Liminal Space: Navigating the Human Side of Business Transition with Susan K. Bradley

What if the most important part of your business transition is the part that feels uncertain? 

Elizabeth sits down with Susan K. Bradley, CFP®, CeFT®, founder of the Sudden Money® Institute, to explore how the in-between moments of change hold the greatest potential for creation and clarity. Susan brings nearly three decades of experience guiding families and advisors through the emotional, relational, and structural layers of transition. 

Together they unpack liminality, the creative tension between endings and beginnings, and why navigating it with awareness builds resilience and renewal. 

In this episode: 

• How Susan went from financial planning to founding the Financial Transitionist® Institute 

• Why “the human side drives the bus” during transitions 

• How disruption creates new patterns, possibilities, and perspectives 

• Liminality defined — and why living the question leads to better outcomes 

• The concept of “informed intuition” for advisors and successors 

• Using structured conversations to create shared understanding in families 

• The importance of patience, anchors, and guides in transition journeys 

Chapters in this episode:

00:00 — Welcome & Guest Introduction 
00:55 — From Financial Planning to Transition Thinking 
04:31 — The Human Side Drives the Bus 
06:33 — Change Disrupts → Disruption Creates 
08:23 — Defining Liminality and Threshold Thinking 
10:23 — Airports, Chaos Theory & Strange Attractors 
13:20 — Transition Literacy: A New Framework 
19:13 — Informed Intuition & Structured Conversations 
24:15 — Making the Most of Disruptive Times 
25:19 — One Takeaway: Patience and Navigation 

Connect with Susan K. Bradley: 
Website: https://suddenmoney.com 
TEDx Talk: “Change Launches You Into the Next Great Chapter of Your Life” 

Connect with Elizabeth Ledoux and the Transition Strategists: 

Website: https://transitionstrategists.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetransitionstrategists 
Elizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethledoux/ 
Transition Strategists on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/transitionstrategists/ 
Transition Strategists on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@transitionstrategists 

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Check out “Your Next Gen Friend Podcast” with Andrea Carpenter 

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Get Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman’s latest book, “It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning”: https://amzn.to/3oq2LQv

Liminal Space: Navigating the Human Side of Business Transition with Susan K. Bradley Transcript

Elizabeth Ledoux: 
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Business Transition Roadmap podcast. ⁓ I am Elizabeth Ledoux and I am so, so happy to be here today with Susan Bradley. ⁓ Susan Bradley is the founder of Sudden Money Institute and Financial Transitionist Institute. ⁓

I saw her present at the Purposeful Planning Institute in 2025 at the rendezvous just this past summer and her presentation really resonated with me and I thought it’d be great to bring that forward to our audience. gosh, Susan, welcome to our podcast today and can we start by you telling a little bit about yourself and your background and what brought you to be doing what you’re doing today?

Susan Bradley:
Thank you, Elizabeth. First of all, thank you for inviting me. I always enjoy conversations like this with someone who has been pioneering along the same path as I have. So this is, I look forward to it. Back in 1995, I was a financial planner with a very full practice, practicing in the Palm Beach area in Florida. And I came across a situation that I had no clue what to do about.

which was people receiving what they thought was a fairly large ⁓ settlement for medical complications. And the law firm servicing them nationally was talking to me, they were all women, they were talking to me about it. And I thought that yes, I would write a financial literacy based white paper, woman to woman. And I started that and I researched what they were thinking and doing and ⁓

It wasn’t exactly financial literacy that they needed, but that’s what I knew. So I started to put something together. There wasn’t anything in my industry for it. ⁓ I was connected academically and nationally. So I was on an exploration. The ⁓ company being sued went into bankruptcy, so did many of the women. And that just really wasn’t OK. ⁓

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Susan Bradley:
So anyway, that put me on the path to figure out a change management model for the financial planning world. And I saw lots of gaps, learned plenty, ended up writing the book I wanted to read. And my publisher, Wiley, just loved the term said money. It’s very provocative, ⁓ but it actually mischaracterized what I was trying to say, but it…

put me on a map. ⁓ My colleagues decided what was being written about was important and convinced me to go beyond the book. Eventually it turned into an institute. And soon enough, a couple of years in, we started in 2000, I learned the missing point was transition literacy. I hadn’t studied transitions. So I became a student of transitions.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Hmm.

you

Susan Bradley: 
and read all kinds of different models, but had to apply it to the world that I was working in. And eventually became the Transitionist Institute, which means someone, transitionist is someone who’s skilled and trained to manage change as you are, and your team is. And yet we didn’t know that, we didn’t grow up to say, want to be a transitionist when I grow up. ⁓

but we became them and then we found out there was a name. ⁓ We try and live up to that. The ⁓ exploration and learning has not ended, not one day. There’s so much. It’s the human side, as I think you do too. I’m interested in the human experience, not the technical.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Haha.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because the human side, you know, has to mesh with that technical side at some point in time. And ⁓ yeah, the technical side is really just the tool side to help the human side thrive, in my opinion, right? And they do need to, they just have to be harmonious if that can be possible. So yeah, we’re in agreement on that.

