Cheryl Richardson: Waking Up in Winter
An Interview with Cheryl Richardson: Waking up in Winter
What steps can we take to lead the lives that we consciously choose and find personal, professional, emotional and spiritual fulfillment? Cheryl Richardson, the New York Times Best Selling Author of Life Makeovers and Take Time For Your Life and a beloved spiritual teacher found herself asking these same questions. She delivers her most intimate and profound work to date on the obstacles and opportunities of reaching mid-life in her new book, Waking up in Winter: In Search of What Really Matters in Mid Life. It is the 
breathtakingly candid account of the most impactful year of Cheryl’s life. With passages that capture the intricacies of marriage, friendship, success, money, and self-care, Cheryl offers her experiences as an illustration of how to grow, reflect, laugh and change.
A lifelong journal writer, Cheryl Richardson had been for years documenting her innermost thoughts, desires, and hopes. She recognized that these passages and reflections were exactly what her readers need for representing her teaching in action and life being lived.
Cheryl Richardson is the New York Times Best Selling author of several books. She was the first President of the International Coach Federation and holds one of their first Master Certified Coach credentials. Her work has been covered widely in the media, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, New York Times, USA Today, Good Housekeeping and O Magazine.
She was the team leader for the Lifestyle Makeover series on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and she accompanied Ms. Winfrey on the Live Your Best Life Nationwide Tour. Cheryl also served as the co-executive producer and host of the Life Makeover Project with Cheryl Richardson on the Oxygen Network and as the co-executive producer and host of two public television specials, Stand Up For Your Life and Create an Abundant Life.
Interview of Cheryl Richardson from Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio
Cheryl Richardson: Thank you so much, Victor. It’s great to be here with you.
Victor Fuhrman: And thank you. We like to find out how they arrived on their life path. Now, were you born to become who you’ve become, or was there something different in your life? Please share your story with our readers.
Cheryl Richardson: I will say that, very early on in my life, I had a real hunger for self-knowledge and learning. I really value education and growth, personal growth. So, in some ways, I do feel like my life that has unfolded before me really reflects something I was connected to very early on. That might have something to do with journaling because I did start keeping a journal when I was 12, and without realizing it at the time, that would become this tool for self-reflection and self-understanding. I have always been a gal who’s been interested in checking under the hood. And over time, keeping a journal would go from just tracking what I did during my day, like a diary, to really exploring my feelings and my thoughts about things and recognizing that in journaling and just free writing. I could tap into wisdom and insight that was really important to me and learn things about myself that I didn’t know until I put pen to the page.
So, yeah, my whole life has just been one lengthy inquiry into what makes me tick, what makes human beings tick. I mean, in a lot of ways, my work as a coach really was kind of the next level of taking what I was doing in my own life and bringing it out to the world and working with individuals and then eventually groups and then eventually speaking to larger audiences. And then technology comes, right, and suddenly were able to communicate with people all over the world. And I’ve just been sharing my own journey, my own inquiry process with readers in the hopes that it helps them in some ways. And, thank God, so far, so good.
Victor Fuhrman: Isn’t that the key to being a teacher or mentor of any kind of is that you take what you’ve garnered in life, the good and the bad, and then share that with others so that they can learn from your experience?
Cheryl Richardson: Well, I do believe, the old saying we teach what we have to learn, I think is true. I think that we also need to be committed to mastery, not that you ever arrive or get fully cooked. I don’t think so. I mean, life is just ever evolving in that way. But, as a teacher, I must really be deeply committed to and connected to my own personal growth and my own personal development. In doing so, I needed to be able to teach from a wealth of experience that reflected arriving someplace, and accomplishing some kind of understanding. So really teaching along the way as I’ve gone through certain experiences, but then also, in my books, ultimately, the books reflect what I’ve learned and how it’s worked in my life and how my life has changed as a result of what I practice.
So, yeah, I think that that’s–I think it’s really important to walk your talk. The best teachers do that because they have the best influence on their audience.
Victor Fuhrman: Let’s talk a little bit about journaling. Was journaling a natural process for you? Was that something that just started flowing from you, or was that something that you had to teach yourself?
Cheryl Richardson: Well, Victor, because I really did start when I was 12, and I remember, I often like a joke when I’m teaching writers, I laugh and say my very first entries, because I still have it, was a poem. I wrote a lot of poetry in the beginning. I think that was the was the way that I was trying to capture the essence of my life without realizing it and just trying to just, capture the events of my life. I see it’s such a reflection of me. Like I have this weird sense of humor and this commitment to fully being alive.
And then over the years, journaling became a whole bunch of different things. Sometimes, it was just writing about my day. Sometimes, it was writing song lyrics and then writing poetry. Sometimes, it was, copying down favorite quotes that I had seen because I wanted to be able to go back and read them or writing affirmations, although I didn’t call it that.
I remember one year, I spent a whole year just writing letters to God in my journal because I was trying to establish a new relationship with God that was different than the religion of my youth. One time, I spent a whole year, at the end of the day, I would make a list of 10 things that brought me pleasure that day to reconnect with the importance of pleasure in my life.
Victor Fuhrman: You consider writing to be an art form, don’t you?
Cheryl Richardson: I do, and I consider myself an artist, and writing is important to me, the craft of writing.
Victor Fuhrman: Absolutely. So, your words on the page are to you what the canvass is a great artist.
Cheryl Richardson: And yet I’m not a literary writer, but I do want to capture the truth of what it means to be a human being on planet Earth. I want people to feel like we’re sitting in our living room together, and you’re listening to me talk, we have an intimate conversation, and then it’s easy and accessible, but also that you don’t feel alone, you feel like, God, she gets it. I’ve been through what she’s going through. And to me, that’s the highest form of feedback is for somebody to say, wow, I feel like you really get what’s going on for me, and I’m comforted by that.
Victor Fuhrman: Cheryl, you write in Waking up in Winter that May Sarton both influenced and inspired you. Share a little more about who this poet and author were for our listeners who may not be familiar with May and how she touched your life.
Cheryl Richardson: I think it was in the ’80s, so I was in my late 20s, and I happened to stumble upon a book she had written called Journal of the Solitude, and it was about a year in the life of a creative woman. And I was already writing at the time, but I was just starting to think about publishing my work, becoming a “professional writer.”
And so, I stumbled upon this journal, and I thought, oh, this is great to be able to read about a writer’s, like a real writer who’s been published life would be awesome. And I was so captivated by the journal forum, and of course, I had been keeping a journal, so I was captivated by that process. But, I felt like I was reading the intimate details of this woman’s life.
And we shared a lot of things that a lot of interests – animals, nature, the ocean, writing, women’s issues. And I loved her book. So, she was a poet, but she wrote fiction, non-fiction, a whole series of journals throughout her life all the way through ’83 when she died. Her last journal was called At 83.
And she really captured her life experiences on the page. One journal was called House by the Sea and was when she leased this house right on the water in Maine, and she talked about moving to this place and what her life was like involved with the ocean. And one journal was called Recovery, and it was when she had had I think a stroke or a heart attack and was recovering through that.
I was fascinated by her journals, and I couldn’t wait to get the next one and to read it. I don’t know it’s just my thing, I guess I felt like she was a friend, and I felt like I was living life alongside her, and I was learning a lot about what it meant to be a professional writer before I would ever publish a book. She wrote about topics that a lot of people didn’t write about and had opinions and wasn’t afraid to share them.
