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“I’ve always liked math, but it’s sharing the ideas with students that gets me out of bed in the morning,” says Betsy Sloan, reflecting on her former career as a CPA and her current life as a teacher. “I care more about people than the bottom line. And I really care about ninth-graders: you get to fall in love with them and then have them for three more years.”

As a high-school teacher, Betsy has found the freedom to be who she really is. “As a CPA in a Big Eight firm in the 1980s,” she says, “I couldn’t wear pants. I couldn’t even wear a dress. It had to be a suit. In the insurance firm in the 1990s maybe I could wear a pants suit.” Her work attire today is a brown button-down blouse and khaki trousers, and her auburn hair falls to her shoulders in graceful waves. But during her nine years as a teacher she’s gone from her natural auburn to black to blonde—and back to auburn.

“Students are very accepting,” she says. “All they care about is how much homework I give them. And all the administration cares about is whether I’m teaching the curriculum.”

“What I care about is that the kids get my jokes,” she adds, laughing. “I’m shy, but put me in front of a class and I’m a ham.”

Quickly settling into a more reflective tone she adds, “My charge is much more than developing good math students.” Betsy has found that the great meaning in her work comes from counseling and mentoring her students, whether leading a discussion after one student died in a car accident or inviting kids into her classroom at lunchtime. “We usually have four games of Scrabble going, kids hanging out over Scrabble and talking.”

DEEP DIVE

Using This Book

This book is practical. It is meant to be used. It will lead you through the process I use with students at the Harvard Business School and with participants in my workshops. The chapters will lead you in sequence through the six phases of the vision cycle: The arrival of the crisis, the deepening of the crisis, letting go of your current mental model, making a crucial shift to a new perspective, recognizing the deep patterns of your personality, and taking action for meaningful change.

Throughout the book, there are highlighted self-assessment Deep Dive exercises. These exercises allow you to take the material you have just read and focus it immediately and specifically on your own life situation. I encourage you to participate in the One Hundred Jobs exercise presented in chapter 4 as it will provide an experiential basis for many of the ideas discussed in later chapters. A second major exercise, the Image Gathering exercise also introduced in chapter 4, is actually a guided meditation, and you may listen to me presenting this exercise by going to www.careerleader .com/gettingunstuck. This Web site will also provide additional material for applying the ideas presented in this book to your work and life situation. Completing the Image Gathering exercise is not essential for using this book, but it will add richness and texture to the insights you gain from the One Hundred Jobs exercise. For each of these exercises, there are detailed guidance and case examples.

You may, of course, skip the exercises altogether and read the book for the theory it presents. There are many stories and case histories to help bring the ideas to life as you do so. However, I extend an invitation now, as you begin the book, to enter into the reading as fully as possible and make it an experience of your own frontier.

For those of us who, like Betsy, take the time to fully experience impasse—letting the crisis deepen, listening to that clear inner voice, and taking action to make change—life will prove more and challenging than our younger selves had imagined, and it will, at the same time, feel more familiar and authentic.

I wrote this book to guide you through the necessary crisis of growth that each experience at impasse brings. (See “Deep Dive: Using This Book.”) It is my hope that what I have learned about how this process takes place will draw you deeper into your own vision for what needs to come next in life and deeper, as well, into your ability to recognize and help those around you who find themselves at their own frontiers.