Janet Attwood on Challenges, Passion, and Stalking a Mentor Into a Job
Eric asked Janet to talk about the biggest challenges she faced in the years before she started living with real purpose. She laughed and admitted there had been a long list of them. For a long stretch, well into adulthood, her life wandered without much direction, right up until she found the work she does now.
The first hard thing she pointed to was drugs. She started at 17, and she called that a genuinely rough patch. It took three years before something clicked and she finally asked herself what she was doing, because whatever it was clearly wasn't working.
Then she paused, because the word challenge sends her in a different direction than Eric probably expected. Her view is that none of us runs the universe. Something larger does, and in her experience that something tends toward kindness. Every moment, she figures, arrives as a gift. So when she looks back at the things she'd call challenges, they read more like presents in hindsight. The hardest lessons were the ones that paid off most. That's why she hesitates: she keeps having to remind herself to think of them as difficulties at all, since the best parts of her life grew straight out of the worst moments.
One of those moments came at the very start of her career, a story most people haven't heard. She had just decided to follow her passion. Sitting in a seminar, she felt the idea for the passion test beginning to take shape in her mind. The woman running that seminar, Debra Poneman, was teaching a program called Yes To Success, and Janet knew right then that she wanted to do what Debra did.
She had no clue how to actually do it. What she did know was that she wanted Debra to hire her. So she chased her across the country, turning up at seminar after seminar and planting herself in the front row every time. It went on for a while. Eventually, at an event in LA, Debra threw up her hands and said fine, you're hired.
That job let Janet step into the thing she loved: getting up to speak, connecting with people, and talking about what actually mattered to her.