Episode #101 Encore with Diana Wentworth
On today’s episode, Sharri Harmel speaks with Diana Wentworth, an amazing thought leader who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook. Along with her husband, she founded the Inside Edge, which was an incredible inspirational breakfast group that met in Hollywood, California. She also created a “five years from now” plan that was hugely successful and that is used by many inspirational thought leaders today. Diana is a worldwide inspirational speaker, a coach, wisdom circle leader, and founder. Listen as Diana shares her amazing life and ideas with you. So many nuggets of wisdom in this episode!
Diana Wentworth’s website, www.dianawentworth.com
Inside Edge, www.insideedge.org
The Love Event, www.theloveevent.com
Diana’s Facebook, www.facebook/AuthorDianaWentworth
NuCalm, www.nucalm.com/diana-wentworth
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Episode #101 Encore with Diana Wentworth
Sharri Harmel: Welcome everyone to episode one hundred and one of the Extraordinary Women podcast. I’m your host, Sharri Harmel and today I have the pleasure of talking with Diana Wentworth, an amazing thought leader who wrote the Chicken Soup for the Soul cookbook a while ago. And along with her husband founded the Inside Edge, which was an incredible inspirational breakfast group that met in Hollywood, California a while ago. And you know, also in the process of the Inside Edge, she created this step into five years from now plan that was hugely successful, used by many inspirational thought leaders today and truly one that we can all use in our lives today. Now, Diana is a worldwide inspirational speaker. She’s a coach, a wisdom circle leader and founder, and the list just goes on and on. And you will hear that when you listen to my conversation with Diana and as she says, her Encore years might just be her best ever. Now I’ll get on with the conversation and let Diana share her amazing life and ideas with all of you.
Sharri Harmel: So welcome Diana. It’s just a pleasure, total pleasure to have you with us today because you have an incredible career you really have, and it’s gone many different directions, but there’s a theme about it all. And that’s what we want to hear about today. So if you don’t mind, why don’t you give listeners an idea of who you are, kind of where you started.
Diana Wentworth: oh my gosh. Yeah, it’s a long story because, oh yeah. Now I’m an elder, you know, I’ve been around a long time and the whole thread of my life has been about reinvention and following my heart. So I’m a lifelong entrepreneur. I thought when I was, you know, in high school and so on that I would get married and be a milk and cookies mom and have five kids.
And then I had one and discovered, oh my gosh, that’s not who I am. You know? So that is when reinvention began. And I had had a lifelong passion for cooking and entertaining. My grandmother was an entrepreneur, she ran a boarding house. She loved to fix meals for her people and she also sewed and did all of these other things.
And I don’t know, she had a hum tremendous effect up on me. So I thought it was all about food in the beginning and so I went in that direction. I studied with a chef for five years, the head of the L’Escoffier room at the Beverly Hilton. I went to the Cordon Bleu briefly in Paris. I just did it as an avocation. I thought it would be fun to learn how to do that and I’d love to invite people over. I like the feeling of creating a feeling of home with people, you know, of gathering around the table and discovering new things about each other and all of that. So yeah, as soon as I had a baby, I discovered that, oh my gosh, I now can’t leave the house and all of that. And I quit smoking suddenly, cuz this poor baby was in a cloud of smoke and I started making crepes. I had them like almost stacked up to the ceiling cuz I could pour the batter, flip the batter and then butter, the pancake, you know, and friends dropped by and they said, can you teach us to do that? And that became my cooking classes right in my own home. And I just did it out of passion. It was so much fun and word spread and all these rather famous people showed up in my kitchen. Evans and Meredith McCray and all these strange these women and it was just fun. You know, I lived for it and I loved creating menus for entertaining that you could make ahead. And you wouldn’t have to be in the kitchen when your company arrived. So all of a sudden it became a career. My fabulous, amazing first husband became a partner with me and we started writing cookbooks. Our first cookbook took five years to write, but at one cookbook of the year in the category of entertaining and I was positioned with Martha Stewart as the cooking expert in the west. So, I mean, it was incredible. It was just an incredible ride. So we wrote six cookbooks, we had a TV show, and we had a cooking TV show.
