Threshold FAQ

You asked. And, together, we answered.

The cross-section of a tree is a physical diary of the thresholds it crossed to survive. Image by James St. John via Wikimedia Commons

Who doesn’t love a good FAQ? There are the questions you have, but haven’t had a chance to ask, and then there are the questions others have that you hadn’t realized you wanted to ask. Everybody wins.

As I speak with more and more people about Threshold Work, many of the same questions come up again and again. And for me to figure out my answers—what I really think—I have to write my way there. Usually more than once.

So, here we go. The top 8 questions about Threshold Work, asked by many of you, and in many ways answered by many of you. Synthesized by yours truly, with a few detours from my rambling mind.

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1. What is a threshold?
   Since I began my listening project, my definition of a threshold has evolved. Or, more accurately, I have been refining my definition of what constitutes a threshold through listening to people’s interpretations. Here’s where I’ve landed:

   Threshold: Markers in our timeline that break us out of our story, and shift our frame on reality.

   Consciously or unconsciously, a threshold causes a shift from, “I experience life in this way” to “I can experience life in so many other ways.”

   Thresholds can be sudden or gradual, dramatic or subtle, chosen or forced, a single moment or a slow unraveling.

2. How do I know if I am coming up on a threshold?
   The common thread across stories is that leading up to a threshold people experience the limitations of the self as they have known it—the self being your “worldview,” the way you “move through the world,” or your “beliefs and expectations” about what is possible in this life.

   This often shows up as a widening gap between the inner self and outer self—as the inner self continues to develop and grow, and the outer self is continuing to move along the well-worn grooves of your life. The grooves no longer fit, but they are safe and comfortable.

   The inner/outer self gap can manifest emotionally or physically. Emotionally, people describe a gradual stagnation: “waning enthusiasm,” “emptiness,” “the need to unhook from what wasn’t working.” Physically, people report: “major bloating and gut issues,” “ruptured appendices and kidney stones,” or simply “not feeling like themselves.”

   Julka put this beautifully: the “body and spirit often know essential truths about one’s life, but the brain won’t allow the knowing to come through” because it is focused on rational calculations and maintenance of the status quo.

   As much as we want to anticipate and prepare, in many cases, people do not know they are coming up on a threshold. Which is perhaps the most important thing to know: the signs are often clearest in retrospect, and learning to recognize them after the fact is its own preparation.

3. How can I prepare for crossing a threshold?
   You can’t fully prepare for a threshold, any more than you can prepare for grief — the experience will ask something of you that no rehearsal could have anticipated.

   But you can build capacity, and as long as we lack cultural initiation practices, your life is the curriculum to do so. For some, this curriculum begins at 7, for others at 67; for some, it is a slow drip and for others a flood.

   What it builds, as far as I can tell, is a mindset of “I can survive that”, a much wider and more fluid emotional range, and a stronger foundation from which the seven skills I identified in Leading through rebirth become accessible.

   I have no doubt you have many of these skills already. The trick is being able to access them, even when things are hard. Not to project manage your threshold—as I have been known to attempt—but to be present and compassionate as you move through it, and to trust that it is the curriculum of your life.

   A form of preparation Jamie named is to cultivate people he called Threshold Guides in your life: those who have crossed and can hold you when your turn comes.

4. How do I know if I have crossed a threshold?
   At dinner in NY a few weeks ago, someone new to my work asked me this question, and my instinctual answer referenced a quote Paul shared that is attributed to Confucius:

   “We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one.”

   How one ‘realizes’ such a thing is the question. It’s one thing to know in your mind that you only have one life (and to spend most waking hours avoiding that knowing). It is another thing to have an embodied understanding of the precious and fleeting nature of life.

   Getting up close to death—your own, or that of a loved one—is one way people come by this embodied understanding. But it is not the only way.

   In modern life, many people experience identity risk as worse than death. By identity risk, I mean those moments where someone honors who they are at the risk of their sense of belonging and status—like Melissa described shedding the “Gold Star Girlie” persona that was born of “a fear of not being enough.” Or, the moment when someone experiences the person they thought they were becoming crash down around them, leaving what Amy called a “scorched earth feeling.”

   These moments test the limits of: I can be separate and still belong; I can be myself and still be loved. They are thresholds as much as proximity to death is a threshold. They shift the frame on reality, and what is possible in this life.

   You know you have crossed a threshold when the realization that you only have one life is no longer just an idea. It lives in your body.

5. Does my threshold count?
   Many people are hesitant when they begin their threshold story session with me. Unsure if the life experience they have to share qualifies.

