Diana von Welanetz Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling author of ten award-winning books and the coauthor of two Chicken Soup for the Soul titles. Film rights to her romantic memoir, Send Me Someone, were purchased by the Lifetime Network. With her late husband, Paul von Welanetz, she hosted a long-running television series and founded The Inside Edge (www.InsideEdge.org), a weekly breakfast forum in Southern California that helped launch the careers of many of the most celebrated authors and speakers of our day. After twenty-eight years, progressive business leaders still gather at The Inside Edge to discuss new ideas in psychology, science, global issues, success strategies, spiritual awareness, and the arts. Today, Diana speaks nationally on the subject of her newest book, Love Your Heart: Follow the Red Thread to a Heart-Centered Life (written for the American Heart Association).
At seventy, looking back from a more enlightened vantage point, I am able to discern how my deepest childhood wound led to my greatest gift.
My father was fifty when I was born and he suffered from what may have been bipolar disorder (though there was very little understanding of that affliction at the time). My older brother and I were intolerable to him, so when I was eight years old, we were sent away to separate boarding schools, only a few miles from our home. I felt isolated and so alone because the school had only a few other boarders and none in my fourth-grade class. I wondered why I was unacceptable to my own family. And so it was that I developed a lifelong determination to connect deeply and truly.
That goal became my highest priority, and so I chose my two husbands very well. Both my late husband, Paul, and my present husband, Ted, have had a huge capacity for deep partnership. Both perceived and trusted my natural abilities to envision and build community. Both encouraged me, cheered me on, and have been there for me in every possible way through three careers.
Career #1: My mother and grandmother had a deep passion for cooking and gathering people around the table. That passion was so contagious that I left college and attended cooking classes in Paris. After marrying Paul, I continued to study for five years with a renowned chef in Los Angeles. I was a brand-new mother and adjusting to feeling housebound with my baby daughter when Julia Child’s television show The French Chef introduced French cooking to America. Asking myself how I might attract more people in our lives, I began teaching classes in my home kitchen. I thrived within a community of women gathering around my kitchen table. Soon the classes were in such demand they led to my husband, Paul, joining me as a team in our classes on menus for entertaining. Our first cookbook, The Pleasure of Your Company, won the “Cookbook of the Year” award, and that cookbook was followed by five more. We opened our popular cooking school on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood and hosted a long-running television series, The New Way Gourmet.
Career #2: Eight years later, when women were entering the workforce in huge numbers, interest in entertaining at home paled. Trendy restaurants, chef competitions, and one-upmanship took over the cooking world. Paul and I watched our career lose meaning because food no longer served as a catalyst for connection around the home table. Eager and a bit desperate to reinvent our career, Paul and I were drawn to and joined a quite radical motivational coaching group called Impact, led by a woman named Tracey Goss. The group met five days a week from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. That is where we met people like Tim Piering, Jack Canfield, and Dr. Barbara DeAngelis, who would become our colleagues in the days ahead. Tracey insisted we make far-reaching goals and be accountable for achieving them.
As celebrity chefs, through Impact, we were invited to join a group of leaders in human potential who were traveling into to the Soviet Union (at the height of the Cold War) as “citizen diplomats” to be part of a documentary. It was led by Rama Vernon, founder of Yoga Journal, who is known as the “Mother of Yoga” in the United States, as she is the one who first hosted the great yoga master Iyengar in this country. The group included futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, Patricia Sun, Alan Cohen, the real Patch Adams, Mike Farrell from M*A*S*H, Dennis Weaver, and many other leaders and peace activists.
On that trip, we observed how our fellow travelers tended to be loners. By being together during our three-week journey, they began to reach out to create supportive connections and share resources, giving birth to all kinds of new possibilities. Within six months of our return, Paul and I launched The Inside Edge, a weekly motivational breakfast forum where entrepreneurs, professionals, and high-achievers received encouragement and mutual support. It rapidly spread to five Southern California cities. Many of the members, such as Jack Canfield, Louise Hay, and the late author Susan Jeffers, credit The Inside Edge with launching their careers.
