It’s well known that our satisfaction is directly proportional to our expectations.
I was recently reading Bruce Feiler’s Life is in the Transitions in preparation for book club this week (People asked for a focus on navigating transitions. You should come!) and experienced a helpful reset of expectations courtesy of his research into 225 American life stories.
Feiler is the person who coined the term “lifequakes” to describe forceful bursts of change in our lives that lead to upheaval, transition and renewal. He contrasts these with “disruptors” that are milder and more frequent, but suggests that a pileup of disruptors can form a lifequake. Here’s what he found:
- The average American adult experiences 30 to 40 disruptors in their life. These include, for example, a change in relationship status, the death of a loved one, losing a job, a personal injury — he identifies 52 of them. That means we experience a disruptor every 12 to 18 months.
- People experience three to five lifequakes in their adult lives.
- 75% of people describe these lifequakes as an “autobiographical occasion that caused them to reimagine who they are.”
- A lifequake is not a “midlife crisis” — they are spread out across the lifespan (and there is very little evidence supporting midlife crises anyway)
- 87% of lifequakes are personal (vs. collective) and 57% are involuntary — roughly 50% are both.
- Lifequakes last an average of five years. 75% of people report them lasting four years or more. We therefore spend roughly half of our lives dealing with them.
If you are in the midst of a big transition and it feels like it is taking you a good long while to figure it out, read that again. Lifequakes last an average of five years and we spend roughly half our adult lives dealing with them.
What you are going through is normal. Life is in the transitions. Thankfully, there are tools that help us build our skills in this area — more on that next week.
But while you’re here: I suspect that organizations experience similar patterns…so these skills are not just relevant at an individual level, but at a corporate one as well.