Letter from Lhasa, number 216. (Baxter Magolda 2009): Authoring Your Life. Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life’s Challenges
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Baxter Magolda, M. B., Authoring Your Life. Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life’s Challenges, Stylus, Sterling, Virginia, USA, 2009.
(Baxter Magolda 2009).
Marcia B. Baxter Magolda
This book is an invitation to not worry about what other people think and to focus on what you think and want, if you think and want anything.
“THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK IS TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A COMPASS for the journey through your twenties and thirties as a foundation for your life.” (Baxter Magolda 2009, p. 1).
In fact, the author studied a sample of people apparently guided from external forces and finally feeling unfulfilled. Some dissatisfaction pushed them to move forward, personally and/or professionally.
It is perhaps an arbitrary conjecture that, for their changes, they previously built an “internal foundation” trusting their internal voices. If, in the first phases of their lives, these people were really guided from external “authorities”, also previously they have followed their internal voices of trusting external “authorities”. Their successive unfulfilment and dissatisfaction may have had other causes. Their later “internal voices” may have been again a social construct instead of a genuine and reliable perception. Relationships and careers change without the need of selling that for some personal positive evolution. The large majority of people changes in worse not in better. Anyway, basically, changes are realised on the basis of experiences and, overall, according to how these experiences are lived and interiorized.
The intellectual operation of the author, typically academic, is to cage in a certain frame, she defines, lives’ evolutions and transformations.
Baxter Magolda, M. B., Authoring Your Life. Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life’s Challenges, Stylus, Sterling, Virginia, USA, 2009.
