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This book is not about these business executives, these students, or these particular clients. It is about you and the work you must do, many times in the course of your life, to move closer to more meaningful work and a more meaningful life.

You will be using the vision-building exercises I use in my classes at Harvard and in my workshops with executives and career coaches all over the world. Specifically, you will:

 Learn how to recognize the state of psychological impasse and use it as the starting point for real change in the way you make life and work choices;

 Participate in exercises that activate, evoke, and deepen images that will shape your new life vision;

 Learn how to recognize enduring patterns of meaning that point to the activities, rewards, types of people, work cultures, and communities that are most likely to satisfy you;

 Learn how the creative work you do at times of impasse can enable you to take action and make life choices that will make your vision a reality.

I emphasize career and work crises, but impasse does not differentiate between the work life and the personal life. This approach is relevant for anyone who has come to realize that something must change—in a job description, in working habits, in a marriage, in a friendship, or in an overly frenetic and frustrating way of living. Even though you have picked up this book, your reasons for doing so may not yet be fully formed or understood. That is a good place to begin—that vague sense of possibility will have the chance to emerge as you move deeper into the way of working that this book presents.

A brief note on the theoretical underpinnings of this material: this book does not offer new developmental theory, although it calls repeatedly on theory to help us look deeper into what is actually going on during a time of impasse. To this end, it will use both the theory and models that have emerged from my own research and from the work of some of the most prominent developmental psychologists of the past century. If you are interested in the potent ideas of these researchers and psychotherapists, you will find references in the notes section and in the annotated bibliography in appendix A.

More important than some schema of adult development, however, is the actual experience of working through psychological impasse. Each phase of the impasse cycle and vision process has its own mood and its own challenges. Each requires its own response. This is not about speed-reading or quick course corrections. There will be times to be still and listen, even when you want to run. There will be times to let your sensibilities sink deeper until you reach a bottom that can support a new movement upward. There will times to be busy, to focus and work as if your life depended on it. It is important to sense the mood, gauge the challenge, and calibrate the response appropriate for each phase.

The book is designed as a journey; you will move through a sequence of meditations, readings, and exercises designed to take you through the full impasse cycle and into a richer vision of your work and life. The best way to get unstuck is to take your time with the book, and to work through each exercise as it appears in the text. Of course, you may want to do some exercises more than once during this journey—and again and again in the future when the feeling of impasse returns.