Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing…Including You
Brad Stulberg
HarperOne: An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers (September 2023)

Accepting the inevitability of change “turns out to be empowering and even an advantage.”

In the Introduction, Brad Stulberg observes, “Learning an entirely new way to conceive of and work with change — what I’ve come to call ‘rugged  flexibility’ — minimizes distress, restlessness, and angst while promoting deep happiness and lasting fulfillment.”

He suggests and explains ten of the most important ways to  practice rugged flexibility:

1. Embrace non-dual thinking.
2. Adopt a BEING orientation.
3. Frequently update your expectations to match reality.
4. Practice tragic optimism, commit to wise hope, and take wise action.
5. Actively differentiate and integrated your sense of self.
6. View the world with independent and interdependent lenses.
7. Resp0nd to change with the four Ps. [i.e. pause, process, plan, and proceed]
8. Lean on routines (and rituals) to provide stability during periods of disorder.
9. Use behavioral activation.
10. Don’t force meaning and growth; let them comed on their own time.

In his classic work Leading Change, James O’Toole suggests that the greatest resistance to change tends to be cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” Presumably Brad Stulberg agrees. Here is his concluding observation: “Be kind and patient with yourself — hard as it may be — and do what you can to lean on others for support. We are all in this together.”

Here is some excellent advice to those now planning or are already engaged in organizational transformation, expressed in this African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

While reading Master of Change, highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to the questions posed within the narrative. These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.