Free Workshops and Captivating Pictures

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As I was shopping at Berkeley Bowl yesterday, almost ready to get in line, I heard my name called—“Ariel!” It was Marla, who had been in my Ageless Pizazz!® class last October, smiling and looking great. She described how the class had influenced her: she now was incorporating bits of pizazz into her life, expressing herself more, approaching life with more creativity and fun.

That did it. After a similar reflection from another participant last week—she told me the class had opened her to depths of spontaneity she didn’t know were there—I had to really own the value of what I’m doing. Continue reading →

Pizazz = Be Here Now

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In my forthcoming book, Ageless Pizazz! Nine Principles for Turning Up Your Oomph, Having More Fun, and Being More Powerful as You Get Older, the first principle, the very essence of pizazz, is “Be here now.” In 1968 when I was 28, I met someone who embodied that principle powerfully: Donovan Bess, my new father-in-law, who was about 60.

Up until then, I had  thought older people were pretty boring. Like Peter Pan, I had no desire to “wear a tie, and a serious expression in the middle of July” and sink into colorless conformity. Then I met Donovan. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he was grey-haired, wiry, and adventurous. He had the liveliest mind of anyone I’d ever met and actually cared about the question that fascinated me most: What is it to be a human being? He was the one who wrote the Chronicle’s stories on the human potential movement, the newest gurus, encounter groups. And he didn’t just report on them, he immersed himself in them. Continue reading →

You Are Ageless And You Have Pizazz!

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Yes, you are ageless and you have pizazz. That’s the core principle of my workshops, my private sessions, my forthcoming book, and this newsletter. All are meant to wake you up and make you tingle. Contrary to what we were brought up to believe, we can keep blooming, and blooming, as we get older.

I haven’t always believed this. When I was nine there was a radio drama, “The Romance of Helen Trent…the story that asks the question, ‘Can a woman over 35 find  romance…in her life?’” Continue reading →