Besides hosting the weekly breakfast meetings, Paul and I created futuristic parties and invited members to show up as who they dreamed they would become in the next five years, and spend the evening sharing inspiring stories of how they achieved their success. Paul and I were still gathering people around the table but for a greater purpose. Behaving as though their ambitions were fully achieved, people were transformed! And the ripples that began at The Inside Edge spread way beyond anything we will ever know or imagine. After five vibrant years, though, Paul was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He told me as he was dying, “I don’t want you to be alone!” I asked him to send me someone. He soon did and I found myself remarried to Ted Wentworth.
Because of lasting friendships developed through The Inside Edge (www.InsideEdge.org), Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen invited me to become their first coauthor in the hugely successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Editing and compiling such heart-felt stories led me beyond cookbooks into the publication of a memoir and other nonfiction.
Career #3: My husband Ted Wentworth and I have begun exploring what we call “Act III.” We are trusting that by very consciously embarking on the final chapters of our lives, the true meaning and legacy we have created will be revealed. Staying in our comfortable life and our cozy little home, we risked becoming “pot bound.” Now we have liquidated most of our possessions and are heading off on a one-year adventure to explore where we want to land. We sense it will be as part of a very conscious community of like-minded and forward-thinking people in which we can encourage others and share life experience.
I’ve been truly sparked by women who take hardship and use it to create something exquisite. My best friend, Mary Olsen Kelly, author of Chicken Soup for the Breast Cancer Survivor’s Soul and many other titles, wrote her beautiful breast cancer story, Path of the Pearl. She likens a woman’s life to that of the pearl oyster that embraces the irritant that invades it and transforms it into a gem of great value and beauty. In 2009, I had an opportunity to do that one more time when I had a sudden heart attack. Thanks to research funded by the American Heart Association, I had stent surgery and was out of the hospital in only thirty-six hours. What followed was a year or so of re-centering, during which I was inspired to write my newest book, Love Your Heart: Follow the Red Thread to a Heart-Centered Life. In the book, I share a profound exercise I learned in a coaching session with Sheva Carr, founding director of The Institute of HeartMath’s HeartMastery Program. Sheva, who teaches the intelligence of the heart, suggested I create a list on the left side of a piece of paper of the people who most inspire me, who I would consider “my mentors.” I felt stumped at first, and it took a few minutes for my mind to begin identifying them. Then it began to be fun, and as my list grew to about ten, I was intrigued to find that almost all of them were women. There were mostly writers I knew through their books, one political leader, one film star, my best friend Mary, Oprah Winfrey, and Helen Keller.
She then guided me in listing the core values each of them embody/radiate next to their names. Tuning into the essence of each of these great women, I noticed how my heart seemed to fill with their admirable qualities: expansiveness, inclusivity, reinvention, eloquence, transcendence, devotion, enlightenment, presence, warmth, care for others, graciousness, beauty, elegance, vulnerability, depth, surrender, wonder, enthusiasm, and exuberance. Sheva explained that I had just discovered my own core values through this exercise, and those qualities still ring true today.
The word that resonated most was reinvention. I had chosen women who, in finding themselves blindsided by difficult circumstances, had discovered ways to become someone entirely new. And I could see the truth of that in my own life. My mother and my grandmother had modeled for me the old adage “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I had even structured my book Send Me Someone, a romantic memoir, based on how the pivotal points of my life were opportunities to transform adversity into new beginnings.
Reflecting on the shock of 2009—the heart attack and surgery—and on the amazing grace of a rapid recovery that found me trekking through the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey only three weeks later, I am filled with wonder and appreciation for the growth and beauty that year brought. Through it, I learned that one out of three women will die of heart disease and that there was an opportunity for me to help change that. It led me to listen closely to my heart and reinvent my life in many new ways, most meaningfully as an activist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association.
All the vitality and strength that I’ve gained as a result of my lifestyle changes offer me new opportunities to live long and leave a legacy. Because of that heart attack, I became all the more determined to celebrate every moment, and all the more determined to share this commitment with others.
What is holding you back from embracing manageable changes to give birth to new ways of being? What if we develop a whole new attitude toward the aging process and celebrate every month the new ways we have improved our path?
Ask yourself, “What is my optimal future? How can I define and move fully into it?” Even more important, “What does the world need from me right now?” Might you present radical new ideas to cultivate connection, community, collaboration, continuity, and contribution? Please join me in picking up this bright thread that promises to lead us together into a future full of reinvention and new beginnings!