1. Your new book, Tame Your Inner Critic, is about taming the negative inner voice so many of us have so that we can live our lives with passion and purpose. What inspired you to write Tame Your Inner Critic?

A lot of my client work centers around helping people get over issues of unworthiness and self-deprecation. I wanted to spend our time together developing goals, helping them uncover their life purpose, and appreciating the gift they are meant to share with the world. And we did that—but first we had to work on self-acceptance.

So I wrote this book on taming the inner critic. The book includes over forty exercises and meditations designed to help the reader weed out the critical voices, the harsh words, that destroy self-worth, allowing their internal wisdom to shine through. Through this process they come to understand their true purpose in life, finding ways to share their unique gift with the world.

2. Why is quieting our inner, personal judgments and doubts so critical to being able to live a happy, meaningful life?

I believe that the inner critic is a mash up of all the thoughts, feelings, criticisms, and judgments we've picked up from the people in our lives and accepted as our own truth. It's difficult to hear our true wisdom among the cacophony of these competing voices.

It calls to my mind the image of walking in dense fog, surrounded by this thick vapor, preventing you from seeing the road in front of you. Some of this mist sticks to your clothes leaving you feeling a bit soggy and wet.

Thoughts are just like this foggy mist. The thoughts and feelings of others can be so thick that you can feel them. And they are sticky, just like the mist. We become covered with thoughts and feelings that we've unconsciously picked up and stored away in our body and the energetic space surrounding us.

Soon we can't hear our true wisdom—thoughts that originate within us—from the stray thoughts that we've picked up as we've intermingled with our friend and neighbors.

Living a life full of purpose and meaning–your own purpose and meaning–can be pretty difficult if we are covered in a mist of other people's thoughts and feeling.

3. You've studied analytics and quantum theory in your academic and professional life, yet you are also a certified Reiki Master and have studied clairvoyance and psychic healing. How do these two seemingly different sides of your knowledge come together in your work?

I used to think they were different sides of knowledge, but not any longer. Sages and masters have thought for centuries that we are all connected through a web of unseen lines of energy. We use these lines to telepathically connect to our friends and family. Even if most mainstream scientists scoff at these ideas, there are some physicists studying this phenomenon. And I find this quite exciting.

The study of quantum theory and psychic healing has opened me up to the awareness that there is much to our world than what we can see with our physical eyes, or hear with our physical ears. Both fields of information rely on letting go of some of our three dimensional thinking–to step into the world of the unknown. And, maybe someday, quantum physicists will "prove" some of what the mystics have taught us. Already they are exploring the possibility that our world may contain many more dimensions that we can see. Could it be that we "talk" to each other telepathically by communicating through these unseen dimensions?

It's a great time to be alive!

4. Tame Your Inner Critic offers more than forty exercises and meditations designed to help us uncover our own unique passions. Are these a necessary part of the journey towards contentment?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our fairy godmother came down and, with a wave of her magic wand, made our inner critic disappear in a cloud of smoke?

Sorry to say, it doesn't work that way. We have to do the work. We have to participate in our growth and healing.

The exercises and meditations in the book are one way to do that. Of course, there are other ways, but I've found that digging in and journaling about my experiences brings a lot of information to the surface that I would have ignored otherwise. Oftentimes, I will go back and re-read a journal entry, or look at an old exercise I did, and find a hidden nugget of information that helps me navigate my current situation.

I'm hoping this book does just that.

5. What do you hope your readers take away from Tame Your Inner Critic?

I call reading this book a journey of discovery–uncovering clues to who you truly are and the gift you are meant to share with the world. I hope the reader will come to understand that they are sparks of the Divine, full of beauty and grace. We are all meant to shine: to shine bright and share our uniqueness with the world.

Oftentimes the inner critic stops us from exploring those parts of ourselves. The inner critic tries to keep us small, corralled in the world of "have to" and "shoulds." But we are much more. We are spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body, and I hope the reader comes away feeling inspired to live their life their way, full of inner peace, grace, and self-love.