Author: Patty Newbold

I have many interests. I get bored without new technologies, new knowledge, new skills, new experiences. And I am a Baby Boomer. I’ve been around for many years. I was born in New Jersey and somehow I have ended up there again. Besides my work, I love to spend time with my grandchildren and their wickedly smart parents, check out architecture and museums, sew, write, and hang out in, on, or by the water. My husband and I love a good restaurant meal together. I adore him because he keeps me sane. My talents do not include music, poetry, or art, but I still love to create things. I’m a geek, a writer, an explainer, a teacher, a coach. I learn quickly and I am insatiably curious. And I have a real knack for making complicated things a lot simpler, from technology to relationships. Read on to learn more about my Scanner life.

I launched my blog, Assume Love: How to have a happier marriage without waiting for your spouse to change, in 2006. I attended marriage education conferences and got myself certified to teach two marriage preparation programs. I taught twice a month teleworkshops, spoke to corporate trainers about managing married people and offer a workshop for married people about how to make life as a twosome a lot easier. In 2020, I published the first two books in the Enjoy Being Married journals set: Agreed: A Journal to Bring Joy to Any Marriage with Too Many Disagreements and Loved: A Journal to Bring Joy to Any Marriage with Dashed Expectations and Unmet Needs. (Amazon would like me to tell you that as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases when you use my links to the Amazon site, which is the only place my books are sold.) You can also find my work on Quora.

When I first met NY Times best-seller author Barbara Sher in 2004, I signed up to be one of her Sher Success Teams leaders right away. I had already read two of her books and seen one of her PBS specials, and I loved helping people go after their dreams. Today, I am the Director of Sher Success Teams. When Barbara asked for help launching the teleworkshops for her new WriteSpeak program in 2007, I had already used this new technology for my corporate clients. After we ran three or four of them, she asked me to join her for the first WriteSpeak retreat, where I taught a class on setting up your website and blog to accompany her workshops on launching a writing and speaking career. The year-long program is now mostly online, but Patrice Jenkins and I still teach the 6-hour teleworkshop portion live, with lots of great recordings of Barbara, and handle the coaching calls throughout the year. In 2012, we launched Barbara’s Club with a wonderful online program called Hanging Out, with all new writing from Barbara to help those not sure what their dreams might be. We added four Barbara Sher book clubs online and an email-a-day program called the Survival Guide for Dreamers. Since her death in 2020, I have become President of Barbara Sher Online LLC in partnership with her estate, a delightful part-time, post-retirement job with a really great team and the best members you could ask for.

As a partner in Decision Dimensions in New Orleans, and a branch and division manager for Applied Science Associates, Inc. in New Jersey, from 1983 to 1990, I helped large and mid-sized corporations improve their training, motivational methods, and performance support tools from 1979 through 1990. We set up evaluation systems for their training. We created computer-based, workbook, videotape, and classroom training programs on a wide range of technical, high-tech, and management skills. We built tools to make work easier, some on paper, many on computers. Our clients included Popeyes, Taco Bell, AT&T, IBM, and many others. Then, in 1990, I launched my own consulting firm, MOST Performance Improvement, using a proprietary model for helping corporations and government agencies make it easier for their employees to do a good job and their customers to get better results from using their products. In the 31 years since then, we added more clients: Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Reuters, Chase Bank, and J&J, among others. We also got to help Martin Seligman and the University of Pennsylvania make their learned optimism instruction available to corporations and students and to put their positive psychology research programs and coach training online over many years. Beginning in 2007, we began putting author Barbara Sher’s life-changing programs online; this work will continue, but MOST Performance Improvement and my management consulting career came to a close in 2021.

After graduating from MIT in January of 1974 with a degree in urban studies and planning, I worked for three consulting firms, INSGROUP in Huntington Beach, California, CONSAD in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and my own PLN Associates in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, consulting to local and state governments and the U.S. Federal government to assess the outcomes of programs to improve K-12 and university education, drug and alcohol abuse prevention and treatment, and innovation in urban governments.