Reset Protocol
Reset Protocol™
Beyond The Road Less Traveled: The Road Most Desired™
Paperback $27.95 · Hardcover $59.95 · Audible Audiobook $14.99 · Kindle $12.99
466 pages · 8.25″ x 11″ executive format · 108 questions · 22 chapters
Instead of the Road Less Traveled, have you ever stopped long enough to ask whether the road you are on is actually the one you most desire?
That question matters now for an extraordinary number of people. In the 30-month January 2024 through June 2026 window used in Your Last Paycheck™, Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data recorded roughly 50 million layoff and discharge events and nearly 100 million additional quit events. Those are events, not 150 million unique people — some individuals appear more than once — but the scale still represents roughly 150 million moments in only 30 months when a worker-employer relationship ended and somebody had to decide what came next.
For some people, the old road may no longer be available in the same form because the employer changed, the industry changed, AI changed the work, or the economics changed. For others, the disruption exposes an even more important question: even if you could go straight back to the road you were traveling before, is that still the road you most want? And standing behind all of those layoffs, discharges, and quits are millions more people who are still employed, still performing, still meeting obligations — but privately wondering whether the career and life they are maintaining are actually taking them toward their own Road Most Desired™.
That is the connection among the first three Five Year Life™ books. Your Last Paycheck™ begins with the immediate problem: stabilize the damage, protect cash and options, and understand a job market that may no longer resemble the one you entered. Reset Protocol™ takes on the next problem: before you automatically rebuild the same road, determine whether that road still deserves to be rebuilt at all. Reset Protocol Workbook™ gives you the writing and action space to turn what you discover into decisions, tests, and next steps. One helps stabilize the disruption. One helps define the destination. One helps move your feet.
Most important: Reset Protocol™ is not a book you are required to read cover to cover. You certainly can, and there is a complete narrative arc if that is how you prefer to work. But the book is deliberately built more like a tool chest than a conventional self-help book. On a difficult Tuesday morning, you may need Question 1. During a career crossroads, you may need Question 49. Six months later, Question 84 or Question 108 may suddenly become the one that matters. The job of the book is to help you find the question that deserves your attention today, then give you enough structure to keep drilling until the first easy answer gives way to something more useful.
That is where the epiphanies can happen. Not because the book tells you what your answer should be, and not because every uncomfortable feeling contains a hidden truth, but because a carefully sequenced question can make you look at evidence, tradeoffs, patterns, priorities, and possibilities you may have been too busy — or too practiced at coping — to put into words.
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Data note: JOLTS reports labor-turnover events, not unique people. The figures above use the January 2024–June 2026 30-month window documented in Your Last Paycheck™. See BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
What This Book Helps You Do
- Get brutally specific about your Current Point A™. Most people know when something feels wrong long before they can explain exactly what is wrong. Reset Protocol™ helps you separate vague dissatisfaction from specific pressures, tradeoffs, conflicts, constraints, and facts you can actually examine.
- Define your Most Desired Point B™ without borrowing somebody else’s definition of success. The book does not assume that a bigger job, a smaller job, retirement, entrepreneurship, a relationship change, a move, or any other predetermined answer is right for you. It gives you a disciplined way to identify what you want enough to test it against reality.
- Distinguish the problem you actually have from the problem that is easiest to talk about. Work may be the visible pressure while money is the deeper one; money may be the visible pressure while a relationship is consuming the most bandwidth. The questions are built to help you keep drilling until you can name the issue precisely enough to decide what deserves attention first.
- Protect what is already working instead of blowing up your life in the name of reinvention. A reset is not demolition for its own sake. You are repeatedly asked what should stay, what deserves testing, what may need negotiation, what requires better evidence, and what can be changed with the least unnecessary collateral damage.
- Turn reflection into one observable next step. Each question ends with a 24-hour Action so the work does not stop at insight. The action is intentionally small enough to begin quickly and concrete enough to give you new information before you make a larger decision.
- Use a five-year horizon to judge today’s choices. Five years is long enough for a career, relationship, financial structure, location, routine, or identity to change materially, but close enough to make today’s tradeoffs matter. The framework keeps asking whether the road you are maintaining is actually taking you toward the life you most want to be living.
Strategy Defines The Destination. Tactics Move Your Feet.™
Reset Protocol™ is where you get serious about the destination before you spend another five years moving faster in the wrong direction.
