Authoring Your Life: Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life's Challenges

Who am I? What do I want in relationships? How do I know what to believe? How do I manage the stresses of living?This is a guide to addressing life’s challenges and competing demands. It will help you to reflect on the problems and setbacks you encounter to discover your own voice, uncover your authentic sense of values, build your confidence, and find meaning in your life. This is, however, far more than a self-help book; and it addresses multiple audiences.Because everyone’s circumstances differ, and life is unpredictable, this book does not offer simplistic solutions and steps to follow. Instead, Marcia Baxter Magolda immerses you in the stories of thirty-five adults whom she has followed and interviewed for over twenty years. With her guidance, and using the self-authorship framework she has developed, you will recognize in yourself many patterns and parallels from the protagonists’ stories of emotional and intellectual growth. By reflecting on these life stories, you will gain insights about your individual values and identity, and strengthen your sense of self-reliance to handle significant transitions and unexpected circumstances. In addition to helping you identify the phases of your journey to self-authorship, Marcia Baxter Magolda offers reflective exercises and questions to help you uncover your strengths and identify the barriers that may be inhibiting you from building the internal, psychological compass that will serve as the foundation for your journey. Offering advice on how to be “good company” for those who have set out on their journey to self-authorship, the book is also addressed to partners, family members, friends, teachers, mentors, and employers, so they can offer support to those that face these challenges.Finally, for scholars of adult development, this book offers the latest articulation of the developing theory of self-authorship.

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Miami University of Ohio and a nationally recognized author and speaker on student development and learning. She received the American College Personnel Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Research Achievement Award in 2007, for her outstanding contribution to advancing student learning. Her scholarship addresses the evolution of learning and development in college and subsequent adult life, and educational practice to promote self-authorship. Her seventh and eighth books respectively are Authoring Your Life and Development and Assessment of Self-Authorship.

Sharon Daloz Parks is Associate Director, the Whidbey Institute. She was formerly an associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She has also served in faculty and research positions in leadership and ethics at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (Jossey-Bass, 2000) and co-author of Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World (Beacon Press, 1996).

Matthew Henry Hall is a cartoonist whose work appears in Readers Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Adjunct Advocate, and many other publications, including the the "Teachable Moments" column of Inside Higher Ed.