   I once shared this hesitancy to claim the climaxes in my own life. I believed my thresholds weren’t severe enough to count—as if there were a leaderboard for suffering. But what I’ve learned is that no one grants you “threshold permission.” The outside world may rank losses as major or minor, worthy of grief or not. The inside world doesn’t work that way.

   What you thought you wanted but didn’t get may be your threshold. What seemed small—a move, a friendship ending, a role shift—may be your threshold. The truth you keep showing up for everyday may be your threshold. What matters isn’t the size or type of your crossing. It’s what it does to you: how it shifts your vantage point, expands the container of your reality, and adds new choices to the menu of your life.

6. What is Threshold Work?
   Threshold Work views life’s built-in journey as the developmental path. It is about being with the process of life and its big moments, not as experiences to fix or change, but as experiences to honor, trust, and witness.

   At its core, Threshold Work explores past threshold crossings as moments of perspective. Through retelling and somatic experience, we are able to stand on both sides of a threshold, recognizing the before-and-after states that have passed so that we are more equipped to move through the ones to come.

   This means giving language to your ‘before state’ (your worldview, beliefs, mindset, persona) so that you can more clearly see what shifted. It means acknowledging your natural threshold skills, the ones you have cultivated, and the ones that need attention. And, it means identifying the Threshold Guides in your life, and where you can pay that forward.

   It is worth noting that “before and after” sounds more neat and resolved than it is. I do not believe the collective threshold we are in will have a clean other side; rather, uncertainty is something we learn to live with, and the unknown is where we learn to come alive.

   Thresholds are where we practice this—being present while we are in it, rather than waiting for a resolution that may not come.

   In short, Threshold Work is the curriculum for modern life. For how this is taking shape in practice, see Q8.

7. What drew you to this project?
   There are many ways to make sense of our lives. I happily collect them, and I added one to my collection last week via Richard Rohr’s teachings on the Enneagram. As a fellow 1, I relate to Richard’s description of his life’s work: legitimizing disorder. The 1 is often referred to as The Reformer. We tend to like order, we have perfectionist tendencies. As my original Enneagram teacher, Jane Tight, said, “The 1 walks into a room and immediately sees what is wrong with it.” Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

   Through the lens of the Enneagram, I see how my work is legitimizing disorder—in other words, this project is my attempt to give meaning to pain and suffering. To put my healing in service of others’ healing.

   I can trace this back to a few moments in my life, but ultimately it was my experience crossing the threshold between life and death when my son was born—and the resulting “after state”—that crystallized my interest in this work. For more on this story, you can read my previous essay, Buzzing presence.

8. What are you doing with all the stories you’re collecting?
   One of my storytellers, Monicka, generously suggested that I have a responsibility to create something worthy of what I am witnessing: the lived experiences, the hard-won wisdom, the beauty woven with suffering. I feel this responsibility more and more with each story I listen to—and it exists on multiple levels.

   First, to myself: I am creating what I most need to exist in the world. And, by that, I mean I am creating meaning from my own experience making choices that feel right and true in my bones, but require a counter-cultural conviction that I have to show up for day after day. Much like B described the daily act of authenticity required in coming out again and again, introducing themself with they/them pronouns, I encounter the normative leadership-as-ascent framework on a daily basis, and it is an act of authenticity to live and lead in a different way.

   Then, to my storytellers: Many threshold storytellers have closed our session with words of gratitude and also an offering, “If there is anything I have said or lived through that will help someone, please use it.”

   Lastly, to my kids: My kids are my proxy for civilization. I can’t wrap my mind around all of humanity, but I can feel into the future I want for a 4- and 8-year-old. I want them to belong to a world where leadership is conceived as an inside-out activity, where the good life includes more than power and money, where people’s choices consider the more-than-human predicament, and where we honor and support the natural cycles of a life.

   More specifically: What am I doing with all the stories?? My standard answer is that I am allowing it to emerge. But I have reached a point in this process that I can say with some confidence: I am working on a book proposal (working title: Leading Through Rebirth: The Missing Curriculum of Modern Leadership), and I am developing some Threshold workshop material. I would love some signal of interest in these directions to encourage me down the path (or direct me elsewhere) and to know who to include as sample chapter readers, and workshop attendees. A heart or comment goes a long way.

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Are these the questions you had? What else are you curious about thresholds, Threshold Work, Leading through rebirth, and Stories of Transformation?

As always, thank you to all of the people who have shared their stories (and their tears) with me. You can sign up to share your story here.