Sharri Harmel: TV. Yeah, show all about cookie and go backwards just a little bit. Did you grow up in California?
Diana Wentworth: I grew up in Beverly Hills when it was just like this little tiny town. It had a bridal path down Rodeo Drive where people rode their horses when I was a kid.
Sharri Harmel: Oh my gosh. Now we know where the, the name comes from.
Diana Wentworth: Oh, gosh. Yeah, I have so many stories, you know, I can go on forever, but yes. Anyway, something began to happen. We had a cooking school on Sunset Boulevard where Wolfgang Puck would teach and I mean, we really had a fabulous career and then all of a sudden women decided to go into the workplace. They didn’t wanna spend three days cooking a meal and the super chefs were rising and that’s not what we were about. We loved gathering people together, so we didn’t know what to do. It was really a hard time and we were trying to reinvent ourselves and we went to a seminar that was called impact from six to eight in the morning and you had to make up a goal that would be impossible almost to reach in three weeks. And while we were there, we met some really interesting people like Jack Canfield and Dr. Barbara DeAngelis before they’d ever written any books. But it was clear already that they were charismatic and that they were going someplace, you know? And through that, Paul and I were invited to go into the Soviet Union with a group of Activists like Dennis Weaver and Mike Farrell from Mash and Swami Swatmananda and all these amazing people because it was the height of the Cold War and they wanted to make a documentary about American citizens going out and mixing with Soviet citizens and having dialogues because our countries weren’t speaking to each other at that time. And I began to notice something and that was that people just loved to share resources with each other. We’d sit around the table, here we were around the table again but people were saying, oh no, you need to meet so and so, and I just began to notice that there was this synergy in this magic happening and it occurred to me, Hey, wait a minute, I don’t have to make the food in order to create these kinds of events. And so we side stepped our cooking career and started something called the inside edge, which started out in Beverly Hills and grew into Orange county and San Diego so throughout Southern California. And it met from 6:30 to 8:30 in the morning before people went to work and we would have all the most amazing speakers. I mean, nobody ever said no to me. I mean, I had David White when he was just starting out, you know, the poet and I mean, everybody wanted to speak at the inside edge. It was incredible. We had a thousand members, it was incredible.
Sharri Harmel: So, it was like a membership site before anyone used the word membership site.
Diana Wentworth: Yeah. Well, it was a membership meaning because there was no such thing as a site.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah, exactly. I love that. The insight edge and this kinda pre if I have, if I have my dates, correct, it’s almost a little bit pre kind of that self-help movement.
Diana Wentworth: Self-help was very much alive and interest in that, but interest in self growth and all of that was very much alive, but there was no internet. And people wanted, you know, to figure out how they could create the most fabulous lives for themselves.And so I would throw these parties where people would have to show up as who they were gonna be in five years.
Sharri Harmel: Well I heard this it’s like this, something about this five year question.
Diana Wentworth: Yeah. So that was mine. I started that.
Sharri Harmel: So talk about that before you get to the party.
Diana Wentworth: Okay, well, that is the party because you, I would give a party where you have to show up as who you’re gonna be in five years and it was very confronting. And Jack Canfield said recently at our 35th anniversary, he said that he has used that party as the closing event of every training he’s ever done since we did it at the inside edge. And it was great because people would have to stay in the role of that future self, you know, and tell everyone how they got there, so it was exciting. I think my favorite story, Dr. Susan Jefferson had never written a book and she showed up in a limousine, uh, with three mock books. And she said, I just returned from my third New York times bestseller tour and her book Feel the fear and Do It Anyway went through the roof and she had three books within five years. She was the biggest success story, but Louise Hay was there too. She just had a little tiny, tiny book and there’s so many people credit the inside edge with the launching of their careers and I think that’s been the most fulfilling and exciting part of my life. And that went on for a long time, you know?
Sharri Harmel: And how long was the inside edge? How long did it go on?
