Lost in the In-Between? How to Navigate Liminal Space with Confidence

Ep. 162 - Lost in the In-Between? How to Navigate Liminal Space with Confidence 

Episode Description:
Are you in a season of uncertainty? Feeling stuck, unanchored, or unsure of what’s next? Welcome to liminal space—the messy, in-between stage of life where one chapter is closing, but the next one hasn’t fully begun.

In today’s episode of Clear & On Purpose, we’re talking about:
✨ What liminal space is and why it feels so uncomfortable
✨ The real reason we struggle with uncertainty and “not knowing”
✨ How to stop feeling behind and start seeing possibility in the unknown
✨ Practical ways to navigate this phase without forcing clarity
✨ Tiny experiments that help you move forward without the pressure

If you’ve ever felt lost, overwhelmed, or like you’re in a waiting period—this episode is for you. You’re not behind. You’re not failing. You’re exactly where you need to be.

🎧 Listen now and learn how to embrace the in-between with confidence.

🔗 Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff 

• Feeling Stuck? How to Navigate Liminal Space with Confidence
• Join The Village for More Conversations Like This
• Follow me on Instagram for daily insights

💬 Let’s Connect!
Have you experienced a season of liminal space? How did you navigate it? DM me on Instagram or leave a review sharing your thoughts!

📩 Loved this episode? Share it with a friend who needs to hear this today.

Resources Mentioned:

• Join The Village: Click here to connect with our community.
• Sign up for the Momentum Challenge: Click here to get started.

Resources & Links

• Follow Christina @christinaslaback
• Email us at hello@christinaslaback.com
• www.christinaslaback.com

Transcript

Liminal Space

Christina: [00:00:00] Because we hate the idea of uncertainty. We love a clear path, a defined goal.

It gives a sense of control and our culture thrives on this forward motion, more productivity, more efficiency, more certainty. And if we don't know where we're going, we feel behind.

Welcome to Clear and On Purpose, the podcast designed to help you cut through the noise and get back to what matters most. If you're feeling stuck but need to take intentional action, you're in the right place. I'm Kristina Slaibach, homeschooling mom of two and life and business coach, helping you drop in and align with your values and create more space.

Each week, I'll be sharing practical insights and simple insights. Actual steps to help you find clarity, boost your energy and design a life that balances ambition with. Let's dive in and get clear on [00:01:00] purpose.

Hi, and welcome back to Clearing On Purpose, the podcast where we explore what it means to live with intention, clarity, and alignment without getting stuck in the pressure to always have it all figured out. I'm your host, Kristina, and today we're talking about something that I've experienced a number of times throughout my life and I will probably continue to experience, and that's this idea of liminal space.

This is something thatI would feel often enough, but I never had the words for it. And it's this in between, uncertain, kind of like, I have no idea what's next, period of time. It's this time between two spaces where You're not really in the place that you were, but you aren't yet where you're going.

and it can be really uncomfortable. It can feel really scary. It has that,unmoored feeling. Like, just that you're floating out into an abyss and [00:02:00] you don't really know what's coming next. And in a world that's obsessed with progress, productivity, and knowing exactly where you're headed, sitting in that in between can sometimes feel like

Failure, like you don't have it figured out and you don't know and just that simple act of not knowing the next step or not knowing what's next can feel like you're already falling behind, but I want to talk about what if that liminal space isn't something that we need to rush through. What if it's something that we don't need to just try to get to the end of, but instead.

actually look at it as an invitation to explore, to grow, to trust, and to let go of that pressure and be able to just experiment. with what's possible. So today we're going to just break down all of this, what liminal space is, why it feels so uncomfortable, and how you can navigate it in a way that [00:03:00] actually serves you.

So if you've been feeling stuck, if you've been feeling like you just don't have it figured out, if you've been feeling a little bit lost, keep listening because I think that a lot of this will really resonate with you. So let's start with the basics. Liminal space is that transition between two things.

It can be physical, like being in an airport between destinations, like a hallway between two different things. it can be something like twilight, so that moment when the sun sets, but it hasn't really gotten all the way dark yet. You are just in that in between. But it can also manifest in emotional and psychological spaces, and it can be these moments where we feel like we've left something behind, but we're not sure what's next.

So this can be, when you graduate from college, but you're not really into that next career. It can be when you're at the beginning or the end of a relationship. It can be when you start a [00:04:00] transition, a new job. If you're going out into business on your own. It can go be when you're hitting retirement or you're about to expand your family or,become a parent for the first time.

