Up: [[People]] Created: 2025-01-07 ![[William-Bridges-author-organizational-consultant.webp|300]] ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTANT. AUTHOR AND SPEAKER American — Mill Valley, California 1933 - 2013 (79 years old) ## How I First Learned of Him As is almost always true for me, my introduction to this mentor began with a book. In this case, *Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change* (1991) ## Since Then… But the far more influential book for me was Bridges’ *The Way of Transition* in 2000. That one really hit home because it was autobiographical. It’s not that I was going through his changes — coming to terms with the cancer diagnosis and death of his first wife. But the ways he dealt with the inner psychological process of transition were helpful to me in my own change process then and each of the next three times I read the book. ## William Bridges through the Lens of Instructions for Life ##### PAY ATTENTION It was through paying such close attention to the emotional and psychological issues when trying to negotiate transition in his own life that William Bridges carved out his model of transitions. ##### BE AMAZED William Bridges was an American Literature professor, specializing in the transcendentalists, when he decided to take a sabbatical to study the psychology of literature. This was in the 60s, the heyday of the human potential movement at places like Esalen and Berkeley and Bridges got very involved in humanistic psychology, eventually becoming the first president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology. He left his college position in 1974 and moved his family to an intentional community of psychologists just north of San Francisco. That intentional community didn’t work out, but Bridges had found his life’s work in paying attention to, writing and teaching about the transitions that always accompany any change. ##### TELL ABOUT IT Bridges’ model has been influential with individuals, and especially with corporations, for more than forty years. His understanding that you can’t succeed at change (an external event) unless you address transition (the inner psychological process) is a major contribution to change theory.