Susan Bradley:
And you know, I know that sounds logical to most people. We formed some money with the belief that the two sides of money, the technical and the personal, were equally important and equally complex. So there wasn’t much on the human side for what we were looking at. Psychology of money and Dick Thaler’s work and all that was out there. But it wasn’t helping, so we had to kind of go further.

But I don’t know if you found this, but I find that the personal side drives the bus during transitions. It is what it determines well-being. It drives decisions, particularly relationship decisions. It drives ⁓ identity and self-esteem. So it’s the human side that I think

My work starts on the human side. I would imagine yours does too. And then it’s integrated with the technical. It helps if you really know the technical, then you can leave it aside and go to the human and integrate the two, which is where most of the people that we train to be certified financial transitionists are. They have the technical, they go deep dive in the human, then they blend.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. Yeah, no, it’s to us, it’s a completely people first concept. It’s people come first and then the structure comes around the people versus the other way, right? Vice versa usually doesn’t work so well. ⁓ when you, well, your topic at the Purposeful Planning Institute was change disrupts and disruption creates.

So I thought I would just ask a little bit about that concept and how you came to that. And yeah, just tell our audience a little bit about what you mean.

Susan Bradley:
Yeah, and that was again, it was it was an evolution. Our culture doesn’t usually think of disruption as a creative force. It clearly is if you get on a high enough balcony, but particularly when you’re in the midst of it, it doesn’t feel positive. It’s something to to deal with, dispense and move on as best you can.

What we found over and over as we studied with people like Bill Bridges and others ⁓ looking at the different models is they frequently touched on the idea of something more that comes from it. And you see it in clients when you work closely with the client and over and over again. And then there’s the whole body of work on liminality.

which is the in-between. And all of that work, going back to the late 1890s, is about ⁓ experiencing change, absorbing it, managing it internally, and then using it to create what comes next. That word create comes up frequently, to shape or to create or reimagine.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yes.

Susan Bradley:
And it usually happens after the big stuff is done. So it doesn’t look as important. You’ve already rearranged the portfolios and the cash flow and the risk management and all of that. And it seems like people should be, OK, you’re done. And that liminality comes in. That’s the beauty of seeing it so you can capture it.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Yeah, so talk a little bit about that liminality. that what is liminality? What does it mean in this context?

Susan Bradley:
Yeah, it’s a great word. I believe it has Italian roots and it means threshold. So think of you’re going from one room, one way of life, owning a business, having your family set up in this context of the business, and you’re moving to the next. The move is inevitable. There’s no going back. So there’s a move. But you’re having the in-between time at the threshold between the two rooms.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Nice.

Susan Bradley:
And

in that space that you start to see into this change transition experience and if you have guides like your group to think through this, you see things you couldn’t have seen in the old room. It’s a new view. And one of the words to describe liminality, which would be really annoying outside of this context is

Ambiguity. Most experts don’t like ambiguity. But ambiguity has value. Uncertainty has value. the idea is to know the possibilities enough that you don’t spend your energy trying to get rid of uncertainty and answer all the questions. Many questions are better left unanswered for a while. You live in the question.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mmm.

Yeah, you live in the question and you discover the answers as you navigate, right? As you learn, as you grow, as things come to you, as ⁓ new thinking, new pathways open up, you can see them where you couldn’t see them before.

Susan Bradley:
works.

Yes, yeah, it’s beautiful. Another way to think of liminality, ⁓ if you look it up and start to play around with it, which of course is infinitely easy now with perplexity and all of that. ⁓ We did a lot of work that you don’t have to do quite so much now, but ⁓ architects use liminality in the context of an airport. An airport is not built to dwell in.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Susan Bradley:
you are passing through it. And each airport is built a little differently for the circumstances, the weather patterns, the kind of people, the kind of planes, private is it, whatever. And so you think of liminality as a time you’re passing through to the next. And it’s productive in a whole different way.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
you

