From childhood stutterer to inspirational speaker!

The Courage to Shine is a powerful and inspirational memoir by Eileen Forrestal, a former anesthesiologist who transformed her life. After a lifetime of "putting people to sleep," Eileen is now in the business of "waking people up" as a writer, speaker, and coach.

At 40 years of age, she finds herself unfulfilled and dissatisfied, in an moderately successful career, childless, with a failed marriage and a strained relationship with her aging mother. She wonders, as so many of us do, how did this happen to me?

In The Courage to Shine, Eileen retraces her journey. She shares her childhood trauma of accidental overdose of junior aspirin that leads to her subsequent speech impediment, the embarrassment of which causes her to hide her voice in silent shame and suffer a lifetime of thwarted self expression.

"My 'wake-up call' resulted in me speaking freely, expressing my love for my mother, and apologizing for blaming her for all my unhappiness in life! I discovered the healing power of forgiveness. I appreciate the courage it takes to tell the truth about oneself, but the truth did indeed set me free and the reward of healing my relationship with my mother was worth everything. I am now free to shine as 'the person she hoped I would be when I was three.'"

Eileen left her career in medicine to concentrate on healing the broken-hearted with words (not drugs) and grew her company Get Up and Go Publications into a global brand, sharing words of wisdom to inspire and motivate over 500,000 readers to "get up and go" for their dreams!

If you ever wonder if you're living the wrong life, as if somehow, when "two roads diverged in a yellow wood", you took the wrong road and wound up here, The Courage to Shine will inspire and uplift you. You may find yourself asking, does taking the path less travelled path make all the difference, or perhaps, is there any such thing as a wrong road?