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.
Her latest book is the memoir, My Feats in These Shoes: A Solely Original Memoir.
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Can you tell us what your book is about?
“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. After being told by her father that she had the ugliest feet he’d ever seen, the author resolves to reject his paternal foothold. She found herself, and hardearned firm footing, in a hilariously flawed,
lifelong, cute-shoe-based revolt. 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.
Why did you write your book?
As a professor, international public speaker,life coach and fitness trainer, people always ask me how they can have a life like mine.."YOU DON’T WANT A LIFE LIKE MINE, YOU WANT YOUR BEST LIFE!” I tell them. This book shows how no life is easy, but it’s not the circumstance, it’s what you do with the circumstance that matters.
What kind of message is your book trying to tell your readers?
See above
Who influenced you to write your book?
Seeing myself through my university students, women workout classes, and client’s eyes, thinking I was born optimistic and successful, knowing they were imagining me under some sort of rainbow rather than the cloud of reality.
Is it hard to publish a nonfiction book?
Memoirs are particularly difficult, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put it out there…we learn from each other’s lives.
Which author(s) do you admire?
Ann Lamott, Bill Bryson, Mary Karr
Have you suffered from writer’s block and what do you do to get back on track?
I believe there is no such thing, keep grinding.
What would you do with an extra hour today if you could do anything you wanted?
Lunch with my family.
Which holiday is your favorite and why?
Thanksgiving, no issues, no gifts, just being together, being thank full and eating good food!
If we were to meet for lunch to talk books, where would we go?
Pack a sandwich and head to The Strand Bookstore in NYC.
What do you like to do for fun?
I love teaching boot camp and barre, helping people get better and stronger and doing it to great, loud music!
Can you tell us about your family?
My husband is an author and entrepreneur, our sons, one is an attorney and one a professor of ethics, they either had no moral guidance or I overdid it!!!
What do you like the most about being an author?
The idea that what I might think, write will help illuminate someone else’s life.
What kind of advice would you give other non-fiction authors?
Like Nike says, “Just Do It”