Chapters: Mastering Change in Life and Work

This text picks up where "Who Moved My Cheese" leaves off. "Chapters", which means living life serially, like chapters in a book, is a concept that will fundamentally change the way we look at our careers, our relationships, our families, and our futures. By living serially, we can take charge off a force that threatens to overwhelm us. We can learn to master change. "Chapters" is constructed around two fundamentals truths of 21st century life: we are living longer, and we are living at an accelerated pace. Change has become such a constant in our lives that the old paradigms for living no longer apply. Two generations ago, the story of our lives was largely etched in stone by choices we made in our first 25 years: colleges, the mates we chose, first jobs, and contacts we made. Since then, social change, economic change, and technology have altered traditional expectations. We no longer spend our careers at a single or even several companies, or even a single occupation. Marriage is no longer necessarily for the long term. Retirement may mean life on the golf course, the start of a new career, or both. Today, we have the opportunity of choosing and choosing again every five to ten years how we're going to reinvent ourselves. The problem with living life at this pace, however, is becoming increasingly clear: humans weren't built for the degree of change now being imposed upon us or for the information overload that accompanies it. "Chapters" is about taking control of the change that overwhelms us all before change takes control of us. To master change and the transitions it brings, we need to discard the notions that life is lived on a continuum, that we should strive to achieve perfect "balance," and that we can have it all, all the time. Instead, "Chapters" prescribes a step-by-step approach to serial living wherein we anticipate and plan for the changes in our lives, treating each chapter as the only chapter rather than endlessly multitasking. By focusing serially rather than juggling endlessly, we can learn to live and work in the "zone," a term borrowed from the lexicon of athletes, which enables us to perform at our peak at achieve true personal satisfaction. Candice Carpenter uses the chapters in her own life to illustrate her step-by-step approach to living with change, and she draws on myriad examples from people she has interviewed. They come from all walks of life - doctors and lawyers; students, schoolteachers and stay-at-home moms; entrepreneurs and executives - but their lives have common themes: what it takes to begin a new life chapter, how to recognize when it's time to shift gears and take a new road, how to plan ahead for change, how to handle the inevitable false starts and failures, and above all, how to deal with the emotional upheaval that comes with changing from one life stage to the next.