I suppose I was predestined to become a teacher, and it certainly didn't take me long to figure out my calling. A week into kindergarten, I would come home excited about what I had learned that day and teach it to my younger sibling, my dolls, and anyone who would listen. A few years later, I would take books and baskets of activities when the kids I babysat were old enough. I loved helping people get excited about learning new things, and seeing them walk away with new skills and ideas.
Of course I ended up in the classroom for a number of years, and after completing my doctorate and moving across country, I started running a program for beginning teachers at the local university. Fresh out of the classroom myself, I could relate to the issues they faced. My work included many frantic or frustrated late-night phone calls, weekly classroom visits, and facilitating weekly meeting to provide resources and build support for the new teachers in the program.
It was during this time that I wrote my first book and started my own business, as I was increasingly called to work with groups of teachers, counselors, and parents around the world. I learned that while people want to be entertained, the real value was in the practical strategies they could take back to their classrooms, clients, and families—and their adult relationships as well. I saw how a good story or joke could snap people into new ways of seeing a problem, change their thinking, and ultimately shape new behaviors.
Over the years, my writing expanded into broader topics for a broader audience. While the core of my work will always focus on building respectful, cooperative, win-win relationships, I believe that most of us are also hungry for help with our inner work. Recent books have addressed topics like gratitude and abundance thinking as well as dealing with perfectionism, in ourselves and others.
So why I love helping may be more about why I love learning, because each opportunity challenges me to grow in some new way. The combination of writing, presenting, coaching, web development, and podcasting has offered me a rich and varied palette of ways to connect with people, as well as meeting my own daily goals—to learn something, create something, and help somebody. Just like I learned in kindergarten.