Diana Wentworth: It still exists. We don’t in person anymore. We do meet, we have met online right now. I’m not booking any new speakers for this year. We had Gary Zukav recently with his new book. We had to move on to zoom, you know, because of COVID and we stopped our in person meetings, but it had the most incredible thing. And then the most amazing thing happened because one morning at the inside edge, Jack Canfield was speaking and Mark Victor Hansen had driven up from Orange county to be there and Jack had said he had this idea for a book that he was doing. It was gonna be all these stories that the speakers used to make people laugh and cry and I don’t remember if he had the title of Chicken Soup for the Soul yet, but I know that Mark said, he was on the other side of me and he said, I’m gonna do that book with you. And Jack said, Why would I let you do this book with me? It’s almost done. And Mark said, because I’m such a great marketer, and that was the beginning of Chicken Soup for the Soul. And Jack said recently that it wouldn’t exist without the inside edge and all of that so the most divine thing was that everybody thought it was a cookbook and the publishers said, we need a cookbook. And they said, well, Diana can do the cookbook so I got to be the first co-author and the first publication of that was 950,000 copies and they gave me a third of the book. So that just was the most wonderful thing. That was the best business call I ever took.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. But go back if you don’t mind, go back to the group that preceded the inside edge, cuz the inside edge was your idea, your affiliation where this other group.
Diana Wentworth: It was called Impact. And it met from six to eight in the morning, it was an offshoot of EST. It was especially just for people in the entertainment industry. Paul and I had a TV show at that time and Jack and Barbara as their projects were making their first audio albums, you know, with all the cassette tapes?
Sharri Harmel: Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh. You’re bringing back all these memories. Crazy, but the Soviet union thing, cuz some of this sounds almost unbelievable if you wanna know the truth.
Diana Wentworth: I know, you know, I have a lot of unbelievable stories.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. You describe yourself as kind of just this average girl who has great dreams and wonderful role models and yet all of these things and are happening. And then you go to the Soviet union. How long were you over there?
Diana Wentworth: Three weeks. But I’ll tell you this story that really brings the magic into this because I was at UCLA in a sorority and the music was really loud. And I said, Hey, can you turn that down? And somebody said, oh, Diana doesn’t like Elvis Presley. And I said, I had this sudden weird feeling and I said, actually, I do like him and I’m going to date him someday and they laughed and I laughed at myself. About two months later, my mother took me to Europe for a tour. And we were at the Prince De Galle hotel in Paris. One of the kids in the group came running up to me and said, Diana, Elvis Presley’s in the dining room and I’m too scared to ask him for his autograph and I said, oh, well, come with me. I walked in the dining room. He was all alone there with two of his bodyguards in his army uniform. He was in the army in Germany at the time and we started talking. We had a good time talking that night. We went to the Moulin Rouge. Our tour did, and Elvis happened to be there at the same time, but he was up in the balcony and I ran into his bodyguards down below and they said, are you going back to the hotel after this?And I said, yes, we got back to the hotel. There’s Elvis in the lobby waiting. And he went up to my mother and asked if he could take me to the Lido that night to the nightclub.
Sharri Harmel: Oh my goodness. So you did.
Diana Wentworth: Oh, my Lord. That was the beginning of a two year friendship with him. I have letters from him and we used to talk on the phone a lot but how did I know that I was gonna meet him?
Sharri Harmel: I’m curious, like what else you said this is going to happen and maybe that’s part of the five year question, this can happen and or this will happen. Not even can, right. This will.
Diana Wentworth: Well, I think it’s feminine intuition, you know, and I think if we trusted and begin to culture it and cultivate it, it makes a big difference.There was another time that I was dating a man who was, you know, considered an extremely eligible bachelor and I had this sudden knowing. He didn’t really know who I was that, you know, I was more like arm candy to him. And I picked up the phone and broke the relationship and my parents happened to be leaving for a trip to Asia the next day so I tagged along on that trip. And it was fabulous. I mean, I knew I’d done the right thing. I just had this great feeling. And we got to Hong Kong and it was our first morning there. And for some reason, very early in the morning, I got all dressed up and I went and stood in the hotel lobby. It was like 6:30 in the morning. And I’m thinking, what the heck am I doing here? And two men walked off the elevator and one of them was called by a page to the telephone and the other one was left standing next to me. And that was Paul and three days later we were engaged. So I managed to sense just the right place to be at just the right time. And Paul and I were married for 25 years, said before he died. I listen. I really, really listen.
