Six months into the new role, you catch yourself at 9pm rewriting work you were supposed to hand over. The draft was fine. You call this keeping the bar high, but it feels closer to relief.

William Bridges spent decades on one distinction: change and transition are not the same thing. Change is the event. The announcement, the new title, done in a day. Transition is the inner work of leaving one identity and entering another, and it runs on its own clock. Every transition, he insisted, begins with an ending. No one becomes a leader without first unbecoming the thing they were best at.

But promotions arrive as pure gain. Cake, congratulations, a bigger scope. The new leaders I talk with rarely mention what they gained; what they miss comes up constantly, disguised as complaints about the calendar. A loss with no place in the ritual goes underground and starts steering.

You miss the craft, so you keep a hand in it. The hovering eats the hours the new role needs, so the new role stays uncomfortable, so the old work pulls harder. And your team reads the hovering as a verdict on their competence. What began as grief starts functioning as distrust.

Bridges never said to let go faster. He said to give the ending a name. Say the quiet part to the person whose work you keep redoing: “I’ve been holding on to this because I miss the work, not because you’re failing at it.” Then pick one piece of the old craft to keep on purpose, and release the rest.

What’s the piece of your old job you still haven’t put down?