You're Not Stuck. You're Between Identities.
A Conversation with Jeanie McIntyre on Growing Up Late Podcast
Youtube link is here: https://youtu.be/BtXRzPt8wF0?si=WjT5FsX_xBnkUT8A
By Ruchika Singhal | Leadership Lens | Elevare Advisory
There is a moment most of us have experienced but very few of us have words for.
The job ends. The relationship shifts. The children leave home. Or nothing dramatic happens at all — and yet one morning you wake up inside a life that looks exactly right on the outside, and feels completely wrong on the inside.
We call it being stuck.
But in my recent conversation with Jeanie McIntyre on Growing up Late podcast, I shared why I think that is the wrong word entirely — and why getting the diagnosis right changes everything about how you move through it.
The In-Between Is Not the Problem. It Is the Point.
The conversation began with a question I get asked constantly: Why do people stay stuck so long?
My answer surprises people every time.
They are not stuck. They are in the in-between — the space between who they were and who they are becoming. And the reason they stay there longer than necessary is not a lack of courage or ambition or resilience.
It is because the in-between is terrifying.
In that space there are no answers. No title. No role. No clear sense of who you are when someone asks. And everything in us wants to escape it. So we do what humans naturally do when something feels unbearable.
We go back.
We stay in the job that is slowly hollowing us out because at least we know who we are there. We stay in the relationship that stopped working years ago because leaving means becoming someone we do not recognise yet. We reach for the familiar — even when the familiar is what broke us.
Here is what I told Jeanie: the in-between is actually the most regenerative space a human being can occupy. It is where identities are shed. Where new ones quietly take root. Where the noise of the old life finally goes quiet enough for something truer to be heard.
But only if you stay in it long enough.
And that is the hardest thing to ask of anyone.
My Own In-Between
I have lived in the in-between more times than I can count.
Seven schools in fourteen years as an army kid. Each time we moved, I lost a world and had to build another one from scratch. New city, new school, new language on the playground, new version of myself required — every two years, like clockwork.
Then nearly thirty years in corporate leadership across Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca, and Medtronic. Building teams, leading businesses, crossing borders. And then — leaving all of it. Not dramatically. Not with a plan. Just with a quiet, persistent sense that the identity I had built my life around no longer fit who I was becoming.
That leaving was my most significant in-between. And it was terrifying. And it was the most important thing I ever did.
It is also what led me to build Elevare Advisory — a reinvention coaching practice built around a simple but profound belief: that the in-between is not a waiting room. It is a workshop. And the work being done there is the most important work of a life.
Why the In-Between Feels So Dangerous
In the conversation with Jeanie, we explored something I find fascinating about human psychology.
When disruption hits, we do not rationally evaluate our options. We react from a place of threat. The familiar feels safe. The unknown feels dangerous. And so we make choices — often unconsciously — that keep us tethered to the old identity long after it has stopped serving us.
I see this in the clients I work with constantly.
The senior executive who stays in a toxic organisation for four more years because leaving means admitting the identity of "successful corporate leader" is over. The woman who rebuilds the exact same kind of relationship she just left because the alternative — being truly alone with herself, in the in-between — feels worse than the pain she knows. The professional who takes the first available job after redundancy not because it is right but because the uncertainty is simply unbearable.
In every case the escape from the in-between costs more than staying would have.
Because the in-between, uncomfortable as it is, is where the next identity is being quietly assembled. And every time we flee it, we interrupt that process and have to start again.
The Three Phases That Change Everything
This is where my framework — Pause. Pivot. Propel. — becomes not just useful but essential.
Because the in-between does not manage itself. Left unstructured, it becomes paralysis. Or panic. Or the desperate grab for the nearest exit.
What it needs is a container. A sequence. A way of moving through it with intention rather than fear.
Pause is the first and most counterintuitive phase. When everything in us is screaming to act, to fix, to move — Pause asks us to stop. To name what we are actually feeling. To find what is still stable. To give the emotional storm time to settle before we try to navigate.
Most people skip this phase entirely. They go straight from disruption to action and wonder why nothing lands. Pause is not weakness. It is the most strategic thing you can do in a crisis.
Pivot is where the real identity work happens. This is the phase where we examine the beliefs and stories we have been carrying — and consciously release the ones that no longer serve us.
In my conversation with Jeanie I described it as the farewell we never give ourselves permission to have. We have rituals for every other kind of ending. Retirement parties. Funerals. Graduation ceremonies. But we almost never formally say goodbye to an identity.
And because we never say goodbye, we never fully let go. We carry the old identity forward into new circumstances where it does not belong, wondering why nothing feels quite right.
The Pivot asks a different question: not what do I do next, but who am I becoming now?
Propel is where reinvention becomes visible. Not through a dramatic leap but through small, consistent, deliberate steps. One micro habit. One honest conversation. One thread of genuine curiosity followed before it makes sense.
This phase is about building evidence that the new identity is real. That it is possible. That the in-between was not the end of something but the beginning of something richer, more aligned, more fully yours.
What This Conversation Reminded Me
Fifty minutes with Jeanie McIntyre reminded me why I do this work.
Because the in-between is universal. Every person listening to that conversation has been there or is there right now. And most of them are calling it failure, or weakness, or being lost.
What they need — what we all need — is a different name for it.
Not stuck.
Between identities.
And a map for the space in between.
About Ruchika Singhal Ruchika is a Reinvention Coach, keynote speaker, and founder of Elevare Advisory. She is the creator of The Reinvention Playbook and author of Happiness Is Right Here. She works with professionals navigating identity transitions — career loss, burnout, grief, retirement, and the quiet sense that the life you built no longer fits who you are becoming. www.elevareadvisory.org
