TRAVELING HOPEFULLY
How to Lose Your Family Baggage and Jumpstart Your Life

1. What is the significance of the title “Traveling Hopefully”?

The title “Traveling Hopefully” is derived from a wonderful quote by author Robert Louis Stevenson: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” To me, traveling hopefully is the ideal way to travel through the world, moving toward our best lives of passion and purpose after unloading family baggage and leaving limiting themes far behind.

2. What prompted you to write this book about overcoming family baggage and jumpstarting your life?

I came to a point in my own life when I realized that the image I presented to the outside world wasn’t reflective of who I was on the inside. I was a successful executive in the entertainment industry, having headed up corporate communications and public relations divisions for three major studios, but I finally had to admit that I had worked very hard to get exactly where I didn’t want to be. With a faltering marriage and an overstressed and overweight physical self, my personal life was in no better shape than my professional one. I finally saw that I was living my life based on outdated messages of my past and that my family baggage had become the foundation of limiting self-beliefs and negative actions.

3. So does that mean we should blame our parents for our family baggage?

Quite the contrary. Unloading your baggage isn’t about blaming your parents or pointing fingers at your family, but about dissecting your past so you direct your future. Once you begin to deconstruct the outdated messages of your past, then you can begin to build a life based on your current dreams and passions rather than a family legacy you’ve inherited and allowed to become your life.

4. Do we all have family baggage?

Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we all carry family baggage. Family baggage is the result of the messages we receive growing up, some positive and some negative. It’s what we do with these messages that is critical. Like a lot of people, I’d never really looked deeply at the negative messages that were a result of my family legacy which included divorce, mental illness, and emotional distance. I had allowed the outdated messages of my past to become the basis for a pattern of decision-making that just didn’t serve me. Once I realized I was the one who had chosen to lug all this luggage around, I made a conscious decision to unload my baggage and create the life I truly wanted without wasting any more time.

5. Is that what you mean by “jumpstarting your life”?

Yes, jumpstarting your life is what happens when you shed your baggage and shift your perspective from limiting to liberating. When I began the process of personal excavation so I could rediscover who was really underneath all my baggage, I embarked on what I came to call my jumpstart journey. Out of desperation and a desire to change, I created and adapted different types of tools, exercises and meditations that helped me create a big-picture vision and a bottom-line action plan for my life. After I experienced a dramatic transformation in my life, I refined those tools into a repeatable process called the Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life so that others could benefit.

6. What are the Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life?

They are five basic principles of life transformation that combine passion, planning and perseverance to keep you moving forward, or traveling hopefully, on your path to success. The Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life are:

• Step One: Dissect your past to direct your future
• Step Two: Link internal clarity with external action
• Step Three: Create a Traveling Hopefully Personal Roadmap
• Step Four: Recruit a Support Squad
• Step Five: Keep moving toward what you want and away from what no longer serves you

7. How do you put these steps in practice?

Along with the Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life, there are 21 Hopeful Tools – which include meditation, guided imagery, and written exercises – to turn these abstract concepts into concrete action. The five steps, along with the corresponding tools, will help guide you from a sense of internal clarity, or self-awareness, all the way to external action, resulting in change in the real, physical world. Once you understand the balance between dreaming and doing, you will have the insight to know what you want and the action steps to get you there. .

8. What do you mean by “the balance between dreaming and doing”?

Think of dreamers and doers as people at opposite ends of a spectrum. At one end of the continuum are the dreamers, who may be introspective, creative and self-aware, but not always able to take appropriate or aggressive action in the real world. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the doers, those people who are always in action, but often it is motion for motion’s sake since they have not stopped to do the necessary internal homework to understand where all that motion to supposed to take them. Once you identify where you are on this spectrum – that is, whether you are a dreamer or a doer - you can learn how to create an appropriate balance between the dreaming needed to envision your best possible life, and the doing involved in carrying out your bottom-line action plan.

9. How did your life change when you began to use the Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life?

After more than a decade in senior level positions in the entertainment industry, I decided to work my down the corporate ladder. I moved into a much more creative studio job, then left the corporate world altogether and founded my own coaching and consulting company, as well as publishing my first book (Stay-at-Home Dads: The Essential Guide to Creating the New Family). I also made the difficult decision to leave my marriage after twelve years and, in my forties, began to reinvent my personal life.

10. When did you decide to guide others through their life transitions?

As people began to learn about the dramatic changes I’d made in my life, they began to seek my guidance to help them reinvent their personal and professional lives, and often in locating a satisfying balance between the two. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs, corporate executives and artists in redefining their lives. My mission is to help others identify their passion, create a big-picture vision for a purposeful life, build an aggressive action plan – then teach them plenty of methods to help persevere despite whatever setbacks and roadblocks are put in their path.

11. Besides your personal experience, what background and expertise do you have in coaching others to transform their lives?

As a veteran communications executive, I was a nationally recognized expert in creating media profiles and building brand franchises. My corporate background in combining powerful strategies with aggressive execution, articulating the process to others, and guiding a team toward an end result translated quite naturally into motivating and inspiring people to create the lives of their dreams through the coaching process.

12. What are some of the 21 Hopeful Tools included in Traveling Hopefully and how do they work?

The 21 Hopeful Tools are designed to take you first on an internal journey to awaken the inner voice of spirituality, childhood dreams and passion, then to take that sense of internal clarity and translate it into external action so you can see concrete results in the real world. The tools range from free-flowing creative meditations to more linear and logical exercises like goal-setting and action planning, so that you can examine the life you’re living and the life you want to lead in a variety of different ways.

Some of the tools designed to stimulate your internal creative self include:

• Envisioning Your Healing Sanctuary
• Finding Yourself in Literary Works, Fairy Tales and Myths
• Looking at Life Themes Through Verbal Meditation

Tools that tap into your rational self and guide you to take concrete action steps include:

• Discovering the Power of the 3 P’s: Professional, Personal, Possessions Goals
• Recruiting a Support Squad
• Designing Your Traveling Hopefully Personal Roadmap

13. What can readers expect to gain from Traveling Hopefully?

Just like life, what readers put into this process will be directly proportional to what they get out of it. If they do the internal and external homework detailed in the Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life, they will learn to combine passion, planning and perseverance and turns their dreams into realities – just like I did.