What Makes Reset Protocol™ Different
Anybody can sit down and make a list of 108 questions. That is not what this book is. These questions grew out of patterns observed across approximately 33,000 candid, one-on-one mentoring relationships over four and a half decades — many of them sustained for years — with people navigating business pressure, career upheaval, relationships, money, health, grief, reinvention, ambition, retirement, identity, and the collision between several of those things at once. The point is not that 33,000 relationships magically produce universal answers. The point is that the same underlying questions kept surfacing in different lives, different industries, different ages, and different circumstances often enough that they earned a place in the framework.
Each of the 108 questions is therefore designed to do more than sound thoughtful. The primary question opens the door. The case studies show how the same issue can look completely different in two lives. The Internal Dialogue brings the question closer to the private conversation you may actually be having with yourself. Then Consider These Questions drills down through evidence, contradictions, tradeoffs, other people’s perspectives, timing, cost, risk, and the reasons you may be protecting the status quo. The 24-hour Action converts one piece of reflection into something observable. The Hope Moment keeps the question forward-looking without promising a result. And the Deeper Question gives you somewhere to go when the first answer is no longer enough.
That architecture matters because the first answer to an important life question is often the easiest answer, the most rehearsed answer, or the answer that causes the least disruption. Reset Protocol™ keeps asking — carefully, not recklessly — what else is true? What evidence supports your conclusion? What does not? What are you protecting? What would this cost? Who else sees the situation differently? What would you preserve even if something else changed? The goal is not to corner you into a dramatic decision. The goal is to make the question useful enough that you may finally see choices that were hidden inside a problem you had been treating as one undifferentiated block.
The Question Picker™ — Start With What Matters Today
You do not need to remember where you left off or force yourself through a predetermined sequence. The Question Picker™ lets you enter the book through ten common states — anxiety or panic, overwhelm, anger or resentment, sadness or grief, shame or self-criticism, loneliness, relationship conflict, burnout or meaning erosion, money fear, and feeling stuck. From there, you choose whether you need a relatively quick Relief question or a deeper Depth question and go directly to the question most relevant to the day you are actually having.
Four Reading Paths — Because Your Life Does Not Have to Fit the Book
Question du Jour lets one question be enough for today. 7-Day Triage™ lets you choose seven pressure points and work one per day. 9-Month Sectional Reset™ gives you a slower section-by-section approach, while 108-Day Deep Reset™ takes you through one question per day. These are not four different programs; they are four ways to use the same tool chest at the depth and pace your life can realistically support.
How the Book Is Built
Reset Protocol™ contains 22 chapters. Chapters 1–13 establish the logic behind misalignment, five-year thinking, work, money, relationships, health, identity, and the transition into deeper inquiry. Chapter 14 contains the complete 108-question core. Chapters 15–22 help you compare what you found, test patterns without overinterpreting them, decide what deserves change, rebuild the structure of your days, and move from reflection toward a future you can actually evaluate in the real world.
The 108-question framework moves through nine broad areas:
| Current reality and pressure | Identity and emotion |
| What is working — and what is not | Financial reality |
| Work and career | Health and energy |
| Relationships and connection | Environment and daily life |
| Future direction |
You can move through all nine areas or use only the areas that matter right now. Because the book is built for re-entry, the same question may produce a different — and equally valid — answer a year from now when your circumstances, evidence, priorities, or constraints have changed.
See How One Question Becomes a Much Deeper Inquiry
Throwing a provocative question at you is easy. The value is in what happens after the headline question. Here are three examples from the actual manuscript showing how Reset Protocol™ keeps drilling.
Question 1 — What Is the Single Biggest Source of Pressure in Your Life Right Now?
The question is not asking you to list every problem. It asks which pressure, if meaningfully reduced, would create the greatest relief or capacity elsewhere — and then challenges your first answer.
Consider These Questions:
- What came to mind immediately, and does it still seem like the biggest pressure after you pause?
- Which pressure do you talk about most, versus which one you actually think about most?
- If this pressure were resolved tomorrow, what would change about your daily experience?
- What are you sacrificing to manage it — sleep, health, relationships, time, energy, joy, or something else?
- How long have you been carrying it, and has living with it changed what you now consider normal?
The 24-hour Action: Write down the pressure that came to mind first, then finish the sentence: “If this pressure were meaningfully reduced, I might have more room to…” You are not solving it yet. You are making the pressure specific enough to examine.
Question 49 — What Part of Your Work Life Feels Misaligned?
