Martha Beck - Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic

Breaking Point: Why Women Fall Apart and How They Can Re-Create Their Lives

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The Famous Music Publishing Companies. Lyrics from Paths of Desire written by Emil Adler and Julie Flander. Copyright 1991 by Famous Music Corporation and October Project Publishing. HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, A New English Version, with Foreword and Notes by Stephen Mitchell. Translation copyright 1988 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright 2001 by Martha Beck

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beck, Martha Nibley, 1962

Finding your own North Star : claiming the life you were meant to live / Martha Beck. 1st ed.
1. Success. I. Title.
BJ1611 .B32 2001
158.1dc21 00-043133

eISBN: 978-0-307-45313-6

v3.1_r2

Karen, this ones for you.

AUTHORS NOTE

Throughout this book, I have drawn heavily on examples from the clients in my Life Design program and workshops. However, to protect their privacy and ensure confidentiality, I have changed their names, descriptions, and other identifying characteristics. I am profoundly grateful to them for their example and trust in me; in helping them find their own North Stars, they have helped me find mine.

I have not disguised the names of any members of my family, my friends, or my sainted beagle, Cookie.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes a great deal to my students at the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), who put up with my unorthodox teaching style, forgave me for my mistakes, shared their life and career histories, and urged me to explore my interest in life design. In particular, Id like to thank Jessica Walters and Susan Bagdadhi for their insight, energy, and sensitivity. Id also like to thank the individuals who allowed me to interview them, in an undisguised attempt to steal the secrets of their success.

The ideas for this book began to take shape while I was working as a research assistant for Dr. John Kotter, of Harvard Business School. I thank him for hiring me despite my total lack of experience or ability, and for being patient while I developed a little of each.

Im also deeply grateful to Dr. John Beck, of Andersen Consultings Institute for Strategic Change (no, the name is not a coincidence). Many of the ideas in this book came from John, and all of them were run through his brain at least three or four times as we debated over our morning lattes.

Aristotle believed that a physician had to experience a disease before trying to cure it. Ive definitely been through the process of losing and regaining my own North Star, and without certain people as guides, I would never have found my way back. Its impossible to name all these people, but some of them are (in the order they showed up) Rebecca Nibley, Robert Bennion, Will Reimann, Sibyl Johnston, Ruth Killpack and the gang at Aspen, Lydia and Sylvia Nibley, Dawn Swanson, Annette Rogers, and all my brave, wonderful clients.

My incredible editor, Betsy Rapoport, has been not only a friend and North Star guide, but a midwife to this book and my writing in general. I cant thank her enough for her brilliance, kindness, wit, and sheer endurance. My agent Beth Vesel and her assistant Emilie Stewart have also been stalwart supporters. My magazine editors, including Jeanie Pyun, Lisa Benenson, Marcia Menter, Carol Kramer (and all the other folks at Real Simple), encouraged me to push life design ideas further and put them in readable form. It has been a privilege having them as teachers.

Finally my love and thanks to the population of my Stella Polaris: John, Kevin, Kat, Adam, Liz, Cookie the Intrepid, and especially Karen. Their presence in my life is daily proof that even impossible dreams come true.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Right in the middle of my life, I realized that I wasnt where I wanted to be. It was like Id wandered off the right path into a very, very bad neighborhood. I dont even want to remember how scary that space wasmakes me feel like Im gonna die or something. Im only telling you about it because a lot of good came of it in the long run. So anyway, I dont even know how I ended up so far off course. I felt like Id been sleepwalking.Dan, age 41

This story could have come from any one of the hundreds of people Ive met in my office, classes, and seminars, but it didnt. As a matter of fact, Dan is short for Dante, as in Dante Alighieri. The paragraph above is my own exceedingly loose rendition of the first twelve lines of The Divine Comedy, written in 1307. Sometimes I tell clients about it, because it helps them believe they arent the first people whove ever snapped awake at midlife, only to find themselves dazed, unhappy, and way off course. Its been happening at least since the Middle Ages, and not only to the middle-aged.

I see a lot of folks like Dan in my line of work. I offer a service called life design. It isnt therapy, although I do tend to talk a lot with my clients about their feelings and personal histories. It isnt career counseling, although Ive helped many people spiff up their rsums, prep for job interviews, and refine business plans. Life design, at least the way I practice it, is the process of helping people find what Dante called la verace via, the true path. Not that theres only one true path, you understand. There are as many paths as there are people, and the only one I can chart is my own. I have no idea, for example, where your true path may lie. But you do.

In The Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil shows up out of nowherepoof!to guide Dante out of the Dark Wood of Error. I certainly hope this happens for you, too, but I wouldnt hold my breath. And God knows, Im no Virgil. What I am is a coach who can help you recognize your true path, find your way back to it, and stay on course. After reading thousands of helpful books, getting lost in my own Dark Wood of Error several million times, and helping hundreds of people create lives where their souls can thrive, Ive developed concepts and tools for facilitating the process. This book contains the best advice I can give.