ABOUT NORM GUSTAFSON
A lifetime of asking better questions.
Norm Gustafson has spent more than four decades helping people examine the assumptions they live by, understand the choices available to them, and find more intentional ways forward.
Teacher. Consultant. Lifelong student.
Norm spent thirty-four years teaching economics at Sanger High School, where his work centered on helping students understand not only how economic systems function, but how the decisions people make shape their lives. He also taught business courses at Fresno City College and directed a teacher-training institute at Fresno Pacific University.
Beyond the classroom, Norm worked in training and development, business planning, grant writing, and organizational consulting. He served on nonprofit boards, worked with corporate clients, and wrote articles on training and professional development.
Across those different roles, the questions that interested him remained remarkably consistent: Why do people make the choices they make? What keeps us in situations that no longer serve us? And what allows us to recognize that another path is possible?
A practice of reflection
Norm’s work is also informed by more than fifty years of meditation and Buddhist practice. He began practicing meditation in the 1970s and formally became a Buddhist in 1976. In 1980, he began studying Zen with Charlotte “Joko” Beck.
He later studied in the Sōtō Zen tradition with Myoan Grace Schireson, receiving Jukai in 2006, serving as Head Student in 2009, and being ordained as a Zen priest in 2012. In 2016, he received Dharma transmission in the Sōtō Zen lineage as an independent teacher. He has since retired from formal priestly duties, while spiritual practice remains an important part of his life.
That long practice of awareness and reflection helped shape Unstuck, including its framework inspired by Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths: recognize the problem, understand its causes, see the possibility of transformation, and take purposeful action.
From experience to Unstuck
In Unstuck: Find Clarity, Break Free, and Take Action, Norm brings together lessons from education, economics, organizational development, meditation, and decades spent studying human potential.
His goal is not to tell readers what their lives should look like. It is to help them recognize the “boxes” that may be limiting their choices, question assumptions they have taken for granted, clarify what matters to them, and take practical steps toward a life that feels more purposeful and self-directed.
Now retired, Norm is married and has three children and five grandchildren.
Find clarity. Break free. Take action.
Unstuck is an invitation to stop living by default and start making more intentional choices about what comes next.