Sharri Harmel: So what kind of advice do you have though for a woman who because I think we all get those messages, we sometimes just don’t listen or block them out or have our logical brain take over and say, just keep doing this. Or you can’t expect that, or you can’t have that or whatever. Help someone to understand not just how important it is cuz look at the life I’ve had, but why it’s important.
Diana Wentworth: So there’s kind of wellbeing. I think it’s the most important activity we can do. Actually, I ended up taking a couple of courses at UCLA on what was called the journal workshop. And I learned all sorts of techniques about journaling and beginning a dialogue with like anybody in the world that you can think of, the Dolly Llama, you know, or somebody who’s deceased or even with a work. There was a time when Paul and I were hired by a very high end department store to be their gourmet spokespersons and they wanted us to do this very complex project and I began a dialogue with the work and listening to, you know, making a list of everything that led up to it. So if you were gonna dialogue, for instance with a person, you would make a list of 10 items that would be the stepping stones of their life as you know it. So you’ve got a context and then you write an opening paragraph about why you want to have a dialogue and that sets the tone. And then you just begin you just say I want to ask you this and blah, blah, blah and then you have to really be able to listen. And I think we all have so much noise and static going on all the time, but I was a meditator for 50 years. So I was used to being able to listen. I think meditation really is about listening. It’s not prayer, you know, I mean, we’re not asking, we’re not speaking. We’re just receptive and we begin to get a sense something begins to feel right. If there’s an answer that comes and so this is something that I encourage everybody to cultivate this ability to for inner listening.
Sharri Harmel: And it sounds like if someone is really blocked in that area, Possibly start with some meditation, even short spurts of meditation.
Diana Wentworth: Well recently I became a spokesperson for an app called Nucalm, which takes you into that transcendent space, Tony Robbins is also a spokesperson, that you can go into a very focused thing where you’re very intense or you can go to sleep or you can take a power nap. And I use this all the time now instead of my traditional mantra meditation, I just put on my earphones and go into this patented brain science.
Sharri Harmel: And it’s called… spell it for us.
Diana Wentworth: Nucalm. And I have a special landing page that lets people try it out really very inexpensively, so I can give you that link.
Sharri Harmel: Yes. We will put that in the show notes. So everyone, I’m sure you’re going to want to follow this process so check the show notes cause we’ll have all the details there.
Diana Wentworth: Okay, great. Yeah, I’m happy I got to mention that because it’s very, very important in my life. Really. You know, the kind of open and receptive mental space that I live in because you know, at 80 years old, it is a whole new life for me. I had another marriage that was unbelievably fabulous. And I wrote a book called Send Me Someone because my beautiful husband, Paul, when he was passing said, I don’t want you to be alone. And I said, send me someone. And he said, I will. And two months later into the Inside Edge walks Ted Wentworth.
And it took me 10 years to write that book called, Send Me Someone, but I did end up send selling it to Lifetime as a movie so that really was my master work. I think that was my favorite thing, but I had the second husband named Ted Wentworth who was incredible. He even wrote a book called the Enlightenment Code. He was just an amazingly humorous and funny man and he just passed a year ago. So I have been married for 56 years with an eight month intermission. I mean, that’s how long it took for me to get remarried. And now this is the first time in my life that I’ve had complete sovereignty and oh my gosh my life is just exploding.
Sharri Harmel: I wanted to ask about that. For somebody who was partnered for 56 years, how do you navigate alone?
