This is a very special episode—our LIVE-recorded Holiday Party & Write-In 2019! Book Coach Anna Conathan joins us for an evening of prizes, surprises, writing prompts Q&A, trivia and more!

Please note that this episode includes some adult language and themes—so don’t listen in public without earbuds.

If you’d like to join our next event live, join our mailing list at ManuscriptAcademy.com/subscribe.

You can view the live-recorded VIDEO version of this (with the text chat!) at https://manuscriptacademy.com/holidayparty2019

Need a gift for the critique partner who has everything--or maybe for you? Instant download certificates for membership, classes, critiques, consultations and more available at ManuscriptAcademy.com/gift. Gifts start at just $9.95.

Anna Conathan Coaching works with humans looking to move ancient obstacles, improve communication in challenging relationships, begin exciting new endeavors, or free themselves from tired old stories that keep them small in their lives. Trained through the International Coach Federation accredited program Accomplishment Coaching, Anna is passionately committed to helping people transform their own lives through powerful motivation, deep empathy, compassionate curiosity and her innate sense of humor.

Anna Conathan is a personal coach trained through the premiere, International Coach Federation accredited program, Accomplishment Coaching. She is dedicated to helping people transform their lives through powerful motivation, deep empathy, compassionate curiosity, no-nonsense truth-telling, and her innate sense of humor.

A graduate of Emerson College’s School of Performing Arts in Boston, Anna went on to a successful career as an actress, stand-up comic and screenwriter in Los Angeles and New York, where she learned to appreciate her species’ spectacular ability to create, connect, transform, and sling bullshit. Anna has pushed gurneys on "ER," opened for Paula Poundstone, worked as an in-house writer for Disney Animation, and penned original and adapted screenplays and TV scripts for Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Paramount.

But her performance art skills didn’t really show their true value until she became a mother, which gave Anna the opportunity to embrace change, get comfortable with the unknown, and dig into her imagination in a new way. Parenting, as Anna likes to say, is the longest game of improv ever played.

As a lifelong Human Behavior enthusiast and unofficial President of the Always Talk to Strangers club, Anna is here on this rock to serve as a suspension bridge of communication, a doula for tentative creatives and a toasty incubator for other people’s ambitions that are ready to hatch.

When Anna isn’t coaching she can be found hauling traps as a sternman on a lobster boat in her home state of Maine, helping train future doctors in the ways of empathy as a standardized patient, messing around on stage with her Portland theater buddies, or walking the beach with her handsome husband, hilarious son and dingbat chocolate lab.