When my family moved in my junior year of high school, I was scared to make new friends.  “No one knows you’re shy,” my mom told me.  “Pretend you’re not. Be who you want to be.”  This is my first memory of learning about self-actualization and the power of perception.  Years later, I sat mesmerized watching Tony Robbins live on stage.  I toggled between hearing his words and analyzing how he delivered them.  I was in my mid-20s, and I was newly discovering in a profoundly impressionable way body language and the many facets around the soul and science of communication.

 

I am lucky that my parents had neither the money nor the appreciation for sending me to college. Because, instead, I spent my 20s wide-eyed, reading books like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and feeling wildly inspired by human potential.  Personal computers had just hit the scene, and it took seeing Apple’s website for the first time in 1999 for me to fall fast in love with the perfection of typography, visual organization, and white space.  In my 30s, I took every writing workshop and online course I could find and afford because I am obsessed with how words are able to transform our mindset.  Later that decade, I did a year-long intensive in holistic health coaching and became certified in 2007.  A year later, I created and organized a Meetup group that hosted over 130 personal growth workshops over 12 years across several Connecticut towns.  In 2013, I realized that to connect and communicate well with others, I needed to understand my psyche better, so I did an intensive year-long study focused on shadow work and ego, which certified me as a life coach in my 40s. 

 

Although, to be honest, my best and biggest accomplishment will always be raising my beloved son as a single mom.  I made sure to instill in Richie all the empowering beliefs and knowledge of Self that I came to know along the way as we grew up together.  And in the spring of 2021, he got to witness his 53-year-old mother earn a BA degree in Communication and Media Studies—along with an Academic Excellence Award.

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And so, the trajectory of my life would have been different if I went to college after high school.  I would not have worked for the same company for 34 years, where I am still employed, working in a legal and corporate communications field, which I absolutely love.  My passion, talent, and addiction for all-things communication and digital media might have escaped my path if I hadn’t attended college in the new century because the Internet didn’t exist when I graduated high school in 1986.  And I wouldn’t have present-day aspirations to become a university adjunct professor in communication studies after graduate school. 

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I took the long journey to academia, but not really—because every bit of dedication, ability, ambition, and attitude that I now embody grew from my deep quest for self-growth and becoming a better communicator as I connected and shaped the pieces along the way.  I am known for my unwavering belief that there is a recipe for everything—you only have to figure out the ingredients and assemble them in the right way.  But sometimes, life does this for you.