Master of Change

I truly enjoyed reading Master of Change by Brad Stulburg. I’ve put together a brief summary followed by a lengthier review. The summary is very high level and the review, so as not to get too entirely long, is just the high points. This is a solid 3 star review book for me which means definitely worth recommending and reading again.

My Summary

The conventional view of change is that of homeostasis. It originated in 1865 with a French physician named Claud Bernard. The term homeostasis was brought into existence by an American scientist in 1926. Essentially the idea of homeostasis says that to successfully navigate change we must return to and/or remain in some fixed state of being that is at some desired level of comfort and happiness. Popular articles tell us all the time we're fighting to get to or back to homeostasis in diet, exercise, sleep and more. We tend to resist change in one of four ways:

1. Avoiding and ignoring
2. Push back and resist
3. Give up our own agency and sacrifice to the chaos around us
4. Keep trying to return to our version of "normal"

The argument Stulburg spends the book making is there is a better way which is one that encourages identifying stability through change. That view is called allostasis. This term was developed through research at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 80s. Specifically, Stulburg describes the difference as follows, "Whereas homeostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, order, allostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, reorder." Stulburg does not claim that navigating change is easy or comfortable. He claims that to navigate the significant amount of change we will experience in our lives, we must seek an allostasis based view rather than a homestatis based view.

In order to embrace allostasis as a way forward, we must, according to Stulburg, embrace a mindset and way of being that he calls rugged flexibility. A major element of cultivating rugged flexibility is doing what one of my favorite authors [Gretchen Rubin] calls "living in an atmosphere of growth." Stulburg says it this way, "Cultivating a strong and enduring sense of self means treating your life like a path." Paths are forged through the world by the traveler while their opposite, roads, in Stulburg's illustration are laid out for the traveler by others and must be rigidly adhered to. When detours are called for, they are laid out by another person rather than by the traveler themself. Living in an atmosphere of growth allows us to more readily recognize and claim our own agency and turn life's roads into paths.

Stulburg's work on rugged flexibility also relates very closely to the ideas that Dan Sullivan developed and Dr. Benjamin Hardy describes in their book The Gap and The Gain. Sullivan and Hardy spend considerable effort telling us that we must measure our lives backwards, against our own progress, rather than towards some ideal of where we wish to be. Stulburg emphasizes the importance of embracing our current reality and managing our expectations clearly based on our current reality. Stulburg emphasizes that setting expectations that are then not met creates a disappointment. Our identity also cannot be too closely aligned with any one thing. We must have a complex and interconnected identity that allows us to rely on its various components as the different pieces of our identity shift regularly. This fluid sense of self is held in place by values based boundaries.

Stulburg also dives into research around pain and that our suffering is directly proportional to how much we resist pain. Accepting that pain happens and is happening to us, will lessen our suffering.

My Review

I didn't need to be convinced that change is an every day part of our lives and our lives are improved when we learn to ride the waves of change skillfully rather than when we attempt to block and negate change. I have often described my personal role in jobs as a bridge builder between former and newer methods. I attempt to help people move from a way they've done things or something they knew to a new way of doing or learning something new. Therefore, agreeing with the premise that we should not aim for homeostasis but rather embrace allostasis is an easy thing to do. In exploring one of the many references cited by Stulburg in the notes for Master of Change, I found this quote from "Allostasis is consonant with greater self-creativity, non-obsolescence, empowerment, and citizenship, which are intended as “upgrades” for the traditional concepts of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice, respectively" (Lee, 2019).

Two specific arguments that Stulburg align with things I've though about for years - one I've written about extensively and the other I've thought about writing about but never really found the mechanism to do so. I've written extensively about the role of values in our life. Our values, according to Stulburg, allow us to navigate change by giving us an anchor point for our identity. From my own journey with cancer, swimming through a river of uncertainty by focusing on my keystone value of freedom has been incredibly helpful to me. I have cancer and it is altering my life but I still retain an incredible amount of freedom and agency in this battle. The second argument Stulburg makes with which I wholeheartedly agree is to embrace dualistic - or what I call continuum thinking. Since I've not written about this idea before in my own writing I'll express Stulburg's idea of non-dualistic thinking in my own words.

We are made up of hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of continuums in our existence. Here are just a few I think about regularly:

• unhealthy - healthy
• sad - happy
• distressed - peaceful
• ignoring - attentive
• inactive - active
  This is just a small cadre of the multitude of elements that make up every moment of our lives. In most moments I am neither unhealthy nor healthy. I'm somewhere along a continuum between unhealthy and healthy. My place on the continuum changes daily - and, more truthfully, tens and hundreds of times in a single day. The same is true for all of the others. We are always changing and the world around us is always changing. For example, as I type this my brain is active and my fingers are active but my body overall is inactive. We are rarely and either/or. We are a both/and.

