ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author delights that it not only encourages him to look back so as to leap forward, but adds the useful discipline of making himself clear to a broad audience. Four personal orientations constitute the short-list: an early pledge, an early career choice, the tenor of the author's adolescent times, and a vision of the shining career. Many of his positive reveries of community go back to Top Road of the 1940s and early 1950s—a largely-Polish enclave approaching 500 square blocks in Trenton, New Jersey. The author prefers situations with a strong potential for accelerated change or learning, as at the start-up of a management team—a take-off point, or a fall-flat point. In more complex senses, the phase model implies significant practical questions, as with regard to typical stress management workshops. The model permits an explicit estimate of who has how much of "it," which makes the phases a rare if not unique measure of experienced stress.
