Hi. My name is Terry McDonald. My father died in his prime from a heart attack at age 56. My brother had his first heart attack at age 30 and died from his last one at age 50. These two tragic losses led me to a study of psychology and biology in an attempt to understand how heart disease could be prevented or reversed.

My professional studies and the good fortune to be in the U.S. Navy at the right time allowed me to become the director of a counseling center serving active duty military and their families as well as civilian employees. The purpose of the center was to address a wide range of human problems from stress to family problems as well as drug and alcohol problems. As the director I supervised a team of therapists and I carried a personal case load. I also provided free seminars in the evenings as a way of reaching out and preventing many of the problems we were seeing.

After leaving active duty I started a consulting practice and delivered a wide range of seminars to corporate clients. My life changed dramatically when I ended a ten year unsuccessful marriage and found my soul mate Suz.

Suz and I had the privilege of providing corporate stress and wellness training personally to several thousand employees at our client companies. The seminar we gave was either two or three days long and the seminar groups were twelve to twenty five in size. In many cases the seminars were held at conference centers where we and the participants ate, slept and worked. As a result we frequently were in conversations with participants for 16 hours a day. Our seminar participants were wonderful, intelligent and well educated professionals who shared with us a long list of life problems they were experiencing. Our seminars evolved and were refined in these interactions. We never stopped studying the latest research on health, wellness, stress and approaches to address a wide range of problems of living.

Suz and I also strove to become a “product of our product”. We tried every diet, exercise, relaxation and wellness technique and approach before recommending it to others. We worked then and continue to work now to create a life together filled with love, joy, health and prosperity. We have had amazing good fortune along the way.

Executives in our client companies gave us the opportunity to do the work we love and to serve their employees and make a good living in the process. They also gave us the opportunity to provide a much larger employee population with health fairs we designed. Every person we touched and every person we employed in our company, taught us something. Taking our ideas into the seminar room and subjecting them to the scrutiny and criticism of participants helped us to refine them and improve them continuously.

We are far from perfect. We do not take our own advice all of the time. We do not believe we have all of the answers and we also know that the right answer for us may not be the right answer for anyone else. We have spent a lot of time studying the topics we cover in our podcast and we want to offer them as food for thought to you so that you can write an owners manual for your life.