Susan Bradley:
It’s more subjective than objective, but you’re testing. In quantum physics, they have the chaos theory. it moves from, a system moves from what it was to what it will be, there’s that in-between time. And it’s a time of testing within safe boundaries, testing ideas. But keeping, I love this term, it’s called a strange attractor for some reason.

when they simulate this in technology, it’s what is always going to be true about that system. So in your case, families have values, they have beliefs, they have legacy. So when they go to the next, that’s coming with them, but it doesn’t necessarily dictate what happens, but it’s there. So in quantum physics and chaos theory,

part of the safety of testing new is to bring the strange attractor, those hardwired beliefs with you so you’re testing and exploring. So it even goes down to the level of quantum physics. You can go up to architecture. It’s just the way nature is.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

It is, and human beings, right? Things are, they’re always moving, they’re always shifting around us. ⁓ Change happens all the way around us and we try so hard to have all the answers and especially I think in our culture today, know where we’re going, have the answers, be ready. yeah, sometimes one of my favorite words is ⁓ being able to navigate. You know, just be able to navigate because yeah, and, and.

Susan Bradley:
I like that too. Yeah.

Elizabeth Ledoux: 
Yeah, sit in that liminality while you learn and grow so that you can see the best path forward. It’s the way.

Susan K Bradley:
I think navigates a really good word because it’s a transit, right, from point A to point B. And when you think about it, I started out thinking that I was working in a financial literacy space because I had sort of grown up in the financial planning world and I was teaching the kids money camps at the Breakers Hotel and doing women programs, waving back. And I thought it was

Financial literacy, even when I worked with the NFLPA, they hired me to come and do work on, that’s the union side. I thought it was financial literacy. And then I had to just get it really in my face that it wasn’t, it’s transition literacy. Financial literacy is having skills and knowledge to make good decisions along the path of life and behaviors that go with that.

Transition literacy is having skills and behavior to navigate.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Susan Bradley:
and it’s to stay

in that navigational path.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah, yeah. And I don’t, you know, I think that we’re used to, was just thinking as you were saying that, just the concept of, ⁓ you know, what keeps people from moving forward in this transition work, because this transition work is so important. And you know, we work with any kind of family business, but it’s the transition of a family asset that’s of a high value to the family.

that they want that legacy carried on. They want it to be preserved, protected, be stewards of it, and all of those things. And all of those things require so many skills and so much knowledge to be transitioned. However, most of the time or many times, which I believe is what contributes to the failure rate.

of transitions, even from first to second generation, let alone second to third, you know, with only really a third of the businesses or assets continuing forward from that first generation. It’s only a third. They tend to not want to engage or think about that transition. they’ll just stay where they are.

When you were just saying that, I’m like, what’s keeping them? Is it the liminality that they don’t want to go through that? Is it that they don’t understand? What do you think?

Susan Bradley:
I think it’s real. I’ve been studying asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain just to keep me up at night. It’s actually very interesting work with a fellow named Ian McGilchrist. And his research on the left brain and the right brain is very telling. It’s helping me understand my answer to your question.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Light reading.

Nice.

Susan Bradley:
Our industry is our industry of advising people of wealth. Let’s make a big industry. It could be tax, it could be law, could be investments, transitions. It’s very left brain. It was created, it’s very male-centric. It was created by men, for men. Men tend to be, not always, tend to be left brain centered. And left brain is factual, it’s logical.

It likes prediction. It likes everything that transitions or not. The left part of our brain, male or female, wouldn’t really like liminality, wouldn’t really like uncertainty. It would work very hard to squash or to minimize uncertainty. But it’s in the uncertainty on the right side of the brain that the possibilities get seen, that the broader picture is.

And Miguel Cris’ work is really helping me get out of the old right brain, left brain, right brain is emotional, left brain is factual, Gallup says every decision is both. And I had all of that. He’s helping me understand the awesome power of this right brain if it is developed to synchronize, of course, integrate with the left. It’s not either or. So I think

There’s a transition in our, this big broad industry or profession. We’re moving from right brain anchored and centric to a more integrated to include intuition and imagination and reason beyond science. And it’s, you see it bubble up a lot. And I think there’s the consumers of

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mmm.

Susan Bradley:
this profession, the families, the real live individuals are looking more for a transformation experience than they ever have before. That’s Joseph Pines work, the transformation economy. And what is transformation? It’s leaving what was and transforming into the next. So we seem to be on the cusp. And I see

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mm-hmm.

you

Yeah.

That’s so exciting.

Susan Bradley:
I live my life on the cusp or I’m so far ahead of the wave it doesn’t matter. Maybe I should enjoy the cusp for a change.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

That’s what I love about you. When we had such a great conversation, just love that about you.

