Change is constant. We move; we get new jobs; we lose people we love. From birth, the fault lines of our lives are continuously under pressure, shaking us up just when we believe we’re standing on solid ground. You’d think with all this exposure, the way we handle change would be streamlined — that we’d always choose the healthiest approach. But do we?
That’s a topic author Brad Stulberg was prompted to investigate after a pile-on of personal changes a few years back, a string of transitions that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, about a year into the global health crisis, he distinctly recalls a day when he was standing in his Asheville, North Carolina, kitchen, reading the news.
“All the headlines were talking about, ‘What’s it gonna take to get back to normal?’’’ Stulberg, 38, recounted in an interview with Nice News. “Or, ‘How will we get back to normal?’ Or, you know, ‘We have to do these three things to get back to normal.’ And it just kind of struck me, that phrasing.”
He started thinking about how he’d reacted to the recent upheavals in own life in the preceding five years — the success of his first book, the failure of a following project, an injury, a major mental health episode, becoming a father — and how much time so many of us seem to spend reaching for the way things were before we experienced a serious change, which he refers to as a “disorder event.”
So Stulberg, a frequent New York Times contributor and adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health, set out exploring change, turning to biology, psychology, and sociology, among other fields of research. As a result, he developed a new model for thinking about and approaching instability.
He calls that framework “rugged flexibility,” and he put it to paper in his 2023 book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You.
“To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking,” he writes. “Put those together and the result is a gritty endurance, an anti-fragility that not only withstands change, but thrives in its midst. This is rugged flexibility, the quality you need to become a master of change.”
Keep reading for some of his advice on approaching change with a rugged and flexible mindset.
Identity and Change
Any change can throw us off, but certain disorder events are particularly challenging because they tend to shatter our sense of self. For example: You’ve played sports your entire life, perhaps even professionally, but at 40, you experience an injury that prevents you from doing so in the future. You’ve always considered yourself first and foremost an athlete, so who are you now?
“If your identity becomes too enmeshed in any one concept or endeavor — be it your age, how you look in the mirror, a relationship, or your career — then you are likely to face significant distress when things change, which, for better or worse, they always do,” Stulberg writes.
His suggestions for fostering a rugged and flexible identity all involve cultivating a fluid sense of self.
Establishing Core Values
One way to cultivate a fluid sense of self is to establish a set of “core values.” These are “guiding principles you define yourself by, things like creativity, connection, intimacy, wisdom, kindness, strength, compassion,” Stulberg explained in our interview, adding: “Everything around you can change, but no one can take away your core values.”
When a situation arises that unmoors you, your values can act as an anchor. In those scenarios, you might ask yourself guiding questions like, “How can I maintain wisdom?,” “How can I prioritize health?,” or “What would a strong person do in these circumstances?”
“Those core values make you who you are,” said Stulberg. “And then when the world around you shifts, or when there’s an external event that you can’t control, you can always come back to your core values and use them to guide you.” In his book, he lists a number of common core values that can be used to spark inspiration when evaluating what means the most to you.
The House Analogy
Another useful tool Stulberg suggests may appeal to those who appreciate the power of metaphor: Think of your identity like a house.
“If you have a house and it only has one room in it, and that room floods or catches fire, then you have to move out of the house altogether,” he said. Instead, consider building an “identity house” with multiple rooms, so if a problem arises in one room, you can hang out somewhere else while you resolve the issue (or start building a new room).
“So you can have the job room, the parent room, the partner room, the entrepreneur room, the artist room, the creative room, the dog lover room. It doesn’t matter what the rooms are, you just want to have more than one room,” he added, noting that the rooms don’t all need to be the same size, and you don’t have to spend the same amount of time in every room.
“The goal here is not to be, quote unquote ‘balanced’ across all the rooms,” Stulberg explained. “It’s just to build an identity house with more than one room. So that when things change in one room, you can seek refuge in the others.”
Questions to Help You Embrace Change
Just as personal inquiry is helpful when using your core values as a compass, asking yourself questions can also aid you in solidifying your understanding of rugged flexibility and putting it into practice. Stulberg lays out five in the back of his book — here are two he touched on in our interview:
1. Where in your life are you pursuing fixity where it might be beneficial to open yourself to the possibility — or in some cases, the inevitability — of change?
Consider if there is an area of your life where you have been, perhaps stubbornly, resisting the potential of change, and ask yourself why. Stulberg writes that common “offenders” include “aging, relationships, big projects at work, external measures of success, plans for your future, and episodes from your past.”
He continues: “When you identify specific areas of resistance, explore what it would look like to loosen your grip, even if only a little.”
2. In what parts of your life are you holding on to unrealistic expectations?
“There’s a good argument that the best definition of reality is ‘change.’ It follows that if we expect things will never change, well, we’ll spend a lot of our lives unhappy due to wildly faulty expectations,” Stulberg writes. “Where in your life are you wearing rose-tinted glasses? How could you take a more accurate view? What would it look like for you to accept the world on its terms without giving up hope that it can become better?”
More Tools for Developing Rugged Flexibility
In the conclusion of Master of Change, Stulberg offers 10 tools for developing rugged flexibility. These are a few of our favorites:
1. Embrace non-dual thinking
There are certainly scenarios to which black-and-white thinking applies — sometimes things simply either are or aren’t. But much, if not most, of life lends itself more to a non-dual approach, or as Stulberg puts it, a “both/and” truth. He quotes psychologist Danny Kahneman, writing that the Nobel prize winner “used to tell his students, ‘When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask yourself what it might be true of.’”
2. Adopt a being orientation
This tool is another way of making sure your identity isn’t tied to circumstances, and thus isn’t prone to shattering when circumstances inevitably change. A being orientation “means you identify with the deepest and most enduring parts of yourself,” Stulberg writes, adding: “If you find yourself becoming overly attached to any one person, place, concept, or thing, broaden the story you tell yourself about yourself. Instead of thinking, I am the person who has X, Y, and Z, try thinking, I am the person who does X, Y, and Z.”
3. Don’t force meaning and growth; let them come on their own time
We’re all familiar with the idea that challenging events build character, and per Stulberg, research has shown that most people grow and find meaning even after the most harrowing of ordeals. But that can take time, and putting pressure on yourself to immediately find the profundity in an upsetting shake-up will likely backfire.
“Simply showing up and getting through is enough. You won’t be the same and not everything will necessarily be OK, but there is a high probability that you’ll find at least some meaning and growth, even if that seems impossible when you are in the middle of the hardship itself,” he writes. “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.”
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