Master of Change: A Book Summary and Review
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:
- Avoiding and ignoring
- Push back and resist
- Give up our own agency and sacrifice to the chaos around us
- 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…
