Life Is Change: A Guest Post by Brad Stulberg
The bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness is back to tackle one of life’s biggest challenges: change. Read on for an exclusive essay from Brad Stulberg on writing Master of Change.
Paperback $18.99
Master of Change: The Case for Rugged Flexibility
Master of Change: The Case for Rugged Flexibility
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
A revelatory book on rethinking change, developing resilience, and creating a rugged and flexible mindset amidst life’s intensifying flux from writer, coach, and bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness.
A revelatory book on rethinking change, developing resilience, and creating a rugged and flexible mindset amidst life’s intensifying flux from writer, coach, and bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness.
It was mid 2020. I had just moved across the country from the San Francisco Bay Area to a smaller mountain town in Western North Carolina. I left a corporate job to write and coach full time. I became a father. I suffered an injury that essentially ended my running career, a sport that had composed a significant proportion of my identity. My book The Practice of Groundedness had become a major success. Other writing projects failed. The pandemic was raging.
When I told friends and colleagues that I felt like everything was in flux, the most common response was some version of me too. Like it or not, life is change, and in the modern world its pace is faster and more intense than ever. I knew the topic of my next book.
When I dove into the research on change, what I learned surprised me. For starters, the average adult experiences over thirty-five major changes in their life, or about one every eighteen months. This runs counter to the prevailing wisdom that big changes happen once, maybe twice in a lifetime. I also learned that our common conception of how change works is misguided at best and harmful at worst, but also that learning a concept called allostasis can help us maneuver the winds of change with grace and agility.
Allostasis is based on the idea that rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline is a moving target. Allostasis runs counter to a more widespread but older and outdated model for change, homeostasis, which says healthy systems always return to the same starting point: order, disorder, order; X to Y to X. While healthy systems do crave stability, the baseline of that stability can be new: order, disorder, reorder; X to Y to Z. This is also called “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to maintain stability through change is by being adaptable, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.
I discovered the best way to navigate and grow from change is to be equal parts rugged and flexible, what I came to call embracing a mindset of rugged flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable, to know your core values, what you stand for. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to evolve, grow, and even change your mind. Put these qualities together and the result is a gritty endurance,one that helps you maintain your strong core even in fragile moments.
The process of researching, reporting, and writing Master of Change completely changed my outlook on change. It’s still hard, but with the right mindset, it can also be a force for growth, and I’m honored to have heard from thousands of readers that they feel the same.
