📚 A Bookish Chat with 'My Feats in These Shoes' Author Ronda Beaman #Interview

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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Welcome to The Writer's Life! How did you come up with the idea to write your book?

I was an addict from an early age, addicted to shoes! If memoirs 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?

How would you describe your book’s ideal reader?

Anyone who has taken missteps, stumbled, forged giant leaps or stepped up will enjoy this solely original memoir.

What part of the book was the most fun to write?

I have a light-hearted approach to adversity and obstacles, I enjoyed writing about how I overcame the tough stuff.

How did you come up with the title?

In addition to being a shoe-aholic, I am an over-achiever so the idea of FEATS in my shoes was a natural.

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

That pursuing an MFA is NOT the way to get your book written or published!

What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book?

Sit down everyday, make a schedule and stick to it and don’t read it to anyone else. Get your horrible first draft down and go from there. Good writing is really re-writing.

How do you use social media as an author?

I am using @featsinmyshoes on Instagram.

Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

My Feats in These Shoes is part memoir, part inspiration/self-help intended to help readers believe they, too, can build a life better than the one they were given.

If you could spend a day with another popular author, whom would you choose?

Bill Bryson.

Thank you again for this interview! Do you have any final words?

Never give up, you might have holes in your soles, but keep moving forward so you don’t form holes in your souls.

Title: MY FEATS IN THESE SHOES: A SOLELY ORIGINAL MEMOIR
Author: Ronda Beaman
Publisher: Adelaide Books, NYC
Pages: 190
Genre: Memoir / Inspiration

BOOK BLURB:

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.