Coaching with Stefan
Life Transitions
When the life you’ve been living no longer quite fits — but you don’t yet know what comes next.
Sometimes change arrives through a decision you make.
Sometimes life makes the decision for you.
A relationship ends. Children grow up. Work changes. You move somewhere new. Something you’ve spent years building disappears. Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all — you just know that something doesn’t feel the way it used to.
You don’t need to know what comes next.
Sometimes you need somewhere to understand where you are first.
Recognition before explanation
You might recognise…
- “I know something needs to change. I just don't know what.”
- “The life I thought I was going to have isn't the life I have now.”
- “Everyone seems to expect me to move on, but I'm not there yet.”
- “Part of me is excited by what could come next. Another part is frightened.”
- “I have more freedom than I used to, but I'm not sure what I actually want to do with it.”
- “I've spent so long being who other people needed me to be that I'm not sure who I am anymore.”
- “Something that used to give my life meaning doesn't seem to anymore.”
- “I don't want to recreate my old life. But I don't know what I want the new one to look like.”
- “From the outside everything looks fine. Inside, I know something is shifting.”
There can be a space between lives.
We often talk about change as though one chapter closes and another one begins.
My experience has been messier than that.
Sometimes there is a space in between.
The old life has changed, ended or stopped fitting. But whatever comes next hasn’t revealed itself yet.
That space can contain grief, anger, relief, fear, excitement, freedom and uncertainty — sometimes all at once.
You don’t necessarily need to rush through it.
There may be something worth hearing while you’re there.
A lived connection
The life I thought I was going to have disappeared.
My divorce was probably the biggest transition of my life.
I had grown up watching my parents build a marriage and raise a family together. Somewhere along the way I had formed a picture that said: that is what my life will look like too.
I married. We had two boys.
Then the marriage ended and the world I thought I was building came crashing down. My boys were three and six, and walking away from the everyday family life we had created was the hardest part.
I found myself living in a one-bedroom apartment with a garage full of things from my previous life.
Photo: Adam Winger / Unsplash
Stuff is just stuff.
Things that had belonged to a home and a life that once meant everything suddenly carried very little value.
What mattered far more were the friends and family who were simply there. They gave me space to grieve what I had lost — including the future I thought I was going to have.
Eventually, the exploration moved inward.
For a while I explored the freedom. I travelled, bought a motorbike again, ran races, had relationships and tried different things.
Some were exciting. Some felt surprisingly empty.
Eventually I began slowing down.
I became interested in holistic massage and alternative therapies and leaned further into meditation. The noise began to quieten, and my curiosity started turning towards myself.
I wasn’t only asking what I should do next anymore.
Who am I when I’m not trying to be who I thought I should be?
And then life changed again.
Years later, COVID arrived and the business I had spent years building was hit hard.
Once again I found myself in a dark place, questioning who I was without something that had become such a large part of my identity.
This time an inner voice kept bringing me back to something that had been there throughout my life: being there for people.
I decided to train as a life coach.
But the training wasn’t simply preparation to help somebody else. It became part of my own transition.
I cried in front of a room full of people and didn’t feel embarrassed. I encountered a part of myself I had never really acknowledged — a grumpy old man I seemed to be carrying inside me.
When I finally gave him some space, I cried my heart out.
I wasn’t learning how to become somebody new. I was getting to know more of the person who was already there.
Your transition doesn’t have to look like mine.
Those experiences changed me. Yours may be completely different.
Your life may not have collapsed.
You may not be looking for reinvention.
You may simply know that the person you have been, the life you’ve been living or the things that once mattered don’t quite fit in the same way anymore.
You don’t have to immediately turn that into a plan.
Sometimes the first thing is simply creating enough space to hear what’s going on.
A conversation first
You don’t need to know what comes next before we talk.
A conversation with Stefan. Somewhere to talk about what is changing, what you may be leaving behind and whatever is beginning to emerge.
An unhurried twenty-minute conversation. Nothing needs to be decided.