Susan Bradley:
Thank you, I appreciate that. But I think the skill within families and with those who advise families is something, it’s a term we’ve used for probably 15 years, but it has more meaning now. We call it informed intuition.

So you have information that’s important, whether it’s technical or important about self, important about what’s important and what’s true about the client, about all this transition study. And they all come together kind of effortlessly and smoothly if you develop this skill. So you’re intuitive, but it’s informed intuition. It has process. Like you have process.

It isn’t just, it’s a good idea to have a conversation. It’s how. And it’s steps to go through that conversation.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
yeah. Well, and you know, ⁓ I guess in some, I’m trying to kind of tie in some of the work that we do and even a meeting that I had today with a client ⁓ bringing together more than one person. So in this case, bringing together five people who are going to begin to manage and run and ⁓ whose financial wellbeing is also, you know, a part of

these assets moving forward, a part of the business moving forward. So not only do they have that financial piece tied in there, they also have the relationship tied in there. And they’re used to getting together and interacting differently in the family than they are when they get into this transition business. the transitioning of the business. So trying to weave all that into what you were just talking about, about that.

informed intuition and how do you bring that community together and how do you help each and every one of them do what you just said, right? Have that structure but also have that intuition that’s informed and go together.

Susan K Bradley:
You know, isn’t it interesting that it feels like they’re sort of opposing ideas of a structure and intuition. I actually think that intuition is structured, but we figured out, I don’t know, some years ago that what we were doing, we’ve created process for every reoccurring challenge that advisors, we work in five continents. So advisors, not just their culture.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
They’re not.

Susan Bradley:
they have this thing that comes up and this is where clients get stuck. So then we get, ⁓ let’s go find out and we create something. It turns out what we were doing when we were successful is we were having a structured conversation. It turns out that there are components and it’s a purposeful, like we have this, we want to know people’s

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mmm, yeah.

Susan Bradley:
communication preferences, what really makes them feel comfortable when they come into the meeting, when they’re in the meeting, when they follow up like that. Everybody is different. So you have the conversation, ask the question, but you have something and I don’t know all your work, but that’s why I was peeking around your website. It seems that you have something that you ⁓ and your families can look at that visual changes the way the brain works rather than the copy.

⁓ School teachers taught me that. The neuroscience say yes, but school teachers know it best. So you have something you look at and it is a purpose. It’s the reason we’re having this conversation is clear. And what you’re looking at gives the client ⁓ a process to explore and find their words, discover what they want to say, because we all have it. We’re not just, we’re not asked.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Susan Bradley:
frequently, particularly in a context like that. How do they find their words? Then what does it mean? And let the client drive it and decide what’s best. And then you make agreements and you move on. You can do that with 40 different kinds of tools, just those steps. it took me forever to figure out this structured conversation. Pass it on to anybody who would like to shortcut for themselves.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I know, Susan, that you are a wealth of knowledge and have so much background and so much experience. I love your approach to understanding what people need and just how to help these advisors in the world, not just in the country, but in the world, ⁓ make a difference for their clients and help families move together. So yeah, it’s awesome.

Susan Bradley:
Thank you. That is our mission, is to help individuals and families make the most of their disruptive times so they make good choices for themselves, their family and their community. And if you do enough of that, the world gets to be a pretty good place. We don’t need everybody. We need just maybe 2%. So that’s what we go for.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely.

I love it. love it. Well, our time goes so fast when we’re on these and I just, one, I’m so grateful. So grateful to have met you. So grateful to have had the opportunity to now have two conversations with you. And yeah, thank you so much for being here. I always end our podcast with one question and sometimes it’s on the spot. So.

Usually, I try to put you on the spot a little bit on this, but I’d love to know if you could leave one thing with our audience today, just one thing for them to take away, what would that be?

Susan Bradley:
Well, the understanding that the transition part of change is part of life, it’s the good stuff. And it takes probably a good five years. So be patient, find confidence, put your anchors out, and enjoy the navigation with a guide.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Excellent, excellent. Well, Susan, thanks again. And if anybody wants to reach out to Susan, her contact information and everything will be at the end of this. ⁓ all of her information will be available. So thank you again and ⁓ appreciate you.

Susan K Bradley:
Thank you, Elizabeth. I always enjoy being with you and I love the work you all do.

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The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux

How do communities thrive? When businesses experience healthy growth and transition. Join CEO of The Transition Strategists, Elizabeth Ledoux as she and her guests identify what makes a successful business transition roadmap. If you know you want to transition or exit your business “one day”, today is the right day to start planning. This show will give you the roadmap.

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