Viveka 
What is the liminal zone in a career transition?
The liminal zone is the in-between stretch after you leave a role that no longer fits and before the next identity has formed — the gap where your old title is gone and your new one hasn’t shown up yet. Anthropologists use the word “liminality” for it, and it points to a real developmental stage, not a personal failing or proof you made the wrong call.
I fly hang gliders, so let me tell you the closest thing I know to how this feels. There’s a moment right after you launch off the ramp where you’ve committed, both feet have left the ground, and the wing hasn’t fully caught the air yet — a second or two of pure freefall where your stomach drops and some very honest part of your brain says OH SH*T. And then the wind fills the sail, the glider bites into the lift, and that same voice flips straight to woooohoooo. Leaving a career you’d outgrown drops you into the first part, where the commitment is made, the ground is gone, and the lift hasn’t caught yet.
Most of the women I work with hit this zone the day they send the resignation email and the office door clicks shut behind them (and it’s usually quieter than they pictured — no fanfare, just a suddenly empty calendar). For twenty or thirty years they knew exactly who they were by Monday morning — the role, the metrics, the person everyone came to for the answer. Then the calendar empties out, and the quiet that everyone else calls freedom shows up feeling a lot more like grief. I’ve been writing a series about the whole arc from constriction to creation, and this in-between is the messy middle of it.
Why does the space after you leave feel so awful when you chose it?
It feels awful because your sense of who you are was wired into the role you left, and that wiring doesn’t disconnect the moment you hand in your badge. You can want the change completely and still feel unmoored by it, because you didn’t only leave a job — you left the daily structure that told you what you were worth and what you were for.
Nobody teaches us how to stand in that gap. We get taught how to get the job and how to do the job, and then we’re handed absolutely nothing for the part where the job is over and the next thing hasn’t arrived. So the discomfort catches accomplished women off guard, and — because we’re accomplished and used to being good at things — we tend to read the discomfort as evidence that we’re doing it wrong. You’re not doing it wrong. Freefall is supposed to feel like freefall.
There’s grief in here too, and it’s worth being honest about. You’re mourning a version of yourself who was competent and known and (let’s be real) sometimes admired, and mourning her doesn’t mean you want her job back — it means she mattered. I ignored the LinkedIn and tech expertise I’d spent a decade building for a full year after I left Vengreso, because I couldn’t tell the difference between “this chapter is over” and “this whole part of me is over,” and that’s a costly mistake I’d love you to skip.
Should you rush to fill the gap with a new certification or side project?
No — rushing to fill the gap is the single most common way women recreate the exact thing they just left. When the emptiness feels unbearable, the reflex is to sign up for a certification, launch a side project, or build a whole new offer inside of a month, and that reflex is usually the old identity grabbing for the nearest thing that feels like productivity.
The problem isn’t ambition (I have plenty and so do you). The problem is timing. If you fill the space before you’ve let it teach you anything, you tend to fill it with a slightly repainted version of what you already had — the same overwork and the same borrowed definition of success that made you leave in the first place. I’ve watched brilliant women escape a role that was slowly crushing them and then, six weeks later, build a business that crushes them in precisely the same way, just with their own name on the door.
Here’s what I’d do instead. Give yourself permission to not monetize the emptiness immediately, treat the pause as part of the work rather than a hole in the work, and let the next thing form out of who you’re becoming instead of who you’re scrambling not to be. Reinvention for experienced women isn’t starting over from zero — it’s taking the puzzle pieces of everything you already know and reassembling them into something that actually fits. Reassembly, not erasure. You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (I did, and I don’t recommend it).
What question should replace “What’s my next career move?”
Replace “What’s my next career move?” with “Who am I becoming?” The first question sends you hunting for a job title to plug into the hole, and the second one lets the answer come from the person you’re turning into, which is the only place a next chapter that fits can actually come from.
This is a small swap that changes everything downstream. “What’s my next move” keeps you inside the old frame where your worth is a position on an org chart, and it pushes you to decide fast so the anxiety will stop. “Who am I becoming” slows the whole thing down on purpose and points you at your values, your curiosity, and the kind of days you actually want to have — the raw material a real next chapter gets built from. I’m not against a plan (I love a plan), but a plan built before you know who’s making it is just the old you booking the old future.
How do you actually move through the liminal zone?
You move through it by slowing down inside it and staying curious, not by out-hustling it — the way out is on the far side of the discomfort. There are a handful of moves that make the freefall survivable, and none of them are about forcing clarity before it’s ready.
Normalize the discomfort as recalibration. What feels like regression — the empty calendar, the wobble, the who-even-am-I mornings — is your system recalibrating after decades of pointing in one fixed direction, and calling it recalibration instead of failure changes what you do with it.
Experiment with identity in low-stakes ways. Volunteer, take the class for fun and not for a credential, make the thing you have no plan to sell, say yes to the project that doesn’t obviously “count” — you’re gathering data on who you’re becoming, and you can’t think your way to that answer, you have to try things.
Keep your people close. Isolation is where the liminal zone turns from uncomfortable to genuinely risky, so stay in community with people who knew you before the title and will still know you after it (this is a big part of why I built a free collaborative for exactly this stretch).
Build a couple of grounding rituals. A walk, a morning page, a standing coffee with a friend, whatever keeps you tethered while the rest of your identity is up in the air.
Take the pressure off monetizing. Give the emerging thing room to become itself before you staple a price to it, because the fastest way to strangle a real next chapter is to demand it pay rent before it’s done forming. Part of what I do with private clients is help them tell which kind of stuck they’re actually in — genuinely stuck, overwhelmed, or not really wanting to go there — and you can see how that work is structured if that’s the support you need.
What does the liminal zone give you if you let it?
It gives you back a sense of your own worth that isn’t tied to output, and it reconnects you with plain ordinary joy you probably haven’t had time for in years. When the calendar isn’t dictating your value by the hour, you get to find out what you’re worth when you’re producing nothing — which turns out to be a genuinely useful thing to know before you build the next thing.
And then there’s the clarity, which I want to be straight about, because everyone promises it and nobody tells you how it actually shows up. Clarity doesn’t come as a lightning bolt or a single obvious sign (I waited for that sign, and it does not come in the mail). It comes as quiet whispers that only get loud enough to hear once you’ve stopped running long enough to listen, which is the whole reason the slowing down works and the hustling-through doesn’t. The wind fills the wing when you stop thrashing.