Anna arrived at our program looking like someone who had lost her footing on familiar ground.
I’ve seen that look hundreds of times. The particular combination of competence and confusion. The sense that the person in front of me has navigated plenty of hard things before—and is genuinely bewildered about why this time feels so different.
Maybe you know that look. Maybe you’ve worn it yourself.
From the outside, Anna’s life looked full. She was a successful consultant in her late fifties, recently relocated to a new state with her husband for his job opportunity. Her two children had launched into their own lives—a milestone she’d anticipated for years. Her aging parents in India, whom she adored, were still living independently. Everything she had worked toward seemed to be in place.
And yet.
Her husband had asked for a divorce. The request came without warning, accompanied by the revelation of an affair. After twenty-eight years of marriage, the shared story she thought she was living had dissolved overnight.
In the same period, her parents’ health had begun to decline. What had been occasional check-in calls became urgent negotiations about care—coordinating doctors, managing medications, making international flights every few months. She was now sandwiched between children who no longer needed her daily presence and parents who increasingly did, living in a city where she knew almost no one.
“I know I should be handling this better,” she told me in our first conversation. “I’ve navigated hard things before. But this time I can’t seem to find my footing. I wake up and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Not just today—I mean with my life.”
She paused, looking for the right words.
“I feel like I’m failing at something I should know how to do by now.”
The Question That Keeps Us Stuck
Maybe you recognized something in Anna’s words. Maybe you’ve asked a version of her question yourself.
What’s wrong with me?
Why can’t I handle this?
I’ve done hard things before. Why does this feel so impossible?
During my own difficult period—divorce, business launch, kids leaving, mother declining—I asked that question in a hundred different ways. I was convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with my coping mechanisms, my resilience, my capacity to manage life.
It took me years to understand that the question itself was the problem.
There was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with Anna. And there is nothing wrong with you.
The issue isn’t personal failure. It’s navigational confusion—trying to cross complex terrain without recognizing it as terrain at all.
What Anna Couldn’t See
When I asked Anna to step back and actually count what was happening in her life, the picture shifted dramatically.
She wasn’t navigating one hard thing. She was navigating five simultaneous transitions—a complex map of varied terrain, all shifting at once.
Her marriage was ending—a clear, painful conclusion she hadn’t chosen.
Her parenting role was evolving—neither the active mothering of before nor whatever comes next.
Her caregiving responsibilities had intensified without warning, pulling her into an open-ended chapter.
Her social world had been uprooted by the move—she was trying to build community from scratch.
Her work life was in question—she’d paused her consulting practice for the relocation and wasn’t sure if or when to restart it.
Five areas of life. All in flux. At once.
When Anna saw this picture—when she could finally see the full scope of what she was navigating—something shifted in her face.
“No wonder,” she said quietly. “No wonder I feel like I can’t keep up. This is a lot.”
The No Wonder Moment
That shift—from “What’s wrong with me?” to “No wonder I’m struggling”—is one of the most important moments in developing Transitional Intelligence.
I call it the No Wonder Moment.
It sounds like: No wonder I’ve been feeling overwhelmed—there’s a lot changing at once. No wonder the old strategies aren’t working—I’m navigating different terrain now. No wonder I’m exhausted—multiple areas of my life are reorganizing simultaneously.
The No Wonder Moment doesn’t make anything easier. Anna’s situation didn’t change when she saw her map. Her husband still wanted a divorce. Her parents still needed care. She still didn’t know anyone in her new city.
But her relationship to the situation transformed.
She stopped asking what was wrong with her. She started asking a more useful question: Where am I, really—and what does each area of my life actually need right now?
You don’t need to judge yourself. You need to map yourself.
That’s the first principle of Transitional Intelligence. And it changes everything.
You Are Not Alone
Here’s what I’ve learned from working with thousands of people navigating change: Anna’s experience is not unusual. It’s remarkably common.
Most adults—especially from their mid-thirties to mid-seventies—are navigating far more transitions than they realize. Not just the scheduled, anticipated kind like graduation or planned retirement. The unscheduled kind. The health scare that reorganizes your priorities. The relationship that shifts without warning. The career that suddenly feels empty. The parent who needs care. The identity that no longer fits.
When we ask people to actually map all the areas that are shifting in their lives, the average number surprises them. Five areas. Twelve. Sometimes twenty or more. Multiple domains of life, all in motion at once, each demanding attention.
And here’s the thing: we were never taught to recognize this. We were never given language to name this chaos as transitions—normal and navigable, even when they don’t feel that way. These changes in our outer world trigger massive processing in our inner world: identity questions, family impacts, community reactions. So when we feel overwhelmed, we assume something is wrong with us rather than recognizing that we’re carrying a lot.
We are navigating complex terrain without a map.
Why We Look for Single Explanations
When people feel the way Anna felt—the disorientation, the overwhelm, the sense of failing at something they should know how to do—they almost always look for a single explanation.
Maybe I’m depressed.
Maybe I’m burned out.
Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis.
Maybe my marriage is the problem.
Maybe I just need a vacation.
Each explanation has the appeal of simplicity. If you can name the one thing that’s wrong, you can fix the one thing. The problem becomes manageable because it becomes singular.
But here’s the most common mistake I see: it’s never just one thing.
The feeling of overwhelm almost never comes from one transition happening in our life. It comes from multiple transitions happening simultaneously—often without recognition that they’re transitions at all.
When you’re carrying five transitions and trying to solve one, you’ll always feel like you’re failing. The solution keeps not working because you’re addressing a fraction of what’s actually happening.
Seeing the full picture doesn’t give you answers, but it gives you perspective. And perspective is the foundation of wise navigation.
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If you’re ready to gain the perspective you need to navigate your own journey through midlife transitions, be sure to join Kari for our completely revamped Navigating Transitions Online program, which kicks off March 2nd.
Over six weeks, you’ll gain the practical tools and insight you need to embrace change and move through uncertainty with clarity instead of confusion.