Liminality: This Strange Phase is Where Everything Changes
My name is Adam Melnik. I’m the owner of Seeding the Lead, and I’m a leadership coach. Today I’m going to teach you all about liminality.
What is liminality?
Liminality is really the space between what was and what will be. Think of it as a threshold or a doorway. It’s where you’re not quite in the hallway, but you’re not in the room—you’re in between.
An example of liminality is: imagine going to a hotel. You go to the lobby and you get your key. You are given this key and told your room is on the third floor, and you get into the elevator. The elevator is not your place—that’s not your destination, that’s not your hotel room—but it’s also not the lobby. It’s a transition place, or an in‑between place.
When we look at liminality, it’s a place where social rules, constructs, and expectations kind of just fall away. It’s a place of unlimited growth. For example, COVID‑19 is a place of liminal space, or liminality. It is in the space of liminality that our time often gets distorted. What this means is that we feel almost disconnected from reality. For example, with COVID we felt as if time had kind of stopped and we were sitting outside of it. It was when we’re outside of this time that we grow as individuals and become potentially who we are meant to be.
An example of this is puberty. When you are going through puberty, you’re not an adult yet, but you’re also not a child. The social rules and expectations of being a child all fall away, yet the social rules and expectations of being an adult aren’t quite there. You’re in between two worlds, and it almost becomes paradoxical: you’re no longer a child, but you’re also not an adult. You are considered to be existing and alive, and yet you are considered also alive and dead—as a child and as an adult. There’s no real social construct holding everything together.
That’s the magic of liminal space: all these rules and expectations just fall away. Ultimately you can do anything; you can become anyone. It is a place of great growth. But it is also a bit of a problem.
Why liminality can be a problem
The reason why liminality can be a massive problem for individuals is that it is the unknown. Where are you going? What is the end point? How do I get out of here? The unknown is scary, and that’s normal, because we as humans want to know the outcome. We want to know the destination.
It’s made things even worse because when you’re in this liminal space, we can look back to what was and wish we could have that. But we have to understand that we can’t have it anymore—that’s in the past. The only way through liminality is to move forward into the future. Moving into that unknown, however, can become paralyzing. We can become stuck because, to be honest, we don’t understand the destination, and it can become scary to make those choices.
How a coach helps through liminality
This is often why we hire coaches. Part of my job is to help my clients move through this liminal space. For example, I worked with a gentleman named Steven. He was an employee, and then he was hired to become a manager. He wasn’t an employee anymore, but he also wasn’t a manager—and in between those two titles was this liminal space that was incredibly scary for him, because he didn’t understand what it would be like to be a manager, yet he understood what it would be like to be an employee.
Part of my job was to help him become unparalyzed, to start making those choices bit by bit, to help him through that doorway—walk him through the threshold. That’s what I do as a coach: I help move you from where you were to where you want to be.
Typically when I work with leaders, many of them will have to learn how to walk their team through a liminal space. Many of them don’t understand how to do that. Instead, they get bogged down with the details, with the planning, with the strategic plans, and they don’t understand that their people are terrified of the unknown. They are moving their organization through a structural reorganization, and their people feel terrified because their people don’t understand what will happen at the end of it. This is all very common.
Part of your job as a leader is to sit down with your team and help them understand: “Hey, we’re going to be okay at the end of this. We’re going to help you move from what was to what will be, and we accept that this is going to be a scary time, but it’s going to be a time of great personal growth.”
If you found this video helpful, please give it a like, subscribe, and share it with somebody who might find this interesting. I’ll see you in the next video.