It's those spaces in between. And when you're looking at it, During that in between time, you can have a lot of this, like, unanchored feeling, this weird, I'm no longer this, but I'm not yet that. I remember when I was pregnant with my son, I felt like I wasn't a mom yet, but also, I wasn't who I was before.

I didn't feel the same as I was, but I wasn't yet embracing the new identity of who I was going to be as being a mom. it can just really have a lot of effects on us psychologically and emotionally. And it can feel like you just want to get to that next stage. [00:05:00] You want to get to that certainty again.

You want to feel that sense of identity coming through. And when you don't have you just want to rush right through. But instead of rushing to fix it, instead of trying to get to that next stage,maybe that's the opportunity toand look at what you really want.

And as a former type A, or still a little bit type A person, maybe That space is particularly unsettling for me. I was always one who was on the track. You know, I took the honors classes. I got the good grades. I got into college right away. I sped through college and graduated double major. I went right into a career path.

I Got married shortly after high school, and it was just like this continual, this is what's next, this is what's next, this is what's next, and we just kept going. Bought a house, got a different career, and so, because so much of that was given and kind of this outward path, it felt certain.

I just knew what those next steps were and I was able to [00:06:00] just keep moving through it. There was always that next goal, that next thing to go for. But as I grew older and as I transitioned into some of these different things, I would hit these times of that uncertainty of that, okay, well, what do I want to do now?

And What I found is that by rushing, rushing, rushing, and just trying to get to that next point, that sometimes I hadn't really necessarily paid attention to what I desired and what I wanted and had that connection. So when I would hit these spaces of, okay, well, what's next? What's this next transition for me?

I would look to outside factors, what is the prescribed next path, what would look like the next best thing to do, and then go through that instead of maybe checking in and saying, you know, what do I want right now, and what would feel really good for me. Because we hate the idea of uncertainty. We love a clear path, a defined goal.

It gives a sense of [00:07:00] control and our culture thrives on this forward motion, more productivity, more efficiency, more certainty. And if we don't know where we're going, we feel behind. So we can live in a time of this overwhelming, what they consider or what they call time anxiety. And it's this fear that is just constantly on us that we should be further along, that we've wasted time and that now we need to catch up.

And. It used to be where you could kind of compare yourself to the neighbors or the people that you knew or your friends or your family group or your peer groups. But now with social media, we can compare ourselves to literally everyone in the world and it just takes it to this whole other level. where we're constantly comparing ourselves to people that we don't know, that we haven't met, and we can come back feeling like we're falling short, we haven't accomplished enough, we haven't done enough, there's always something [00:08:00] more that we could be doing.

And this can be true for things that you're actually striving for, so that next level in your career, having the house and the kids and the family,relationships. Like things that you desire that you actually desire, but it also can expand it even to things that we don't necessarily even want.

Like I know scrolling through social media and I might see something that I never would have considered her before. And now I'm thinking, Oh, I'm way behind because I'm not competing in CrossFit competitions, because look at these people that are doing that. And we look at it and we can see all of these ways that.

Other people are pursuing their paths of what they want and then consider ourselves no matter how much we accomplish, no matter where our lives are doing really well, no matter all the things that we've done. We can still feel like we need to catch up.

 have you ever had a moment where you're feeling really good about where you are? Maybe you're making progress in your business and [00:09:00] you're finally finding your groove and then suddenly you see someone who just ran a marathon or they learned a new language or they started this new side hustle that's making six figures and you think, man, I just cannot catch a break.

I just cannot keep up. We can all get sucked into needing to be somewhere, anywhere, and it's just To get away from that feeling of being lost and thinking that there's this final destination where you're going to feel satisfied and like you've arrived. So it's okay. Well, I just need to hit this point and then I'll feel good.

 I'll feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be. That feeling of that you are not where you're supposed to be. So if you make a hundred thousand in your business, you, you'll be looking at people and thinking, well, maybe I should have hit a million by now. If you write a bestselling book, then it's like, Oh, well I should already be on my next one.

If you're building your dream business, you think, [00:10:00] okay, well now I need to be hiring a team and I need to be doing this. And it's not just for people that are at these stages of life. You look at people that are millionaires, billionaires, and there's always still that next level. They feel like they should be accomplishing more.

