Dr. Ronda Beaman has been Chief Creative Officer for the global research and solution firm PEAK Learning, Inc., since 1990. As a national award-winning educator, Dr. Beaman is Clinical Professor of Leadership at The Orfalea School of Business, California Polytechnic University. She is Founder and Executive Director of Dream Makers SLO, a non-profit foundation granting final wishes to financially- challenged, terminally-ill adults, and serves on the Board of Directors for the National Pay It Forward Foundation. She was recently named a Stanford Fellow at the Distinguished Career Institute.
Her national award-winning book, You’re Only Young Twice, has been printed in five languages. Her memoir, Little Miss Merit Badge, was an Amazon bestseller and was featured at The Golden Globe Awards. Her children’s book, Seal With a Kiss, is designed to improve skills for beginning readers and is offered at Lindamood-Bell Learning Centers internationally. My Feats in These Shoes will be released in Spring 2021.
Dr. Beaman is an internationally recognized expert on leadership, resilience, fitness, education, and life coaching. She has conducted research in a host of areas, written many academic articles and books, and won numerous awards. She was selected by the Singapore Ministry of the Family as their honored Speaker of the Year and named the first recipient of the National Education Association’s “Excellence in the Academy: Art of Teaching” award. She has been selected as a faculty resource for the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) university in Argentina, Kyoto and India, where she received the highest speaker ratings among 36 elite faculty. She has been featured on major media including CBS and Fox Television, USA Today, and is a national thought leader for American Health Network.
Dr. Beaman earned her doctorate in Leadership at Arizona State University. She is also a certified executive coach and personal trainer with multiple credentials from the Aerobic Research Center. Her family was named “America’s Most Creative Family” by USA Today and she won the SCW National Fitness Idol competition.
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If memoirs, done right, tap the right sort of personal journey to ignite fresh insight and inspiration into the human journey, then what better way to humorously and poignantly illuminate the sequential steps and stages of life than with shoes?
“My Feats in These Shoes” is an exuberantly spunky woman’s spirited and irrepressible romp—slips, missteps, leaps, scuffs, and twirls—toward becoming something bigger, something better, something more.
Far from serving up trauma porn (or emotional bunions), this memoir is an upbeat, humorous, affectionate and affecting coming of age memoir that ends each chapter with a ‘Put Yourself in My Shoes’ section for readers to consider their own strides in pursuing an out of the shoe box life.
Baby Needs New Shoes
It isn’t the mountain to climb that wears you out,
it’s the pebble in your shoes.
—Muhammad Ali
My dad’s favorite books, Mein Kampf, Think and
Grow Rich, and How to Win Friends and Influence People are
book-ended by my bronzed baby shoes.
The shoes have deep copper colored wrinkles and folds,
they cave in slightly at the arch, and one is missing a shoelace. My report
cards aren’t bronzed, neither are my pacifiers, baby blankets, rattles, or
bottles. My graduation shoes or wedding shoes are not plastered for posterity,
only my baby shoes.
No other personal artifact, it seems, is
significant enough to be preserved for all time as what I had on my feet when
taking my first steps into the world. I chose to believe my bronzed baby shoes
are a tiny monument to potential and promise. Over- come by this notion, I once
made the mistake of asking my dad who it was that had my shoes bronzed and he
said, “Why would I know? What a waste of money...and copper.”
Welcome! The first page is perhaps one of the most important pages
in the whole book. It’s what draws the reader into the story. Why did you
choose to begin your book this way?
The whole reason I became a
shoe-aholic was my dad’s remark that I had ugly feet…this is what led to my
first steps away from him and toward the life I wanted, so I was setting the
scene for the rest of my FEATS.
In the course of writing your book, how many times would you say
that first page changed and for what reasons?
Truthfully, that seminal story of
sitting by the pool with my dad was the beginning of my story, not just my
memoir, so it never altered from that opening, it just kept marching forward
from there.
Was there ever a time after the book was published that you wished
you had changed something on the first page?
I have wished, from time to time,
that I had given myself more space and wording to reflect the emotional
response to hearing that my dad found something about me that was ugly.
What advice can you give to aspiring authors to stress how important
the first page is?
In any story, speech, introduction,
job interview, date, research shows you have 2 seconds or about 50 words to
pull your listener or reader in. YIKES! Make every word count, show don’t tell
and make them want to know more.
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