| I was the firstborn of 11 children born to a working class Catholic family in Baltimore. A highly sensitive child, I sought refuge in books, in play, in writing and imagination. I began the deep search for meaning at a young age and attended a high school for girls who were planning to enter the School Sister of Notre Dame. It was the one of the best choices I ever made because the curriculum was the challenging and living with more than 100 other women taught me many things about how people relate to each other.
After a brief foray in convent life, I married before I was 20, birthed 5 children and grew up with them by seeking answers to their endless curious questions. Suddenly single after 22 years of marriage, I threw myself into my work as newspaper reporter and editor and back into my beloved books of poetry, psychology and spirituality. Avenues of new insight came from Landmark Education, Joseph Campbell, Matthew Fox, Osho, Richard Bach, Natalie Goldberg, and Meg Wheatley among many, many others.
My second husband, my beloved Gord, appeared like a miracle in my life less than a month before my mother became seriously ill and my dear oldest brother dropped dead of an aneurysm. Gord kept me sane during one of the hardest periods of my life. |
I was the second daughter born to a working class family in the small town of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. From a very early age, stories and how they both create and affect the human condition fascinated me. I listened deeply and empathically to others, told and wrote stories from the time I was about four years old. Central to my love of stories was observing and creating how the people would get themselves into and out of conflict. I went to York College to study Psychology and had some enriching and life-changing experiences along the way to graduation including a competitive internship at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. After graduation from college I worked as a Crisis Intervention Counselor for many years, then worked in marketing before stumbling upon a life-altering career in mediation and dialogue facilitation.
I studied various schools of thought related to leadership, dialogue, and mediation including transformative mediation practice and appreciative inquiry. Life has a funny way of working itself out even during times of hardship (my beloved mediation program eventually closed due to rising costs that could not keep up with revenue potential).
As I was dreaming up a venture called 3 ACT to change the way people work so that it flows and feels more like play, Janet was dreaming SYTB into reality and I am honored to partner with her in providing the groundwork to assist women in realizing both their newest goals and their dreams from childhood. |
