Well, the New Year certainly started off with a bang. A few days ago we got an unexpected phone call from producers in New York for “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet”, which is the Fox 9:00 a.m. morning show, syndicated nationwide, asking me and Lisa if we would popup to New York at the last minute and appear on a segment about understanding teenagers on Tuesday, February 8th.
So, we put everything off on hold, scrambled a bit, flew off to New York on Monday afternoon and prepped for the show and went live on this major broadcast on Tuesday morning with several teenagers also on the panel with us to talk about our books for counseling and to talk about the things that parents need to understand about teenagers (ph) that they tend not to get. The experience was a really fun one and the producers were fantastic. It is such a pleasure to be prepped by producers who take the need for preparation seriously. So many television producers just have a vague idea of what they want to happen and on a live morning show, when you only have six or seven minutes at the most that can be pretty dangerous.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A CLIP FROM THE SHOW
Shaunti and co-author Lisa Rice
So Nicole, the Segment Producer, thoroughly prepped us and we really enjoyed being on there with the teenagers. My only disappointment was that we didn’t get a chance to respond to the issue of divorce that was covered on the show where they asked the teenagers their impressions and both said that if their parents were unhappy, they would want them to get a divorce and I had some pretty strong opinions on that and some analysis that I wanted to bring in and to show that that might be how the teenagers feel at the time, but isn’t what usually works out best for them in the long run, but I didn’t get a chance.
Other than that, we covered the topic of freedom, which was fun and the topic of attitude and identity building and it was just a really good time to have a little snippet on each of the subjects that have come to mean so much to me on the “For Parents Only” book. In the next few hours after that, we met with my editor Roger at the business division of Random House, to talk about the business book and that was a real productive meeting and helped me clarify a bunch of things and then Lisa and I both flew off to different destinations. She flew home to prepare for another speaking event and I flew to Spartanburg, South Carolina for another television program called the “Time for Hope”. This one is a faith-based mental health program, with Dr. Freda Crews, and Dr. Crews did a segment on For Men Only and on For Parents Only, which Jeff joined me for and then we drove home together.
So, all in all, busy start to the New Year and I am looking forward to really diving in now to the business book. I have been doing multiple interviews with businessmen, asking them for their impressions of things that we as women tend not to get and I am finding out some absolutely fascinating things.
So, I’ll be blogging about that more in the weeks to come.