New podcast: Karen Salmansohn

Self-help needs help. It can be tedious. It can be preachy. It can be dull and holier than thou. It’s an embarrassing part of the book store to be caught in.
Unless you’re with Karen Salmansohn.

She is a former copywriter (in fact, she named the Burger King Croissanwich®) and she has great knack for reducing wisdom to pithy memorable phrases. Her Facebook page is full of things like “You are a fine piece of china. Don’t let anyone treat you like a paper plate,” “If 2 people love each other, nothing is impossible (Except deciding where to eat)” and “If you are in a relationship and all you do is cry, you need to stop and ask yourself, are you dating a human being or an onion?” Her preoccupations may seem to be love and food but there’s a lot more to her too.

Karen has sold over a million copies of her wonderful and hilarious self-help books, gorgeously illustrated books like How to Be Happy Dammit, The Prince Harming Syndrome, and The Bounce Back Book. She’s a contributor to Oprah, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, Lifetime TV, a relationship expert for match.com, and a radio host on Sirius. I am lucky to call her my friend and to have her share her wisdom with us on this week’s podcast.

We talked about Aristotle, optimism, perfectionism, masochistic equilibrium, breaking bad habits, changing your neural pathways, and the bucket list from Hell. Oh, and she defines “flawesome.” It’s a funny and fascinating conversation.

Monkey of the Week: The Fuggedabout-it. It’s that voice that says: Tomorrow’s another day. So’s the day after next Thursday. That tells me to quit doing anything that seems to be making a positive difference in my life. It’s an exhausting and boring beast.

Here’s the episode:

Or better yet, subscribe to the whole series on iTunes (and leave a nice review).

Or you can visit monkeypodcast.com and listen to the episodes right in your browser.

What’s your experience with your monkey? How has it affected you, and how have you overcome it? Record your Monkey Tale at dannygregory.com/monkey.