Is It Time to Change Careers? Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

I grew up in a small town in Northern California, but for as long as I can remember, I knew that wasn’t my final destination. My first job wasn’t my last one, either—in fact, I’ve had more than a few careers, and I’ve loved them all … but when I knew it was time to make a change, I jumped in with both feet.

There’s a reason behind that attitude, which I shared with radio host Maureen Anderson on her show, Doing What Works.

I met Maureen when she needed an editor for one of her books, and I soon learned we share a penchant for going all-in. She and her cohost Katie Anderson invited me to chat with them for an episode of their fascinating show, and along with producer Darrell Anderson, we discussed overcoming career-change fear, and what managing a department for an upscale retailer, working as a flight attendant for a major airline, selling real estate, and working with fascinating authors have in common. Continue reading “Is It Time to Change Careers? Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway”

Celebrate #InternationalWomensDay with The Healing Power of Girlfriends

 Some of my most important and long-term relationships are with my girlfriends. Whether you’re on top of the world or in the depths of despair (or somewhere in between), there’s something about spending time with another woman who really gets you that can’t be replaced by a spouse, partner, child, parent, or coworker.

When Deborah Olson first contacted me about the book she was writing, detailing these special relationships and how healing they can be for women, I was excited to learn more. Today, that book is available for your reading pleasure: The Healing Power of Girlfriends: How to Create Your Best Life Through Female Connection. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate International Women’s Day 2019 than to add this book to your personal library.

Women and Friendship

When Deborah and I first spoke, she shared that as a women’s emotional health specialist she often hears the same types of things from her clients, including:

  • the importance of having a close friend to confide in,
  • how hurt they are when a friend turns out to be anything but,
  • the frustration of trying to make time for girlfriends while juggling work and home life,
  • confusion over the mixed signals they sometime get from other women, and
  • uncertainty about where to find like-minded women who are also looking for new friends.

These are just a few of the myriad topics Deborah covers in her new book, The Healing Power of Girlfriends: How to Create Your Best Life Through Female Connectionavailable now in paperback and for Kindle.

“Packed with inspiration, insights, and personal stories, this book captures the nuances and uniqueness of the bonds that only exist within friendships between women.” —Allison Abrams, LCSW-R, psychotherapist, author, and contributing expert for Psychology Today and The Huffington Post

Don’t Try to Stop a Passionate Writer

Deborah and I have worked together on this book for months, taking it from concept to publication. As for many writers, publishing a book has always been dream for her, and she really went for it, learning all she could about publishing and marketing a book while she continued writing and revising her manuscript.  Oh, and that’s while she dealt with a few personal challenges, like helping her daughter whose home was destroyed in Hurricane Harvey in August, 2017, and facing her husband’s serious health challenges over much of 2018.

Through it all, Deborah worked on this book with a goal to make it a go-to source for inspiration, insights, and personal stories based on her years of clinical experience, scientific research, questionnaire responses, and personal anecdotes.  Continue reading “Celebrate #InternationalWomensDay with The Healing Power of Girlfriends”

The Willpower Workaround: A Surprising Interview with Author Maureen Anderson

What if you could eat as much as you wanted, all day every day, and never gain weight? No gimmicks, nothing unsafe.

Radio personality Maureen Anderson (@DoingWhatWorks) did just that, and she wrote The Willpower Workaround to show just how to do it.

“The Plan” isn’t a big, complicated diet—it’s about a simple lifestyle change Maureen made that changed everything. When she first contacted me about editing her book, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical; I mean, you need willpower—and lots of it—to lose weight, right? Was I ever wrong!

Maureen is one of the most interesting, vivacious, and genuine people you’ll ever meet. Her personality shines through in her book, too, and if you’ve ever struggled with dieting (and who hasn’t?), you’ll love The Willpower Workaround.

Maureen was kind enough to answer some of my burning questions about the book and those sugar cookies she writes about to start the book:

I make the best sugar cookies you’ve ever tasted.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Talk to one of my childhood friends, who won’t share them with her grandchildren because they don’t appreciate the work that goes into them. Or talk to one of my daughter’s former teachers, who used to hide them in the freezer in a bag marked “for the dog” so she wouldn’t have to share them with her family.

