I have been traveling.  Taking a road trip from Seattle to Montana.  It seems when I am driving I am less inclined to pull out my computer at night or for that matter anytime.  Anyway I am behind on blog posting.  The trip was excellent.  I was able to ride with the top down most of the way and the temperature was a mild with blue skies overhead.

Basically, I moved to Montana over a year ago; however  kept a place in Seattle where our company is headquartered.  Slowly, I have scaled down the office in Seattle and finally made the call to bring both vehicles to Montana.  I find myself dealing with more transition and loss with this trip than I did after selling the house and moving most of my personal life.  This might reflect the fact that I never enjoyed living in Seattle.  Wasn’t able to find and maintain the right level of connection for me.  I had lots of friends and yet it never seemed easy to connect and do things together.  Now my work  – that was different.  Thrive! was started in Seattle and thrived there – as did I.  So maybe the process of scaling down the office is a bit more of a loss for me than the personal move.

It is not like I won’t be back.  We have a number of clients there which we will continue to work with, and as a result, will be traveling out that way quite regularly. So what makes this so hard?  Office space is rented, the VW Bug was the last real asset to be moved. Plus, we are shifting our business focus – instead of an independent consulting firm we are aligning ourselves as Table Group Consulting Partners.

I would have thought driving a huge moving truck would have been the catalyst for dealing with any loss or dislocation issues.  Instead, it seems driving the convertible VW Bug brought up much more grief, as did letting go of our business independence.  Seattle was never my home personally, but it was where I found my passion in terms of work and career.

I remember when I left Gabriola Island – the last place I called home.  What was calling me was creating a business, a partnership and work that I found fulfilling.  Stepping back out in the world as the person I had become after cancer and close to ten years of reinventing myself.  Our decision to start Thrive! did not come at the best of times for starting a business, post 9/11, but wet we did great.  We have never had to market and have always found work we needed and wanted over the last seven or eight years.  Sure, there were times when we were slow but we’d connect with clients and generate new leads and we found our own voice and way of working.

When the move to Montana came, we were starting the shift to align ourselves with The Table Group more.  Now, we are not creating ourselves the way we were when we started Thrive!.  Instead, we are using material created for the most part by The Table Group.  As a result get more visibility and larger pool of potential clients, but we aren’t quite like we were.

I know this is good move. Just like I know bringing the Bug over the mountains is also good. What I didn’t count on was feeling this sense of loss.  I do know now that there is something going on as we scale down Thrive! and align ourselves with The Table Group that involves letting go.  We can’t really be something new until we let go of the old.  I think the drive was part of that process.

Transitions are never predictable.  We all do the psychological adjustment to a change in our own time.  I teach this, but living it is something else all together.  Good thing I had the chance to take the drive.  Now I know I need to do the rest of the work.  I hadn’t realized what I was letting go of.  I get why I might feel like crying now.  It also makes this blogging even more important.  It seems to be the path I am using to reinvent myself.  The same way I did when we started Thrive!  I can only hope it leads to the same fulfillment and success!