Endings are tougher and take longer than we think. No matter how unhappy we may be in a job, most of us continue to revisit the possibility of making it work because the present role is necessarily tied to a possible self—an image, outdated though it may be, of whom we once wanted to become. June’s academic identity, for example, kept reasserting itself throughout the entire transition period, even after she had handed in her resignation. “My department was family, a dysfunctional one,” June says, “but one I was an intimate part of, one I joined at age seventeen when I went to college.” For her, leaving academia meant not just giving up a long-term career objective but also an image of who she should become that important people in her life, including her mentor, harbored. The emotions she felt when she found the pile of draft articles that would have assured her professorial future show just how much giving up a possible self—even one that has become a burden or lost its appeal—marks a real loss.

The between-identities phase of a career transition is about bringing possibilities to life, proving they are feasible and not just pipe dreams, and learning whether they are appealing in practice or only in theory. To discard outdated identities once and for all (that is, to do the work of ending), we need some good substitutes. Old possible selves are always more vivid than the new: They are attached to familiar routines, to people we trust, to well-rehearsed stories. The selves that have existed only in our minds as fantasies or that are grounded only in fleeting encounters with people who captured our imagination are much fuzzier, fragile, unformed. The middle period is the incubator in which provisional identities are brought, tentatively, into the world via the projects we start, the people we meet, and the meaning we lend to the events of that period.

For action-oriented people, the waiting time, ambivalence, or oscillating commitment to a future course of action of the in-between period can be hard to tolerate. Three temptations, listed below, are common. The danger, of course, is circumventing the reinventing process. Check which of the three, if any, is the most tempting to you right now:

• Taking on too many commitments while in between roles when what you need is some time to rest, restore, or step back before plunging into active mode.

• Exploring one kind of career possibility at a time when you’d learn more by exploring multiple options simultaneously.

• Taking the “bird in hand” job opportunity, because it’s just taking too long, when you might be better off holding out a little longer for something that is a better fit for you.

We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well. The same dynamic explains why young adults seem to change when they go away to college and interaction with family members and prior friends is necessarily reduced.

Similarly, research on the “fresh start” effect shows that while people experience heightened goal-oriented motivation upon returning to work after a holiday, this motivation peaks on the first day back and declines rapidly thereafter. What we do in the period immediately following a time-out, it seems, determines whether we will be able to use that experience to effect real change or whether, instead, old routines will reassert themselves, leaving basic problems unresolved until urgency builds the next time around.