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:

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…