I was sitting with the word liminal, trying to define what liminal time actually meant to me, when I said it wrong. Not liminal. Limiting. I don’t let a slip like that pass without pulling the thread.
That slip held something true. When we experience time as limiting, we are usually already thinking in limits, a mindset that narrows what we believe is possible and quietly caps what we call our best. That kind of thinking shows up as lower productivity and lower career satisfaction, because once something feels limited, we stop looking for what else might be possible.
What Liminal Time Actually Is
Liminal time is the in-between. The threshold. The crossing. It lives between when we decide, when we become aware, and when we act. Something happens to wake us up to it.
I notice this in coaches. Listen to how someone coaches when they feel like they are running out of time, especially if they are working toward a credential. When they think of it as their own time, everything tightens. When they think of it as the client’s time, they allow space and let the client decide how it gets used. The moment we believe our time is limited, it changes how we perform.
Liminal is not unlike a neap tide, that pause when the water does nothing at all. That stillness is a metaphor for any evolution, any transformation, going from here to there, from caterpillar to butterfly, in the in-between where it looks like nothing is happening. Especially when the change starts from the inside. We can feel a transformation in ourselves. We can rarely see it happening in someone else.
Making It Harder Than It Has to Be
A pan sat on my stove recently, sauce dried onto the surface, and I assumed I would need to scrub it. I didn’t. A little hot water and a soft sponge, no real effort, and everything lifted away. Easier than I expected.
That had me wondering if this is what limiting time actually is. Making things harder than they need to be, because we are conditioned to believe our value is in what we produce or provide as opposed to simply being.
Liminal time is the gap between the trains. The still, small voice in the silence. We are all busy, and busyness by definition means being occupied. So what do you do when you reach the threshold of busy, and it isn’t actually taking you anywhere
Waiting Without a Timeline
I can think of two times in my career where I lived inside that in-between, not knowing how long it would last.
Near the end of my career in TV news, I accepted a contract. I wanted to leave the TV station, but I was not used to giving notice without somewhere else to go. It felt like the monkey bars. You need another bar to reach for, or you are just hanging there, losing momentum. So I waited until the assignment came through, then quit. In that wait, I was not idle. I refinanced my house so I could pull out equity and have an extra buffer, since I didn’t know how everything would turn out.
Later, I was waiting to hear back on a six-month assignment in Australia. When the wait for approval stretched on, I got frustrated and knew I needed to keep living my life instead of pausing it. I served on a jury for what became a three-month trial. The assignment was delayed just long enough for me to complete my civic duty.
Neither wait came with a clear timeline. What they had in common was that I did not stop living. I found something to do inside the not knowing. Call it active waiting. Maybe it is not the absence of doing. Maybe it is preparation for what is next, even if that preparation seems unrelated or shows up as resting.
How You Know You’re Moving
Look for micromovements. That is what helps you trust that something is happening even when it does not look like it. I would even call frustration a signal. It often means you are closer to the other side of the in-between than you think.
If you experience it as limiting time, ask whose limit it actually is. Is this a limitation you set, or one someone else set that you quietly accepted as your own? That question alone can change what you believe is possible, and it might be the closest thing to living your best life you will find.
What becomes possible when you no longer see time as limited?
PS: If you’re between one chapter of your career and the next, Career Coaching can be the thought partnership that helps you see what’s possible.
