Welcome to GabFest Reeds for January. I'm John Dickerson. In this episode, I talk with Brad Stolberg,

an author, executive coach, and faculty member at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health.

His work is dedicated to the science behind well-being and achieving excellence.

His new book is called Master of Change, How to Excel when everything is changing, including you.

And it explores how to stay stable in the face of life shocks

that inevitably will come to all of us.

It's out now from Harper Collins.

Here's our conversation.

Music all of us. It's out now from Harper Collins. Here's our conversation. Brad Stelberg, welcome to GabFest Reeds. Thanks so much for being here. John, it's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me. I first got to know you through Instagram when a friend of mine forwarded one of your posts and then they became so

nourishing. I started following you. Then I started reading your work and we're going to talk

about Master of Change, but I just want to testify to the fact that social media is not totally

awful because it brought me in touch with your work. So I want to start with,

when we're talking about change,

one of the things I loved was the study you cited that said there are,

and I can't remember there was 36 or 38 life altering events.

Explain what that means and give, and give me the right number in case I

butchered it. That's right. So this is research that was commissioned by Bruce Filer that found that

the average adult undergoes 36 major life disruptions. These can be things like moving geographies, starting a new job,

ending a job, having kids, having your kids leave the house, getting married, getting divorce,

meeting a new best friend, distancing from a best friend, loss, illness, recovery from illness.

And what really struck me about this is that we think of change as these

...