Meet the Experts

Barbara Sher is a business owner, career counselor, speaker, and the bestselling author of five books, among them I Could Do Anything, If Only I Knew What It Was, How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It, and Live the Life You Love, In Ten Easy Step-by-Step Lessons.  

She has appeared on national and local radio and television, including Oprah, The Donahue Show, The Today Show,
60 Minutes, CNN and Good Morning America. Her first book, Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, has sold well over a million copies.  

In 1972, Sher invented Success Teams—small groups in which members work together in weekly meetings to identify their dreams and help each other make them come true. The teams were an instant hit. By 1976, she was running workshops to help people create Success Teams throughout the United States and Europe. Today, Sher's teams are operating in universities, career centers, Fortune 500 companies and in entrepreneur associations in Nepal, Siberia, Israel, Canada, Thailand, Australia, and Bulgaria. 

She is now causing a stir with her newest book, It's Only Too Late If You Don't Start Now, How to Create Your Second Life at Any Age, a highly unconventional look at the second half of life. Her hilarious hour-long PBS special by the same name has been submitted for an Emmy nomination and is winning accolades wherever it is shown. 

Presently, Barbara Sher consults with clients in her New York office and travels throughout the world running workshops for professional organizations, colleges, corporations, and government agencies.

Barbara Winter, author of the bestselling book, Making a Living Without a Job: Winning Ways for Creating Work That You Love, is also a business owner, itinerant teacher, and self-employment advocate who found her own right livelihood after overcoming her early notions that work was meant to be drudgery.  

It all began in 1974 when she founded The Successful Woman, a pioneering training and development company, which conducted programs on self-esteem and entrepreneurship for women. She went on to found several small businesses—all with the intention of passing along to others the lessons she had learned. 

A former high school English teacher, Barbara has turned her considerable energies to the teaching of adults. Her popular seminars, including Making a Living Without a Job and Establish Yourself as an Expert, are regularly held throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In 2001 she teamed up with Nick Williams with whom she now conducts a number of programs including Running an Inspired Business.  

In addition, she is the editor/publisher of Winning Ways: the newsletter for people living and working with passion, the longest running small-business newsletter in the United States. She also publishes the online newsletter Dreambuilders: Unleashing Your Entrepreneurial Spirit.

Barbara is the mother of an adult daughter, a devoted Anglophile, an intrepid world traveler and is ferociously committed to lifelong learning.  

Valerie Young is the Dreamer in Residence at ChangingCourse.com, an online resource for people who want to find their life mission and live it. Her career change tips have been cited in such publications as Kiplinger's, The Wall Street Journal, USA Weekend magazine, Woman's Day, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Entrepreneur’s Business Start-Ups magazine, and online at MSN, iVillage, and CareerBuilder. 

Valerie has been a guest on People Are Talking (ABC) and The Journey With Carolyn Myss (Oxygen Media) and on such radio programs as the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s The Current, The Wall Street Journal’s nationally-syndicated program “Work & Family,” and Chicago’s WMAQ.  

A popular guest speaker Valerie has delivered her Interrupting The Impostor Syndrome—The Workshop for Women Who Doubt Their Confidence, but Shouldn't program to over 20,000 women from such organizations as American Women in Radio and Television, the Society of Women Engineers, the National Association of Bank Women, Harvard University, and MIT.  

She is a contributing author to Not As Far As You Think: The Realities of Working Women and editor of the e-book Finding Your True Calling: The Handbook For People Who Still Don't Know What They Want To Be When They Grow Up.