You are not one self in transition, you're several
Most advice about career transition assumes a shape. You leave one identity behind, you cross some uncertain middle ground, and you arrive at the next one. Tidy, sequential, singular. The problem is that this isn't what a 2026 review of the transition literature, published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, actually finds happening.
Herminia Ibarra, Sarah Wittman, and Kendall Smith spent the paper synthesizing decades of research on how professional identity actually changes, and the picture that emerges is messier than the tidy version. Careers today move in nonlinear trajectories, not straight lines from old role to new one. And the identity work involved isn't a person shedding one self and growing into a replacement. It's someone holding several possible selves at once, testing each one out, discarding some, keeping others, often without knowing for a long stretch which version is actually going to stick.
That reframes something we've already written about. Our earlier Journal essay on the neutral zone drew on William Bridges' work: the old identity ends, a period with no scaffolding follows, and eventually a new identity forms. True as far as it goes. What Ibarra and her co-authors add is that the middle of that process isn't empty waiting room, it's active, parallel experimentation. Several provisional selves, being tried on and lived in simultaneously, long before any one of them is chosen.
This matters because it exposes a mismatch in how most transition support is actually built. A coach, however good, is generally working toward an answer. Sessions build toward clarity, a direction, a plan. That's the right structure if the underlying identity work were linear. It's the wrong structure if what's actually happening is someone testing three or four different versions of who they might become, at the same time, none of them settled.
What a linear model can't hold is contradiction. Someone might describe wanting to step back from leadership one month and lean harder into it the next, and a coaching relationship built around producing a clear plan tends to read that as indecision, something to resolve. The research suggests it isn't indecision. It's what identity work during genuine transition actually looks like from the inside, several selves being tested in parallel, not one self slowly clarifying.
A single advisor, however skilled, is one perspective testing one version of your story against their read of what you should become. A room of six people, each further along or further behind in their own multi-self transition, working the same territory in parallel, is a different structure entirely. It doesn't push toward premature resolution. It gives the contradictory versions somewhere to be said out loud, without either being immediately narrowed down to the "real" answer.
That's not a minor operational difference. It's the specific reason a Council format holds something a single relationship structurally can't: room for more than one version of yourself to be true at the same time, for as long as that's actually the truth of where you are.