There are at least two things that aid in our ability to embrace dualistic thinking.

One is the ability to hold two competing viewpoints as true, albeit in their own ways, at the same time. For example, embrace evolution as scientific truth while also integrating the Biblical narrative of creation as a story that contains much truth for me. The story of Biblical creation, for me, is not a factual story in need of proof or that must be true. For me, it is a demonstration of our interconnectedness to the world and as humans. It is also the demonstration that we are connected to a higher purpose and higher being. That said, I also believe that over time we, as humans, evolved from species that came before us just as other species adapt to the environments around them.

The second is our ability to appreciate the grey areas of a specific situation and to be willing to and actively seek out the grey areas between my beliefs and the beliefs of another person. In my former executive role, I regularly led change efforts. They were met with all forms of resistance. However, I navigated them most successfully when I regularly listened to the views of others and considered their views as truths while also being open to considering my own views as false. Finding where their truth and my false overlapped allowed me to further improve an area of change we were attempting to change. More specifically, I developed extreme comfort in moving forward when no clear process or procedure for moving forward already existed. There was no specific path to follow so I made my own.

While I, in the end, thoroughly enjoyed this book and will likely re-read it, there were areas I wish Stulburg had explored more deeply as I feel like he left the reader hanging without adequate explanation of important concepts. I'll cover the two that disappointed me the most in this review. I'll add some additional context and resources for why I believe Stulburg missed an opportunity to further explore and connect these areas.

The first idea is that of chronic frustration. Stulburg introduces the concept in the introductory chapter. To illustrate the idea of chronic frustration consider a day where you:

1. Hit snooze one too many times and now are frustrated with yourself that you didn't do as you said you'd do and get up at the time your alarm was set so you wouldn't feel rushed.
2. On the way to work, you realize you forgot to get gas on the way home. You're again frustrated with yourself about forgetting and now about running even more late and feeling even more rushed.
3. You get to work and as you're walking in your boss catches you and berates you for coming in late and then makes an "emergency" request for information that he needs for a meeting in less than an hour. Your own frustration with yourself is compounded and you are now frustrated because this is a standing weekly meeting and your boss makes such emergency requests regularly. His lack of preparation is annoying.
4. Finally at your desk, you realize in your haste to leave the house you forgot your lunch
5. You get to work on the request from your boss only to find that the IT system you need is down right now. When you let your boss know you've put in a ticket with IT and that you'll keep trying, he comes back as if the system being down is your fault.
6. While you wait on hold with IT at your boss's instance, you open your email. Your expense report was rejected because finance says a receipt is missing. You review the report and write back pointing out that the receipt is actually there on page 8 of the report. The reimbursement is going to be further delayed even though you submitted your report on time and now you may have to pay interest on your credit card or front the money from savings because the finance team is regularly slow and finds errors that aren't really there. When you've presented evidence of this to your boss he always says he's working on it but nothing ever seems to change.
7. The IT system comes up and you rush to get the data for your boss. You send it off with 20 minutes to spare before his meeting. His response, "About time."
   All of this and it's not even lunch time. While this might be an overdramatized day, these moments illustrate just a small number of items that may cause us frustration during the day. I believe this concept of chronic frustration is one that deserves deeper exploration. Dr. Andrea Bonior says that "frustration is likely to be the top layer of a feeling" (Bonior, 2019). In her practice, Dr. Bonior indicates that when a client says they are frustrated, she guides the client/patient to examine the emotion and see if some other or additional emotion is underlying the frustration. I believe Stulburg would have been better served by further exploring this concept since at least two of the tools Stulburg provides for reaching a state of reorder in allostasis navigation rely on accurately naming emotions. These are the 4P process:
8. Pause
9. Process
10. Plan
11. Proceed
    of which you could view the second tool a sub-part or a tool on its own. This is identifying and specifically naming our emotions. If all emotions are being labeled as frustration we are blocked in our ability to accurately plan and proceed in the 4P's as we may not be addressing the root cause of the emotion but instead see things as an emotion which is less able to help us move forward.

Additionally, Spulburg gives significant attention to what he calls recognizing real fatigue vs fake fatigue. This recognition relies on developing a better understanding of the sources and causes of our fatigue. I posit that fake fatigue is often caused by chronic frustration. If you can't identify and name the emotions that underly your frustration and then connect those to feelings of fatigue it may be far more difficult to differentiate between what I'd prefer to call external and internal fatigue. External fatigue is analogous in my mind to what Spulburg calls real fatigue and internal fatigue is perceived fatigue brought on by a litany of emotional and environmental issues that no amount of physical rest will actually cure.

