The change cycle, which Martha Beck explains in detail in her book Finding Your Own North Star, is about the cycle of change we all go through every time we have a major transition in our lives. It’s a circle, just like the circle of life, even though the four different stages of the change cycle are labeled squares (as in “back to square one!”)

• Square One: Death and Rebirth
• Square Two: Dreaming and Scheming
• Square Three: The Hero’s Saga
• Square Four: The Promised Land

We all go through all four squares, hopefully ending up in Square Four, the Promised Land, for as long as possible before a catalytic event throws us back into Square One again. It’s tempting to try to skip squares, but we all have to plod through each square, step by step, if we want to make it all the way to the Promised Land.

Square One: Death and Rebirth is where you end up when something happens to change your identity of yourself. If you’ve been married for many years, you will not only grieve the loss of your partner when he or she dies, you will also grieve the loss of who you were when you were with that person. You will have lost a major part of your identity and that loss must be grieved and accepted before there is the possibility of finding a new identity for yourself.

Square Two: Dreaming and Scheming is the stage of change that happens after you’ve grieved the loss of your old identity and begun to accept that you have a new identity. It’s when you start to dream about what that new identity can be. At the beginning of Square Two, your dreams are wispy and insubstantial, and very infrequent. By the end of Square Two, you are making plans! You have a lot of ideas about who you are becoming and you are itching to start implementing your ideas.

Square Three: The Hero’s Saga is where the rubber meets the road. All the dreams and plans you’ve come up with now need to be undertaken and tried out in the real world. The hero’s saga is full of “two steps forward and one step back” as you encounter obstacles to your dreams and continue to push forward and rework your ideas.

Square Four: The Promised Land is when all the hard work of the previous squares pays off. You can relax a little and spend more time enjoying the fruits of your labors. You may need to change things here and there, but the major remodeling has been completed. You have a new life, a new identity that feels comfortable. You stay here as long as you can, knowing that something could happen at any moment to push you back into Square One.

Think about your current life situation. Where are you in the change cycle?

Next week I’ll write in more detail about Square One: Death and Rebirth.