This Is the Author

"My book is about rudeness. It’s about the world getting ruder...from social media to television to impatience in politics. And it’s been happening more and more in Britain and it’s been happening a lot more in America. It just seems like we treat each other in a much worse way than we used to."

"My book is about my search for Barbara Newhall Follett, the child prodigy and adventurer who vanished in 1939. But it’s also about my marriage and my quest for independence but also stability. And I think that a lot of things about Barbara’s life really resonated with me."

"I was inspired to write from the first time that I encountered this change triangle at an academic conference. I had spent my whole life studying psychology and biology, and what makes people move and grow and tick, and I had never learned any of this information on emotions before."

"My book is about raising confident and compassionate girls. I’ve been working with girls in therapy and in groups for almost 20 years now and I’ve seen a lot of changes in girlhood. One thing that I started to notice about 10 years ago was that the mean girl phenomenon seemed to be starting younger and younger."

"I started to realize that if happiness was all about just you, there’s this invisible cap that occurs in terms of your happiness where we can’t seem to sustain the growth or continue its growth up even higher. So we started to think a little bit differently about happiness. And the conclusion I came to, which is the reason I wrote BIG POTENTIAL, is that I think that happiness, while it is an individual choice, is not just a personal choice; it’s also an interconnected one."

"My book is an inspiring, research-driven, field-tested guide to creating an extraordinary career and meaningful life. It’s based on over a decade of study and practice, and offers actionable steps to becoming more purposeful, productive, and effective in all areas of your work. And it’s really fun."

"Our book is about what parents and other caregivers can do in their interactions with their kids that actually develop a more integrated brain that creates a receptive state for learning and keeping the inner spark of your child alive and well."

"My book is about how to approach meditation as a layperson. A lot of times when we think about meditation we normally associate it with this sort of monastic type of activity. I learned how to meditate with this person 15 years ago who really changed my life and changed my understanding of the practice and I wanted to share those principles with other people who were like me, who were struggling to meditate, people who had a lot of questions around the practice. In order to give them answers in a real world practical way."

"My book is about loss and impermanence, death but most essentially, love; it’s a love story. It’s about a young man named Jim Bird, who at the beginning of the book, dies, technically for just a few minutes, and returns with no memory of any lights, or angels or tunnels, or anything exciting like that. Anything that indicates there might be something waiting for him on the other side, or waiting for any of us for that matter. And coming back with that knowledge spurs an investigation of sorts into hopefully there is something and maybe he didn’t see it."

"When you’re young, love is given to you if you’re lucky enough to have at least one caring parent or caretaker, but over the course of a child’s life, I think the idea of love evolves. I was trying to explore that. And I think at some point there’s always going to be a fall from grace and I wanted to see how does a kid go from realizing their initial perception of love doesn’t fit with the real world and it has to be something bigger and greater, something they seek on their own."