Every year between Halloween and Christmas my husband and I used to bake two hundred dozen sugar cookies from scratch. You read that right. Two hundred dozen. Each one painstakingly rolled out really thin, cut, transferred to a baking pan, baked, cooled, frosted, dried, wrapped individually, packed with bubble wrap, and shipped all over the country to friends and family and people we did business with.

Every summer I used to lose the same ten or fifteen pounds a lot of people do because they’re more active, only to always gain them back by Thanksgiving. One year I wondered if it was the cookies. Darrell looked at me. Then he said, “Duh.”

That was all I had to read to know I wanted to work with Maureen, and it was an awesome experience. Recently she agreed to answer some of my burning questions; I found her answers thoughtful and relatable, and I hope you enjoy our conversation!

The Interview:

Candace Johnson: Why did you feel it was important to write The Willpower Workaround and share The Plan?

Maureen Anderson: Thanks for using them both in the same sentence! I think of The Willpower Workaround as the formal name for the way I eat, but it’s a mouthful. I can’t remember if it was my husband or daughter who started calling it The Plan right away—but it’s the perfect nickname, and it stuck.

I wrote The Willpower Workaround because it worked so well it felt irresponsible not to share. The first time I spoke of it publicly in a formal presentation, I did it next to a big poster with photos of everything I ate. When I saw someone taking a picture of the poster I thought, “All those people who told me I should write a book and then give talks were right. It would be great to have a little instruction manual, disguised as a short memoir, available for sale.”

When I decided to give up junk food in August of 2009, it was only going to be for a year. My motives had at least as much to do with wanting a writing project I could sink my teeth into as a diet. I’d been noticing “year in the life” experiments in bookstores. The Year of Living Biblically was a popular one. My book was going to be The Year I Didn’t Cheat. I even purchased that domain name, which inspired the guy taking our order for it to feel bad for my husband. (My husband, Darrell, interviewed me about my progress at the one-month point. Would you like to watch?)

I imagined rip-roaring stories about passing up chips and salsa for another spinach salad, for example, and the snappy comebacks I’d have at the ready for people who made fun of me. Can you imagine a weaker premise for a book? And you know what? I didn’t care! It got me started. I was doing the right thing for the wrong reason, but at least I was doing something. I think one secret to life is experimenting with it.

Candace Johnson: We learn in the book that your initial success with permanent weight loss was based on winning a challenge. Do you have any advice for men and women who need a reward to stay on the path toward changing the way they eat?

Continue reading “The Willpower Workaround: A Surprising Interview with Author Maureen Anderson”

Crossing Over: Making Peace with Self-Publishing/ Guest Post by Maureen Anderson

“If you knew the world was going to end in two days, what would you do?” the writer Sara Davidson was once asked. “Take notes,” she said without hesitating.

That’s me. The world as I knew it had ended, with a painful divorce I hadn’t seen coming, and I’d done what I’d always done to make sense of things. I took notes.

Many years later, perusing those notes, I could never pull myself away. “What a great story,” I kept thinking. “What an interesting way of putting a life back together from scratch.” By then I’d become a radio journalist, interviewing experts on career change. What struck me, thinking of my own career transition, was how much I’d accidentally done right.

Do-Over: An Accidental Template for Scaling the Abyss is that story. But I wasn’t a licensed career counselor or a celebrity. Getting an agent or a publisher interested in Do-Over would be a haul. Continue reading “Crossing Over: Making Peace with Self-Publishing/ Guest Post by Maureen Anderson”

Are You Afraid to Call Yourself a Writer? My Radio Interview at Doing What Works!

© Piren | Dreamstime.com – On Air Photo

Are you afraid you could never make a living by writing? Do you feel like an imposter when you call yourself a writer? In January I wrote a blog for SixtyandMe.com (which I later updated and posted here) about my fear that I couldn’t make a living as a writer.

That’s a topic many of you have written about; I’m not the only person who has hesitated to follow a dream.

The best comment I received, though, was from one of my editing clients, author and nationally syndicated radio personality Maureen Anderson, who wrote, “I love [your] piece! Would you like to join me on the show to expand on it? It would be a fun way to get to know each other in a different format.”

An Hour to Talk About Myself?

Continue reading “Are You Afraid to Call Yourself a Writer? My Radio Interview at Doing What Works!”