St. Patrick's Day, Career Transitions, and the Season of Change

Most countries celebrate their national day on the date they declared independence, won a war, or became a republic. France has Bastille Day. The United States has the Fourth of July. Ireland does something different.

St. Patrick's Day, held on March 17th, marks the feast day of Ireland's patron saint — the anniversary of his death in 461 AD. Not a revolution. Not a founding moment. A death. And the man being honoured wasn't even Irish. Born in Roman Britain in the late 4th century, Patrick was kidnapped at 16 and taken to Ireland as an enslaved person. He escaped and then came back. 

There's something distinctly Irish about that choice of national symbol. Not the triumphant moment of arrival, but the figure who left, wandered, suffered, found himself, and returned changed. A story not of conquest but of transformation.

Which is why, every March, I find myself thinking about transitions.

Three People, One Recurring Theme

Right now, I'm working with three coachees in the middle of significant career changes. Different industries, different countries, different reasons. But the same thing underneath: 

They are between one version of themselves and the next.

The first is closing down a business they built themselves to start something new. The second is leaving a long corporate career to go out on their own. The third moved countries to be with family, stepped away from work for a period, and is now re-entering the workforce in a new market.

None of them are lost. But all of them are experiencing something that doesn't get named clearly enough in the career development world — and because it doesn't get named, it's harder to navigate than it needs to be.

Why Transitions Feel So Destabilizing 

Most people assume the hard part of a career transition is practical: finding the next role, updating the CV, knowing what to say in interviews. Those things are real, but they're not usually what keeps people awake at night.

The harder thing is identity.

Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and former faculty member at INSEAD and Harvard Business School, has spent decades researching how people navigate career transitions. Her finding: most of us experience the move to a new working life "as a time of confusion, loss, insecurity, and uncertainty." (Source: Researchgate: Working Identity, Your Personal Story, Strategies for Reinventing Your Career)

The reason, she argues, is that we've lost the narrative thread of our professional lives. The job title, the team, the routine, the building — these things quietly do an enormous amount of work in telling us (and others) who we are. When they're gone or changing, there's a vacuum. And nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum.

In her books Working Identity and Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Ibarra explores career reinvention as a process rather than a single moment — a period where professional identity is in flux, the old narrative no longer fits, but the new one hasn't fully taken shape yet. 

That liminal state — the in-between — is exactly where my three clients are right now. And it's exactly where St. Patrick was for years before anyone called him a saint.

The Spring Analogy (Bear With Me)

If you've lived in Ireland for any length of time, you know that spring doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive on a particular Tuesday and stay. It comes in fits and starts — a beautiful week in February that makes you think it's here, then two weeks of grey that make you think you imagined it. And then gradually, without a clear turning point, it simply is. The evenings get longer. The trees do their thing. You stop being surprised by the light.

Career transitions work the same way. There's rarely a clean before and after. There's a long, messy middle that doesn't feel like progress while you're in it — and that almost always looks like progress when you look back at it from the other side.

This isn't a reason to be patient of course (it would be hypocritical for me to advise that as I, for one, am very impatient by nature). But it might very well be an invitation to tweak our expectations, i.e. stop expecting linearity from a process that is inherently nonlinear.

A Framework for the Middle: The Three-Point Compass

Over years of coaching people through transitions, I've found that most of what helps can be organized around three honest questions (that most people avoid asking because the answers are uncomfortable.)

Question 1: What are you actually grieving?

Why does this matter?

Every transition involves loss — even the ones you chose, even the ones you're excited about. Closing a business you built is a loss. Leaving a corporate career you've had for fifteen years, even when you're desperate to leave, is a loss. Taking time away from work to be with your family is a choice that carries a cost. If you don't acknowledge the loss, it doesn't go away. It follows you into the next chapter and shows up sideways — as procrastination, as irritability, as an inability to commit to the new direction.

What to do:

Write it down. Not necessarily a polished reflection — just a rough, honest list, an unstructured download or your stream of consciousness even. 

• What are you leaving behind? 

• What are you afraid you'll never get back? 

• What do you miss that you haven't admitted you miss? 

Getting it out of your head and onto paper doesn't solve it, but it stops it running quietly in the background.

"We oscillate between holding on to the past and embracing the future. Why? We have lost the narrative thread of our professional life." — Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity, Harvard Business Review Press

Question 2: What is actually in your control?

Why does this matter?

A large proportion of transition anxiety lives in the conflation of things that are genuinely in your hands with things that aren't. The timeline is not in your control. How fast the market responds is not in your control. Whether your former colleagues think you made the right decision is not in your control. What other people say about your choices is not in your control.

What is in your control: the quality of your work, how you show up, the conversations you initiate, what you learn, how you spend your time, and which opportunities you say yes and no to.

INSEAD research on career transitions identifies that most successful transitions involve moving through phases — and that people who stall tend to direct their energy toward variables they cannot influence, while people who progress focus relentlessly on action within their immediate sphere. (Source: Identity Transitions, Possible Selves, Liminality, and the Dynamics of Career Change, INSEAD)

What to do:

Draw a line down the middle of a page. 

On the left: everything you're worrying about that you can actually do something about. 

On the right: everything you're worrying about that you cannot. 

Then only work the left column. This sounds obvious. And yet, we often don't take a moment to differentiate the controllable from the uncontrollable. 

Question 3: What stays constant regardless of what changes?

Why does this matter?

