I presented a workshop this last week in Kokomo, Indiana for a delightful & dedicated group called Business Professionals Exchange, on the subject of Transitions, specifically as it applies to their need for finding employment after having been terminated from the careers they had been pursuing…due to the economic distress many are experiencing in the United States currently.

After the seminar, I learned my own valuable lesson about how to handle transitions! I headed out of Kokomo on State Road 31, but failed to turn onto State Road 26 which would take me back into Lafayette. Quite some time later…after much daydreaming and not being in “the present” I discovered I had arrived in Indianapolis…some 60-70 miles away! The transition I was expecting was to arrive in Lafayette and have a bunch of time to write a blog, interface with other professionals on LinkedIn and Facebook, and prepare for an afternoon of clients. That, of course, did not happen! The rest of my morning was, instead, filled with finding my way back to Lafayette, Indiana by using a “shortcut” through Frankfort, Indiana.

You may not know this very interesting fact, but Frankfort, Indiana is in the process of “beautifying” their lovely town by making numerous road repairs, so getting out of the town was not as easy as one might think it would be. For a while, I thought it might just be easier to move to Frankfort rather than to continue trying to find a road out of town that was not blocked by construction! In other words…using the transitional reference again…my attempts to transition through the problem-solving process of moving from being in Frankfort, Indiana to being someplace other than Frankfort, Indiana were somewhat of a challenge to me, and I was close to resignation in my attempts to move through that transitional time!

I finally found Interstate 65 out of Frankfort, Indiana, felt a measure of success in moving forward with the transitional process, and some two hours later arrived back in Lafayette, Indiana…a successful, although lengthy, transition after all!

Sometimes, in our lives, transitions don’t unfold the way we expect them to, but with faith and persistence we can always succeed…if we want something badly enough…and I did not want to move to Frankfort, Indiana…although I’m sure it’s a delightful place to live!