Three agreements frame liminal leadership: change is inevitable, transitions operate differently than normal life, and massive change rewires our brains. The speaker uses a chrysalis as the core metaphor, showing how profound transformation happens invisibly inside, and interrupting it can be fatal.
Before we get into some of the real content, I want to just find out if we can agree on certain ideas. And these are the 3 things I'd like to agree on: that there is change, and that this transition period is different, that change is massive at the moment, and that the change does something to our brains. So let's just explore that a little bit more. In this liminal space, it's like that twilight time. You know, the sun is going down. It's not day, but it's not yet night. It's that in-between time. It's beautiful as twilight, but in other places it could be messy, it could be confusing. It's the period between Christmas and New Year's Day, that kind of week where nobody quite knows what day it is or what they're supposed to be doing. And it's like how we feel when we go to an airport and we have a layover in the middle of the night. There's no rules that apply there, it's all different. So this change is happening. When we look at a particular change, so when we look at this, in this case of a chrysalis, we had a caterpillar, it becomes a butterfly, but in that in-between time when it's in this chrysalis, it is— it's a soup, it's a messy soup of things. It's really unpleasant. If you interrupt that process, it will die. It will not actually emerge from the chrysalis. what is happening inside of that chrysalis is happening on the inside. We don't see it from the outside. So very often there is change happening, but we're not witnessing it, or we're not quite sure of what is going on, or we're impatient for it to finish. But we have to allow that process to finish. And the other thing is that that change for that particular butterfly is a massive change. If we're the gardener, we're looking at a tree full of these chrysalises, and it's just, you know, we've come to expect it. It's not that big a change for us. We're just witnessing this as we carry on with the rest of our garden work. So sometimes a huge shift happens in a private place, and we don't always see that, or we can't explain that to other people. And that's part of the liminality, the space in between, is what are we witnessing and what aren't we witnessing? What is hidden from us?
Unlock the Power of Thresholds_ What Ancient Wisdom Teaches About New Beginnings