They feel like they should be at this higher level because we keep moving the goalposts and we never let ourselves actually hit that feeling where we do feel filled and satisfied. But what if we stopped trying to rush? That in between. What if we're able to let go of the time anxiety? So, looking at it and thinking, What would I do if I allowed myself to do something and not worry about feeling any pressure about getting something done?

What would I do if I just felt like I had no time pressure? How would I be spending my time? What activities would I be doing? How would I feel in my body [00:11:00] if I wasn't feeling like I was constantly behind? And so one of the things that we can look at is that this liminal space is actually an invitation.

One of the quotes that I really love is by Margaret Drabble, and it's, When nothing is certain, anything is possible. So that liminal space is uncomfortable because we don't have a clear path, but it's that lack of certainty. That's where we can actually look at all the possibilities, where we can open ourselves to what's available to us, not just what we thought, not just this cookie cutter path that we thought that we were on.

It can be an invitation to explore and to trust and to step out of the pressure of needing to know. it can also be a time where we can open ourselves up to faith and trust that things are, That we are on the right path, that things are working out for us, and that we're here for a reason, and that we're actually living it right now. It can feel like when an opportunity closes or when something doesn't work out the way that we thought, [00:12:00] that we can consider ourselves drifting, we can consider ourselves failing, but can we trust that something's unfolding, even if we don't see it yet?

Can we see it as an opportunity to let go of control? It's imaginary anyway. It's the idea that we have control over what our circumstances is. And in reality, we have control over very little. But we can open ourselves up to being able to just exist without this pressure to keep forcing and pushing things.

And it can also give us permission to not have all the answers right now. To trust that the answers will come, and to trust That we can get through this time and we can live in this discomfort that we have the resiliency within ourselves to be able to sit in this time of discomfort of unrest and be able to grow and benefit from it.

And one way that we can move through this liminal space without forcing is through what Anne [00:13:00] Laure LeCun calls in her book Tiny Experiments. So instead of fixating on what's next, on looking at and having this fully developed, very clear path, it's opening ourselves up to be able to try things out. And just conducting these tiny experiments.

So if you want. to do something really creative. I want to start writing, or I want to start creating art, or I want to do something, what if you look at it as a tiny experiment, and you just give yourself a period of time to play in that space. So you don't have to turn it into, this is now going to be my full time business, I'm going to commit to it forever.

It's just, Checking in and seeing what's next. So if you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel, maybe you post some videos and just see what it feels like. If you're feeling called to write a book, what if you just start journaling and sharing short pieces or just start writing a couple of chapters?

What if you want to explore a new career? Maybe you want to try something else out. What if you took a class [00:14:00] or You have a conversation with someone that's in that, um, in that field. With these tiny experiments, there's no failure. It's only data. So every time that you're trying something, you can give it this playful energy of just experimenting, of just checking in with yourself and being able to test things out and know that there is no failure because you don't have an end goal of this in mind.

You're just collecting data. So you come back and then you can, and you can look at it and say, you know, like, Did I enjoy this? Why? Maybe why not? Did it spark something else in me? Am I, am I considering something else because of it? What did I learn from it? And you can look at it and check in with yourself on how you're adapting and how you're feeling about doing these tiny experiments and just let it be playful.

Like, take the pressure off and don't have everything be so serious. And just allow yourself to play and have fun and reconnect with you.

[00:15:00] It really takes the pressure off, and if you let yourself explore without the feeling like you have everything mapped out, you can open yourself up to new possibilities that maybe you hadn't considered before. So if you're feeling like you're stuck, you're feeling lost, you're feeling confused, if you're in that liminal space right now, I just want to remind you, you are not behind.

You don't have to rush. And you don't have to have it all figured out. This in between space, that's where the possibility lives. So instead of forcing yourself into clarity, what if you just let yourself explore? What if you played with curiosity? instead of pressure. Thank you for joining me for today's topic.

I'd love to hear more about how you've navigated liminal space, what's worked for you, if you're feeling that right now, if that resonates. so check in with me and let me know on Instagram or in the show notes.and I look forward to seeing you on the next time.[00:16:00] Thank you for tuning in to Clear and On Purpose. If you're ready to take intentional steps toward a more fulfilling life and want to customize the approach, I'd love to work with you. Visit www. christinaslayback. com to schedule a free consultation or explore current offers designed to help you gain clarity and reclaim your energy.

And don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with a friend if you found it helpful. It helps others find the show and grow our community.