The Shower Diva: Where Fun Reigns!

Ellyn Spragins, author of "If I'd Known Then -- Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves"

Ellyn created a space for women who she respected and admired to share advice gleaned from hard won life lessons. Even more challenging, she wondered what if the women could talk to themselves as they once were from the vantage point of who they had become? What had they learned? What could they reclaim of themselves from the past? What light would such self-integration shed on the now?

Finally, Ellyn needed to know how undertaking such a task could become a benefit to women everywhere. She wanted to reach out to women from all walks of life and help them "better understand their own hurdles, validate and honor their struggles."

This is where this interview with best-selling author, Ellyn Spragins begins. With women. Sharing with other women. We sat down with Ellyn for an intimate interview on how sharing struggles, stories, laughter and tears with other women would bring full circle the importance of life's special moments.

The Answers Are In Your Hands

"What I know Now will help women better understand their own hurdles and, more importantly, that it will validate and honor their struggles to overcome them. ...We don't always have the wisdom we require at the time we need it. We struggle. We worry. Often, only later do our choices make sense to us. . . ."Only in hindsight can we see that our fears and worries were unwarranted, that insecurities and doubts were just illusions or that we should have taken a risk or dared something new sooner."

Remember the last time you said "If I knew then what I know now?" Haven't we all been there and done that? Well, get out your journals, ladies because this time you're going to want to take notes! If you ever wondered whether you could go back in time to help yourself in the past then pay it forward into the future, wait and see what we learned about doing just that from best-selling author Ellyn Spragins!

Ellyn's book, What I Know Now -- Letters to My Younger Self, is a collection of insights and sage advice from famous women to their younger selves. It skirts close to being that magic tome we've all been waiting for - "Life: A User's Manual!" But here's the powerful, mystical secret behind Ellyn's magic volume. It's waiting to be written by every one of us!

It's the irrevocable life changes that move us out of the familiar and into the new New forever. Changes we often think of as joyous are just as capable of ejecting us from our comfort zone. We get married, have a baby or move to an exotic foreign land to work on a film project. Sometimes the upheavals that change our life maps come as the result of loss - loss of a cherished dream, goal or a loved one. September Eleventh, for example, changed all of us in the blink of an eye. At the very same moment in time, no matter where we were when we heard the news, we knew we'd never be the same again.

The death of her mother in an airline crash was Ellyn Spragins' initiation into the labyrinth of grief. This sudden loss was a tear in the fabric of Ellyn's being that was so deep it catapulted her into a life unimagined. She speaks candidly about it in her book's introduction. She explains how living with that loss ultimately became her motivation for What I know Now -- Letters to My Younger Self.

There was no "beginning, middle and end" to integrating her loss. She learned there's no such thing as a neat closure. Ellyn experienced first hand a hard core truth -- life doesn't come with convenient plastic packets we can use to deposit our grief.

Ellyn stepped into renewed grief for her mother as the years of her own life unfolded -- particularly when her personal life chapters took on contexts similar to those lived by her mother:

Ellyn lost her mom at age 32. Ellyn's mom lost hers at the tender age of 21. Ellyn suffered an ectopic pregnancy before adopting her daughter then becoming pregnant with her son. Her mom had five miscarriages before giving birth to five children.

Through these profound transitions where she compared her life to her mom's, Ellyn longed for her presence; for her advice and comfort. She felt ".. . . a fresh, sharp stab of yearning each time she was not there to be my mother when I badly wanted mothering."

Ellyn says her book grew out of these intense moments until she arrived at a new life stage - the stage of creative curiosity. She wanted to search out how she could transform grief into a unique reconnection to her mother. But how? How could Ellyn find ways to learn from her mother's experiences even though she'd passed on? How had she handled conflict and overcome obstacles? How had her mother "made peace with disappointments and betrayals?"

It was at this point that Ellyn realized she "didn't have to yearn for what is impossible." She came to believe that the universal is absolutely personal -- every woman on earth struggles, suffers and feels regret. These are the core experiences that make us so much alike. They give us soul. Our experiences grow us. They come to mean that we have both wisdom and hope to share.

These are some of the revelations that guided Ellyn towards her project. She wanted to ask women she respected and admired to share advice gleaned from hard won life lessons. Even more challenging, what if the women could talk to themselves as they once were from the vantage point of who they had become? What had they learned? What could they reclaim of themselves from the past? What light would such self-integration shed on the now?

