Janet Attwood: How I Broke Through to Living My Dream
Erik: A lot of people reach that single moment where everything turns, and you clearly had one. You felt it, and then you did something about it. Can you walk us through the middle part? How you got from that turning point to the stage where you were actually living the life you wanted?
Janet: I held onto that love and never let it go. The whole time I kept feeding myself new ideas, learning whatever I could get my hands on. Luck played a part too, because I landed a job as marketing director for the third largest book buyer in the country. I was good at it. The work involved running book fairs across the United States, where we sold the most wonderful books you could imagine.
So there I was, organizing all of these events, surrounded by books I adored, most of them about personal transformation. Meanwhile some of my friends were out on stage speaking. One of them was Marci Shimoff, who later wrote the New York Times bestseller Happy for No Reason and appeared in the film The Secret. We lived in the same town where I was working.
One day Marci phoned me. She said Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul was coming to Cedar Rapids, and she'd been told she could help out at his table. This was before Marci had any fame of her own. She said we could both work the table and sit in on his seminar for free. I said, you've got to be joking, count me in. I already knew exactly who Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield were, since we moved huge quantities of their books at the fairs.
So I went to the seminar, and Marci and I stood at the back. Mark Victor Hansen had maybe 300 people in the room, and we were completely under his spell. Then, out of nowhere, a hotel manager came charging into the seminar shouting that there was a tornado warning, that everyone needed to file through the kitchen and line up single file under the stairwell. Panic swept through the whole room.
Mark Victor Hansen stayed perfectly calm, and I have never forgotten it. He told everyone to walk slowly toward the kitchen, and while we walked, to picture the tornado changing course and heading somewhere else. He thought on his feet that fast. It was the sweetest thing to watch.