About Barbara Sher
Isolation is the dream-killer, not your attitude
Barbara’s presentation at TEDx Prague has been viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube and earned more than 72K likes.
She explains why we have to change our common understanding of why we so often fail to bring our dreams into reality and how reaching out to others empowers success.
Barbara Sher passed away on May 10, 2020 at the age of 84. Her work inspired readers around the world to pursue their dreams and come together to help each other succeed.
She was a business owner, career counselor, and best-selling author of seven books, each of which provides a down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts method for uncovering natural talent, pinpointing goals and turning dreams into reality. She has often been named the “godmother of life coaching” by the media and her many fans. Barbara has presented seminars and workshops throughout the world to universities, professional organizations, Fortune 100 corporations, and federal and state government agencies. She has been called “a standup comic with a message” and “the best speaker we have ever seen,” in evaluations. Joining forces with public television, she has also created five hour-long special programs that continue to air in cities around the U.S.
Throughout her career, Barbara received many awards and an honorary PhD; she appeared on local and national radio and television shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, the Today Show, 60 Minutes and Good Morning America, and has had feature articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other newspapers and magazines. She was a Life Coach columnist for Real Simple Magazine.
She traveled around the world speaking and leading week-long scanner retreats including popular seminars at the Smithsonian Institute, Harvard University and New York University. When she wasn’t on the road, she split her time between her apartment in New York and her second home in Ortahisar, Turkey.
In 1972, Barbara invented Success Teams—small groups in which members dedicate their efforts to helping each other find and achieve their goals. Sher’s Success Teams are operating across the globe Cupertino to Kathmandu. Visit the site to find a team to help you get what you really want even if you have no goals, no character, and you’re often in a lousy mood.
Barbara Sher’s first book Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, (1979), has become a classic, selling over one million copies in more than a dozen translations. In addition to its popularity with readers, Wishcraft is used as the text for university classes all over the world and is a standard handbook for career counselors, coaches, social workers and teachers.
Sher’s second book, Teamworks: Building Support Groups That Guarantee Success (1989) followed up on the powerful Success Team system. It explains how to form teams and members can work together to help each other reach their dreams.
(It is no longer in print but used copies are sometimes available via Amazon.)
Noting how many people stated that they didn’t know what life goals to strive for, Sher began hosting problem-solving sessions and used them to design dozens of innovative techniques that freed people from “goal-paralysis.” Her ingenious, sensible and respectful techniques for overcoming resistance have been widely praised by psychologists and career counselors and made her third book I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What It Was (1994), a top seller for the last 15 years appearing on best-seller lists all over the U.S. and Europe, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Barbara’s fourth book, Live the Life You Love: In 10 Easy Step-By-Step Lessons (1996) is a ten-lesson course.
It teaches, in an appealing and accessible format, the individual skills needed to identify the reader’s own motivational style, find his or her goals and achieve them. Discover how to use “outcome thinking” to flow chart a path to your goals.
The book won the top “Motivational Book” award for by the Books for a Better Life Commission (a consortium of major publishers).
In her fifth book, Barbara took a new and different look at creating a great life after age forty. The book, It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now: How to Create Your Second Life At Any Age (1999) found such favor with readers of all ages that it became her first public television pledge special and has been aired continually for over 10 years.
Her subsequent public television pledge specials, “Live the Life You Love,” “Map to Success,” “Barbara Sher’s Idea Party,” and her latest, “Refuse To Choose” have also been very popular and have broken fundraising records for PBS stations all around the U.S.
Barbara’s latest book, Refuse To Choose (2006) deals with people who have so many interests they’re unable to choose only one (she has named them ‘Scanners’).
This subject has obviously struck a nerve. “In the last four months since the book and the TV show have been out in the public eye, I’ve received an astonishing number of impassioned letters,” she said. “And all of them say Thank you!”
As usual, Sher’s advice is not what you expect. She finds that Scanners aren’t dilettantes or undisciplined, and they don’t change interests because of A.D.D. or a fear of success. “They seem to be highly intelligent, multi-talented people who need to have more interests than the average person,” she says.
Barbara’s sixth book, Barbara Sher’s Idea Book, was self-published to accompany her public television show of the same name.
Would you like to do what you love and still pay your bills? Barbara believes that everyone should live their dreams and in this downloadable ebook she shows you exactly how to do it in her typical down-to-earth way.