplished without drama or crisis, each new chamber is made with unerring precision. As long as the nautilus is alive, it creates new chambers. Its growth is a given. Ours can be too.
The nautilus may be more than a metaphor. What if human change actually follows the same spiral pattern as the nautilus shell? If we could take a picture of the cumulative changes over our lifetimes or over the entire existence of humanity, might we see a spiraling, energetic contrail—the same spiral we see in galaxies, tornados, shells, and leaves? On our spiraling journey we encounter the events of our lives, revisiting essential learning at increasing scales, deepening our awareness, our understanding, and, ultimately, our ability to bring forth into the world more of who we are.
Our journey is far from linear. Our desire to make it so confounds and deflates us. How often have we encountered a situation like one in the past, and sighed, “Oh no, not that again. I thought I’d handled that!” This reaction is caused by how we think: We go to college for four years. We study a certain set of subjects, prove our understanding of them, and then we graduate, receiving a diploma that tells us and the world we’re finished with that. This idea that the journey of learning and development is linear and accomplishable at some final fixed point is an illusion.
The trajectory of life is an ever-expanding circle made by a chain of changing experiences. We travel a dynamic life of change in a spiral around ourselves. With each revolution, we grow. Like the nerve spirals in our eyes or the funnels of the wind, the ocean’s vortexes, and the galaxy’s whorl in our vast universe, we each traverse this path. To see that this is a constant pattern until life ends is not depressing or wearying; it’s enlivening. We’re all doing it, and this means the journey is what’s truly important.
The nautilus represents the idea—a primordial, essential idea—that we’re here to learn, and that this learning, while it takes many forms, is following this fundamental human trajectory. Life is all about this development of self, whether an individual self or a collective one. It’s driven by the yearning toward what Aristotle called eudaemonia, or fully flourishing humanity. The nautilus shows us this outward arcing. Our development can and should be an efficient movement into a wider, fuller experience of ourselves and the world, rather than a painful clinging to the past, stifling ourselves in cramped, too-small chambers. Through the nautilus, we can see our expansion and the winding path it takes through change. With the Thresholds of Change as a clear model of the process, we can approach it as curious rather than confounding, intriguing rather than frustrating, an adventure rather than a torture.