When the external markers of identity shift — title, employer, industry, routine — people often feel like they've lost themselves. They, of course, haven't. Their values haven't changed. Their strengths haven't changed. The way they think about problems, the kind of work they find energizing, the things they care about — none of that moved. It just hasn't been named explicitly, because up until now the job was doing that naming for them.

Ibarra's research found that "by far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change careers is delaying the first step until they have settled on a destination." Instead, she advocates for crafting small experiments — side projects, conversations, short engagements — that allow you to test new directions on a limited scale without abandoning what you know about yourself. (Source: On Many Possible Selves, Reworking our Identities to Reinvent our Careers, INSEAD)

What to do:

Get explicit about your constants. Ask yourself: 

• What kind of problems do I gravitate toward? 

• What do people consistently come to me for? 

• What would I do even if nobody was paying me? 

• What am I doing when I feel most like myself?

These are your anchors. Write them down. Return to them when the transition feels most disorienting.

The Specific Challenges of Each Transition Type

"I'm closing one business to start another."

The public narrative around serial entrepreneurs tends to skip the ending. It jumps from "I built a thing" to "and now I'm building the next thing," as if the space between is just an administrative detail, when we all know it is a lot more than just a detail. 

Closing or handing over something you built is a particular kind of hard. There's grief in it — real grief — even when the decision is right, even when you're excited about what's next.

The work is to let the ending be an ending, properly, before you try to make the beginning a beginning. Founders who rush this part tend to carry the unprocessed emotion of the old venture into the new one, where it creates problems that look like strategy issues but aren't.

"I'm leaving corporate to build something of my own."

There's a moment — it varies by person, but it usually arrives somewhere between week three and week eight of working for yourself — when the freedom you'd been so looking forward to stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like freefall. Nobody is setting the agenda. Nobody is validating the decisions. The performance review cycle that you used to dread was quietly doing a lot of work in telling you whether you were okay.

As Ibarra observes in her work on career reinvention, people "don't know how to search when they don't know exactly what they're searching for." The transition from corporate to entrepreneurship is as much about learning to self-validate as it is about building a business.

That's not a soft insight. It's a practical one. If you can't self-validate, you'll seek constant external reassurance from clients, investors, or your network — and that has real commercial consequences.

"I'm re-entering work after time away."

This transition gets the least airtime and probably deserves a lot more than it gets. The assumption — sometimes from others, often internalized — is that time away from work means falling behind. That the career pauses while life happens.

What actually happens is different. People who take time away to move countries, raise children, care for family, or simply catch their breath tend to come back with a clearer sense of what they want and a longer view of what matters. The challenge is rarely competence — it's confidence. Specifically, the confidence that was quietly tied to the institutional context that no longer exists.

The work here is evidentiary. You need to collect evidence — from your own history, from people who've worked with you, from early wins in the new context — that you are still exactly who you were before you left. Because you are. With more perspective. More resilience. And usually, a more interesting story.

What St. Patrick Understood About Transition

St. Patrick spent years in Europe after escaping from Ireland before eventually returning as a missionary. He didn't know, when he finally came back, how it would go. He'd spent a significant portion of his life in in-between states — enslaved, escaped, wandering, training, waiting.

What the legend (and the research) both suggest is that the in-between is not wasted time. It's where the transformation actually happens. Not in the triumphant arrival. In the years of not-yet.

As Ibarra writes, transitions "move forward and then fall backward repeatedly, but at some point, if you learn enough along the way, the transition sustains its momentum." 

That's not a comfortable message. But it's an honest one.

Frequently Asked Questions About Career Transitions

How long does a career transition typically take?

Research suggests that meaningful career transitions — those involving a change of industry, role type, or professional identity — typically take one to three years to fully consolidate. This doesn't mean one to three years of uncertainty or a break, but it does mean that expecting a clean resolution in a few months is usually unrealistic.

Is it normal to feel worse before you feel better during a transition?

Yes. This is well-documented in transition research. The initial period after a change often involves a dip in confidence and clarity before the upswing. Psychologist William Bridges, in his work on transition management, distinguishes between the external change (which can happen quickly) and the internal transition (which takes much longer). Knowing this in advance doesn't make it comfortable, but it stops people interpreting the dip as evidence that something has gone wrong.

Do I need to know exactly where I'm going before I start moving?

No — and according to Ibarra's research, waiting until you have full clarity is one of the most common reasons transitions stall. Small experiments — a side project, an advisory role, a conversation with someone doing the work you think you want to do — generate the information that sitting and thinking cannot.

When should I get support from a coach?

When the thinking is going in circles. When you know what you should do but keep not doing it. When the emotional weight of the transition is affecting your ability to make clear decisions. These are the moments when an external perspective and accountability — someone who isn't your partner, your friend, or your former colleague — tends to add the most value.

To Close

Dublin is green this week. The flags are up. The tourists have arrived with their enthusiasm and their novelty hats, and the city is doing its annual performance of itself.

Underneath that, spring is doing its quiet, non-linear thing. A good day. A bad week. A morning where the light is suddenly different and you think: there it is.

If you're in the middle of a transition right now, that's probably what it feels like. Not a clear arc. Not steady progress. A good day, a bad week, a morning where something shifts and you think: there it is.

That's the process. You're not behind. You're in it. ☘️💪🏽 

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Merve Hokamp is an ICF/EMCC-accredited executive coach, former Google leader, INSEAD MBA, and the founder of Leadrise Coaching. She works with corporate professionals and business owners in navigating career transitions, leadership development, and business growth. She is also a Venture Partner at Loyal VC.

If this resonated, you can follow her on LinkedIn and explore her work at leadrisecoaching.com