Finally, Ellyn needed to know how undertaking such a task could become a benefit to women everywhere. It wouldn't be enough to confine the project to what existed between a finite number of pages. She wanted to reach out to women from all walks of life and help them "better understand their own hurdles, " validate and honor their struggles."

All of this lead to Ellyn's New York Times best selling book. It has a contributor's list that reads like a "Who's Who." Some of the best and brightest American women from politics, journalism and the arts are gathered together in one volume to personally share how they survived heartache and emerged stronger for it on the other side.

Don't let Ellyn's high profile roster intimidate you! Younger Self's women contributors are high-powered, yes, but they are as warm, accessible, human and generous as your sister, cousin or best friend. For example, how often do any of us get to take inspiration from likes of a Senator Barbara Boxer who tells her younger self "not to be so quick to dismiss others"? Or from an elegant Ann Curry, correspondent for the Today show, who tells her younger self "It's time to be bold about who you really are"? These famous women turn out to be so much like us! The fact that we are not alone, no matter where we are in life, is the book's major revelation!

Ellyn, who now runs letter-writing workshops for high profile professional women, came to some powerful conclusions from these experiences. She states that it's awe inspiring to share time with accomplished women who are so willing to share and reveal stories about themselves. Many are willing to go back as recently as just 5 to 10 years ago.

Sometimes it seems riskier to share more recent experiences than more distant ones. There is such immediacy and "instant" self-exposure. It takes courage to open up that way publicly but they realize that doing so is a contribution to the greater good. Workshop participants explore much more than just work related issues. These women are grappling with finding news ways of merging "life's intersections - work and family." They're looking at the choices they've made and how to rework their lives in order to achieve balance. They're looking at exactly the same things we are! We all have to do it every single day.

"The way [these women] are willing to reveal themselves says something about female leadership. Its different than male leadership" It's great to see women leading with "emotional authenticity"

The women Ellyn is working with are no longer trying to simply ape men in the workplace but instead are capitalizing on their strengths.

Women everywhere are now starting up book groups and are sharing their letters with each other as a way of learning, growing and integrating. As Ellyn mentioned when we asked, this is where the crossover potential exists for Baby and Bridal showers, a project Ellyn is now working on! , She shared with us that she's currently developing something very special for showers, but can't do any big reveals just yet! We're sharing this little bit of a scoop with you right now, but we've promised to keep certain details under wraps.

One thing we can tell you now about Ellyn's upcoming projects for baby and bridal showers -- watch this space, ladies! You're going to love it!

One of five kids, Ellyn moved every two or three years as her father's Army career took the Spragins family from Arlington, VA to Germany, to Ft. Shafter, Hawaii and many places in between. After marrying at 20, Ellyn transferred from the University of Virginia to Barnard College in New York and then, improbably for an English lit junkie, leaped into banking.

Once she was indoctrinated into the alien world of finance and accounting, she began traveling to the Rocky Mountain states for Bankers Trust, but in time decided that writing was her true calling. With some difficulty she got a job at Forbes as a lowly reporter-researcher-fact checker. Barely surviving that experience, she went onto jobs at Business Week, Inc. And Smart Money.

From 1994 to 1999, Ellyn was a contributing editor to Newsweek, where she wrote two of the magazine's monthly sections: "Focus: On Your Money" and "Focus: On your Health." While there she won the National Press Club's Consumer Journalism award and 1997 and the Clarion Award in 1998. In 1997, she authored Choosing and Using an HMO (Bloomberg Press).

Like many others, Ellyn was sucked into the dot-com boom during the late 1990's. She left journalism to become Vice President of Editorial Development at Oxygen Media, focusing on Oxygen Web sites' content, search, and editorial infrastructure. This job lasted two minutes. She then moved on to become a contribution editor at Fortune Small Business and also wrote a Love & Money column for The New York Times Sunday business section.

Her articles have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Working Woman, Bloomberg Persona, Worth, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ladies Home Journal and Town & Country. She has also made numerous television and radio appearances.

She lives with John Witty, a financial writer, two teenagers, a black Lab and a Cairn Terrier in Pennington, New Jersey.

Ellyn's website - http://www.letterstomyyoungerself.com/