Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
Two seemingly similar experiences – and one crucial difference in how we live through them
For many years, I worked as a tour guide, leading people on trips around the world. Unfamiliar continents, unknown harbors, groups who had to face the unknown anew every day. That experience illustrates something psychology has long confirmed: how we deal with the unknown depends less on the scale of the change than on how we experience it.
At first glance, travel and change look like the same story: you leave the familiar behind, encounter something new, have to find your bearings again. But look closer, and the real difference isn't in the change itself – it's in how we experience it. And that's exactly where the real lesson lies, for personal, organizational, and societal growth alike.
Loving to travel doesn't mean you're eager for change. That's not a contradiction – it's a very human logic. Travel is, in almost every case, something we choose: destination, style of trip, duration, mode of transport, accommodation – every piece is deliberately chosen based on what we hope to get out of it: rest, fitness, a better understanding of an unfamiliar culture, simply a change of scenery, new acquaintances. That freedom to choose is psychologically decisive. Self-Determination Theory, developed by Deci and Ryan, describes autonomy as one of three central human needs, alongside a sense of competence and social belonging. Travel satisfies that need almost completely – organizational change often doesn't. There, the message tends to be: "We have to change." "I'm leaving my comfort zone" becomes "My comfort zone is being taken from me."
The emotional framing is fundamentally different too. When we travel, we ask: what will I discover? With change, people often ask: what will I lose – my role, my security, my team, my influence? Loss aversion, an important finding from behavioral economics and part of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's Prospect Theory, describes the tendency for perceived losses to weigh more heavily, psychologically, than equivalent gains – though how pronounced this effect turns out to be depends on reference point, context, and situation, as Novemsky and Kahneman (2005) show in their study on the boundaries of loss aversion; a widely noted reassessment by Gal and Rucker (2018) even calls the effect's general validity into question more fundamentally. This becomes especially interesting when applied to change: a person can be thrilled describing a trip to Japan while simultaneously dreading the rollout of new software at their own company. Both are structurally change, yet the psychological meaning differs. The trip to Japan tends to be experienced as a likely gain – new experiences, new possibilities, new impressions. The new software, on the other hand, can be experienced as a likely loss – of familiarity, security, competence, or control.
Another difference: travel has an exit. In most cases, it's temporary – your own bed, your everyday life, home are waiting. That's exactly what makes the unknown bearable, especially if it turns out to be less appealing than hoped. In a genuine transformation, that safety net is missing. The message isn't "things will be back to normal soon" – it's "things won't be the way they were." That's why it rarely helps to promise people going through change a return to how things were. It helps more to stand by them as they build a new home.
So it isn't the change itself that determines how people react, but what they believe they stand to lose or gain through it. This is where the real psychological dimension of change begins: the passage, or transition. The task, then, isn't to convince someone that a change is good – it's to help make visible what's currently being experienced as a loss, and what might be regained or newly gained through it.
American change consultant William Bridges coined a distinction in the 1990s that remains one of the most influential concepts in the psychology of change to this day: change and transition are not the same thing. Change describes what shifts on the outside – new structures, new processes, new roles, a new timeline. Transition describes what happens inside a person: letting go of the familiar, an often uncomfortable in-between phase, and eventually arriving in the new. Organizations, as a rule, plan the change very carefully – and underestimate the transition.
That explains why so many change projects appear successful in execution and still don't work: the new process is in place, the new system runs, the new structure has been rolled out – but people haven't arrived anywhere internally. Change processes usually end with "kick-off, rollout, launch." The decisive fourth step – or rather, the activities that tend to run alongside the process steps – is often missing: arriving. Because change isn't complete once the new thing has been introduced. It's only truly complete once the new thing has become the new "normal," and people are following the new routines instead of looking for workarounds.
A good tour guide can't guarantee that a trip will go exactly as planned. Weather, delayed flights, canceled ports – much of it can't be controlled. What a good tour guide can do: make sure no one feels lost along the way. They don't take the trip on anyone else's behalf, and they don't carry every guest's suitcase. They provide orientation without creating the illusion of having everything under control. Giving people a sense of safety without promising safety is considered, in leadership research on change processes, one of the central skills of all.
There's a second observation that repeats in every travel group: people don't travel at the same pace. Some want to set off right away; others need a thorough explanation before they're willing to move. The so-called change curve, a model loosely based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, describes exactly that: people move through different emotional phases during change – from shock through resistance to acceptance – and they do so at completely different speeds. When part of a team is still asking "why do we even have to do this?" while others are already at "let's go," that's not a disruption of the change process. That's transition – and it needs time, and different paths for different people.
At the societal level, the same logic shows up in an interesting paradox: many people here love to travel – and still struggle with change, whether in their private lives, at work, or even around new rules and regulations. That's not a contradiction once you look closer. What people love about travel is rarely pure uncertainty. It's organized uncertainty: a booked flight, a reserved hotel, a planned route – and only then does the adventure get to begin.
So the difference isn't change versus no change. It's self-chosen change versus change imposed from outside – precisely the need for autonomy that Self-Determination Theory describes. For societal as much as organizational change processes, this raises a central question: not how to get people to love change, but how to create conditions under which they can engage with a change even though there's no going back to how things were.
These are exactly the questions at the heart of what Bridges describes as the real journey through change: What has to be let go of – habits, roles, certainties? How do you sit with the uncertainty and ambivalence of the in-between phase? And how does the new eventually become the new normal?
There's another observation that's often underestimated in practice: change doesn't happen on a single level – it happens on several at once: cognitive, emotional, physical, and on a deeper level tied to identity and consciousness. These levels rarely move at the same pace. You can have fully understood a change intellectually and still not be ready to feel it or live it – and it's exactly this gap that often makes change so much more contradictory than it looks on paper.
Change rarely fails because people don't know what needs to change. It gets difficult when people don't know how to arrive in the new. Perhaps that's the real lesson travel holds for change: you don't necessarily have to make change less challenging. But you can shape it more like a journey – with a compelling destination, room for detours, stages instead of an endless stretch. And above all, with the feeling that matters most in the end: not being a passenger of change, but a fellow traveler.
Letting go, sitting with the in-between phase, arriving in the new: that's exactly what a new training format is about – Transition Guide. It's aimed at anyone who wants to not just understand change, but guide others safely through it – as a leader, a consultant, or on their own path through a profound upheaval.
You'll find more about the training and upcoming dates here: Transition Guide – the training