This is deliberately more precise than “Do you hate your job?” You may love the profession and dislike the employer, like the employer and dislike the role, value the role but reject the workload, or like the work while no longer accepting the schedule, incentives, manager, or culture around it.
Consider These Questions:
- Pinpoint the part of your work week that feels most out of fit.
- Who sees this work problem clearly, and who would be surprised by it?
- When did the misalignment show up most plainly last week?
- Does keeping the problem private protect status, identity, income, privacy, or something else?
- What part of the work week could be redesigned, delegated, reduced, or removed with the least collateral cost?
The 24-hour Action: Name three specific work misfits, then mark the one that is both important and realistically addressable. Naming the problem is not the same as deciding to quit; it lets you distinguish whether the next test should be redesign, negotiation, transfer, training, acceptance, or exit.
Question 108 — What Part of Your Future Needs a Complete Reset?
Even here, the book does not assume a dramatic reset is automatically the answer. It asks whether the real issue is the strategy, the resources, the timing, a constraint, a skill gap, or something else — and what should be preserved before anything is dismantled.
Consider These Questions:
- Name the part of your future you believe may require a substantial reset rather than another minor adjustment.
- Who has seen this problem over time, and what have they actually observed?
- What investment, sunk cost, identity, relationship, obligation, or practical constraint makes a reset difficult?
- What would a reset cost, what might it improve, and what new risks could it create?
- What relationships, skills, income, routines, rights, health supports, records, or sources of stability should survive the transition?
The 24-hour Action: Write one practical first step that gathers information or tests the new direction without creating unnecessary irreversible harm. Reset is redesign, not erasure.
Who This Book Is For
Reset Protocol™ is for people who are not satisfied with a motivational slogan, a personality test, or somebody else’s prescription for what a better life should look like. It is especially relevant when you know a decision is forming but cannot yet tell whether the right answer is a small adjustment, a serious renegotiation, a new career path, a relationship conversation, a financial restructuring, a change in daily architecture, or a much larger reset.
- You were laid off, discharged, or pushed into a career transition and do not want to assume the next job should simply recreate the last one.
- You voluntarily left a job, relationship, location, or role and now need to define what you are actually moving toward, not merely what you escaped.
- You are still employed and functioning, but privately know that the road you are maintaining may no longer be the Road Most Desired for the person you have become.
- You have achieved goals that once mattered and are trying to decide which still belong in the next five years.
- You are carrying several pressures at once and need a disciplined way to determine which one deserves attention first.
- You want a method for discovering your own answer rather than having an author hand you his.
For Corporate Buyers: A Private, Self-Directed Tool for People in Transition
Reset Protocol™ also fits organizations that need something more useful than another generic resilience talk. Employees navigating layoffs, restructures, leadership changes, burnout, career plateaus, retirement decisions, or quiet disengagement often need private thinking space before they are ready for a group conversation, a coaching session, or a career decision.
The book can be used in outplacement, executive and leadership development, mentoring, coaching, university alumni and career-services programs, employee-transition programs, and offsites where structured private reflection is useful. It does not require people to disclose their answers to an employer or facilitator. That matters because a question can be personally useful even when the answer should remain entirely private.
For organizations or individuals who want the implementation layer beside the main book, Reset Protocol Workbook™ carries the same 108-question architecture into dedicated writing space with question-specific prompts and actions. The main book helps you interrogate the road. The Workbook gives you somewhere to put the answers while you test what comes next.
Bulk purchase, organizational-use, and sample-copy inquiries: SpecialSales@FiveYearLife.com
Join the Reset Protocol™ Advance Reader Team
Reset Protocol™ is still in the advance-reader stage, which means your response can still improve the book before publication. ART members receive the complete manuscript free in exchange for specific, book-based feedback: what you read, what worked, what did not, and why. Generic praise is not useful; neither are generic complaints or derision. The purpose is to make the book better for the next reader.
You are not required to post a public review. If you want to be recognized, you may optionally have your name included in the acknowledgments; if you prefer anonymity, remain anonymous.
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Thanks,
Robert
Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
CEO and Publisher, Good-Man LLC
Founder and Author, Five Year Life™ Series
44X Founder · Former NASA Physicist · Four and a Half Decades of Mentoring
Note: Reset Protocol™ is a self-reflection and planning framework. It is not medical, mental-health, psychological, legal, tax, accounting, or financial advice, and it does not guarantee any particular outcome.