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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About the Book
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.
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Interview
Would you consider your latest book, My Feats in These Shoes, to be a one of a kind? How so?
First of all, it is not an emotional bunion memoir, like so many,filled with harsh, ugly, terrible circumstances…I am not that kind of person or writer. There were harsh and ugly things that happened, but the story is really about what you do with the circumstance, not the circumstance. In addition, I include a self-help section after each chapter called ‘Put Yourself in My Shoes” so the reader can glean some personal reflection from what I went through that might help her. So the book, I think, is a unique mash up of memoir, self-help, humor and essay.
Where is your writing sanctuary?
I have an office in my house, but you can generally find me on the couch in the living room, cup of tea on the table, dog perched above me on the cushion and a breeze blowing through the windows.
What do you believe a writer should not do as far as getting his or her book published?
Never, never, never surrender.
What inspires you?
Life. That I get a turn, that I have this moment, that I am loved. It doesn’t get much more inspiring or more important than that.
Why do you love to write memoir?
When I told my sister that I was writing another memoir she said, “You’re not that interesting.” Yet, I believe that memoir and biography are the most vital of all art forms,that we can learn so much from everyone’s life experiences that will inform and illuminate our own living.
You’re concocting a recipe for a best selling book. What’s the first ingredient?
The WHY. You must have a compelling reason to write it, something that only you can say, to sustain you through the process.
What’s one fun fact about your book people should know?
I left out many pairs of shoes and stories, this could have been ‘War and Pumps’ and never ended!
What’s next for you?
I am working on an outline for my next memoir “Haul In The Family” about creating a compound with my son and his family. I think Covid has made us re-think our independence and cherish the ties that bind…and sometimes gag!
the book rack 