The second area I found disappointing was in Spulburg's discussion of tragic optimism. Spulburg gives a lot of print real estate to this concept but I don't feel he did enough to explain how you healthfully create a sense of tragic optimism. And, for the record, I loathe the phrase tragic optimism, with all respect to Viktor Frankl who coined it. I prefer something like measured or realistic optimism rather than tragic. As I've reviewed my notes to pull together this summary and review, I think Spulburg covered tragic optimism accurately enough but in a manner that felt more philosophical than practical to me. I love that he related Frankl's original work to modern day neuroscience. However, I just don't think it's practical enough, even though so much of the book is highly practical.

I'll relate this again to the idea of naming what you are feeling and taking time to work through the 4P process. Again, these are Pause, Process, Plan, and Proceed. In order to pause and process I have to recognize I'm triggered and then identify what I'm feeling. There is much pressure in our society to "go with the flow", "roll with the punches", and "buck up buttercup". Yet, as my therapist and I discussed in a recent session discussing the feelings and emotions around my cancer diagnosis and the treatment experience, sometimes things just suck and that's okay. While overall I am optimistic, I don't think Stulburg gives enough credence to the fact sometimes reality just sucks.

Reading this book was an excellent moment of serendipity as I am navigating a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment through surgery, chemotherapy, and potentially radiation as well as several years of follow up visits to verify cancer remains, hopefully, undetectable. The diagnosis and treatment is overwhelming at times. The process of navigating treatment, billing, insurance, and scheduling is often burdensome and even angering. When I approach these meetings, treatments, phone calls, and other interactions with optimism as well as realistic expectations it gives me more empathy for the other person in the interaction. I think empathy is a major player in the role of developing and maintaining tragic optimism.

The practical advice Stulburg does provide for building on tragic optimism is to employ wise hope and wise action. Here it is in Stulburg's words:

Wise hope and wise action ask that you accept and see a situation clearly for what it is, and then, with the hopeful attitude necessary, say, Well, this is what is happening now, so I will focus on what I can control, try not to obsess over what I can’t, and do the best I can. I’ve faced other challenges and other seasons of doubt and despair, and I’ve come out the other side. Wise hope and wise action are not just pathways to productively engage in and influence change and disorder. They also support mental and physical health.

I've employed this idea most of my life. I call it the "if someone else can do it, so can I" mentality. I also think more conversation could have been had around the idea of control and it's adjacent cousin freedom. Freedom is one of my core values. Spulburg talks at great length, and quite excellently, about the role values play in our lives. However, control is at the heart of many of our challenges with change. When we can more clearly identify where our freedom, agency, and choice lie in a given situation, I have found that it can lead to far better navigation of change.

The tools I've shared so far are just a few of the many tools that Spulburg shares. The tools are well researched and provide many potential additional sources to explore most of these more deeply. Some of the tools and practices are laid out in great depth while others are quickly introduced and then not really discussed any further. For example, in Chapter 1, Spulburg provides a quick reflection exercise for exploring the inescapability of a change. You answer two questions, provided in the text, "What would it look like to fully accept your reality as it is? How might you work with it differently?" Because many of these types of mini-exercises are sprinkled throughout the book there are a lot of additional potential actions you could take as a result of this book. For instance, I set up these two questions as a journaling template in the app Day One.
![746BF97A-B987-4BE3-818A-7CDDF50BC99E_4_5005_c.jpeg]

I also plan to do his core values exercise as a part of my annual review. I've had core values identified and I've reviewed them regularly. However, Stulburg has you write a sentence to define each and then list out tangible ways in which you know you're acting out that core value. This seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me and one I'm excited to take on.

Summary Review

I am using my new content rating system for this book. The scores I gave in each category follow:

• Initial response - 4 - The start of the book was a little rough but once it got going it was great. I will definitely read again and/or review my notes often.
• Structure - 3 - I think the book is too long for what it is and a bit redundant in places.
• Storytelling - 3 - Same issues as structure
• Coherence/World Building - 3 - Same issues as structure and storytelling.
• Character(s) - 3 - This one is tough because there isn't really a character for this book other than the author but I ended up liking him more and more as the book went on.
• Creativity - 3 - While not all that creative, I do think this is a book we need right now
  Overall rating of 3.17 which equates to 3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

References for Summary and Review

Bonior, A. (2019, Sept 27). "Frustrated?" There's Probably Another Emotion Present. Psychology Today. Website. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendship-20/201909/frustrated-theres-probably-another-emotion-present on December 1, 2023.

Lee, S. W. (2019, April 26) A Copernican Approach to Brain Advancement: The Paradigm of Allostatic Orchestration. Frontiers in Human Neuorscience. 2019; 13: 129. Published online 2019 Apr 26. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00129. Retrieved December 1, 2023.