July 10, 2021
Your Emergency Brake:
Powerfully Shift the Direction of Your Career and Life
Arin Halicki
Aviva Publishing (2021)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-099-1
New Book Reveals How to Make Major Life Changes Gracefully
Arin Halicki’s new book Your Emergency Brake: Powerfully Shift the Direction of Your Career and Life is a surprising, refreshing, insightful, and practical look at what to do when you feel like you’ve taken all you can take and you’re about to crash. It’s at such times that we wish we had an emergency brake to pull. In truth, we can pull the emergency brake on most situations, but doing so has consequences. Arin shows us how to pull it with thought and preparation so we can glide into the next stage of our life or career with grace.
Arin knows what she writes about. She has reinvented her life and career several times. She has written this book to help others avoid the painful mistakes she made as well as to provide tips for how to pull the brake successfully.
One of Arin’s major transitions was completely exiting corporate America to become an entrepreneur. She tried to build a startup from the ground up, thinking her degrees, experience, and relationships would lead to success. What she learned instead is that what mattered most was who she was being in the process of entrepreneurship. Ultimately, she learned she needed to align with her feelings rather than focus solely on her external reality. She also learned to do things her way rather than how others said she should do them. She’s come to understand the power of defining our experiences for ourselves, and in the process, she has learned how our lives and careers can become adventures filled with faith in ourselves. Ultimately, we learn to develop a healthier relationship with ourselves and make being our authentic self our top priority, rather than settling for just constantly doing, as our culture too often promotes.
As Arin states, “Our goal as humans is to experience more joy than fear or anxiety.” Her hope is that readers of her book will wake up each day knowing exactly who they are inside and trusting everything will be okay.
Your Emergency Brake is all about how to reach that goal of balance and joy, and it is a process, but Arin walks us through each step of the process. She draws on her experience as a Kundalini yoga instructor to show how yoga is about union, and she uses that as a metaphor for integrating and balancing all aspects of ourselves. She also bravely talks about her own dysfunctional ways to soothe herself, how she learned better ones, and the overall importance of regulating our nervous system to support ourselves.
Perhaps my favorite point that Arin makes has to do with learning to accept what we may initially perceive as unacceptable. She makes the point that things do not happen “to” us but “for” us. It may take time for us to understand and accept that, but she does believe everything happens for a reason. She uses the metaphor of a pearl to explain this. The oyster sees a grain of sand as a nuisance to be got rid of, but in the process, it creates a beautiful pearl. The same is true with situations that may seem less than optimal to us—in the end, we may discover they hold within them the lesson we most needed to become our best selves. Ultimately, this boils down to releasing our death grip on our expected or desired outcomes and being open to possibilities. It also means allowing fear to become our “BFF.”
Finally, it is about realizing that if we are in a crisis situation where we feel we need to pull our emergency brake, it’s not really an emergency but an opportunity. Arin states, “If you are pulling your brake, it means the Universe is calling you forward to realize your entire potential and not just what others expect you to do for them.” It’s time to be true to you, not to others. As Arin adds, “We were born to be human, not to do human.”
I love the emergency brake metaphor, and I am grateful to Arin for explaining how pulling your emergency brake can allow you to change directions without crashing. If you feel like you need an emergency brake for your life, I think you will find it in this book.
For more information about Your Emergency Brake and Arin Halicki, visit www.YourEmergencyBrake.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