Diana Wentworth: You know, you’re always, if you’re in a partnership, you’re always accommodating the other person’s personalities and likes and dislikes and all of a sudden it was like, oh my gosh, I can eat whenever I want to. I can do whatever I want to. And, oh my God, I can’t tell you how much my world opened up. I had all these offers starting to come in of doing women’s circles, you know, just round tables, people talking about encores and this is a hilarious story actually cuz I went to get a facial. And I didn’t know that the lady who was giving me the facial was very intuitive. And so I got off the table and she said well, Ted was here. That was my husband, Ted was here. And he wants you to remember what it was like to look into his eyes. Because he wants to tell you something. And I had been sensing all sorts of things from him. We’d had orbs. I had pictures of all sorts of things that were going on around here, and I was really feeling his presence still. But then I did that and I just kept hearing the word Encore, Encore, Encore, and these are my Encore years and I can help people. Think about what they wanna do is a whole new thing, you know, what can be their legacy, what could be something outside the box that they could create as a project for themselves and really enjoy. So that’s become my whole life. I’m writing a book called Encore and I just gave a keynote at the, publishing and publicity conference in Las Vegas last week on the subject of Encore.
So define Encore. You know if you go to whatever, uh, a play or a musical performance, especially the audience really appreciates what you’ve done. And they want more, right. Sometimes, if they’re very smart, they’ll save the best for last, you know, so that they really end with a big bang. And so that is what I’m all about right now. We’re talking with people writing about coaching, you know, what is it that you haven’t explored? How can you explore your Encore to be just the very best of what’s still possible in your life? Wow.
Sharri Harmel: People who embrace the Encore, cuz some plays just end and they just end.
Diana Wentworth: Right. There’s no Encore.
Sharri Harmel: So what is the difference in people that you notice?
Diana Wentworth: Well, I think a lot of people buy into our culture and what they say about aging and about women and about, you know, having a lid on us. This is a crazy story. This just happened. Just after Teddy passed, I was taking a writing class from somebody and there were 500 people and they gave us an assignment of writing really fast about something that happened in a school lunch. I remembered growing eight inches in one year being my body was out of control. I didn’t know what size my feet were gonna be when I woke up. You know, I mean, it was horrible. It was just really horrible, like about a period that lasted for six weeks, you know, and I wrote all about this. And then for some reason, the teacher called on me to read what I wrote and I thought, and there were men in the class and everything, and I just did it.
Diana Wentworth: I was so embarrassed, you know, because I had just blurted out all of these personal, personal, you know, physical facts and all this stuff. But there was a sort of a giddiness that was inside of me, of, you know, women have like a trapped exuberance that we’ve had to. Ladies, we’ve had to be perfect. We’ve had to be just in the background and all that. And so I walked over to my computer and I bought a domain called Women Writing Wild, and I thought, I like this, we have to take the lid off of ourselves. And honestly, it was not two weeks later that I got a call from a man that I’ve known in publishing. And he said Diana, I want you to write the forward for a book called Women Gone Wild. And I thought, wow, that’s really a fit. Do you know, what’s happened with that book? Have you heard of that book series women gone while?
Diana Wentworth: It’s on NASDAQ right now. I mean, it’s incredible. The first book I wrote the forward, the second book. Now this is one of those new kinds of books that has all these co-authors you know, it’s more of an anthology on the subject of women gone wild. So I wrote the forward and the first book did really well. Then I wrote a chapter for the second book. I was hired to help do online work with the co-authors to develop their stories so that they were really much more soul centered than the surface, you know? And I love doing that. So that book did really well. Right now, if you go on Times Square, there’s two giant signs, Women Going Wild with the co-authors going around and around. They’re huge. They’re bigger than life. And this book is one of the top sellers ever on Amazon and I’m helping them put together. We’re talking about my participation in the third book now.
Sharri Harmel: Oh, wow. But again, the synchronicities of all of that is just actually, it’s almost like I don’t know, not even earthly based.
Diana Wentworth: And we will never understand what’s really going on, but here’s the secret. I asked a man one time who I began to respect. I said, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned? He said, expect magic. And I love that. I love that. That’s the name of one of my forthcoming books. I really believe that it’s an energy and it really an alchemy. It’s a spiritual alchemy. And when we ask, we don’t kind of quietly and neatly implore. We don’t just say, oh please, could you possibly in your spare time, give me some help. You know? I mean, I don’t, I really, I don’t believe that. So now that I’m alone, I really am quite fierce about it. And I say, okay, I need a miracle right now. You need to show me the stepping stones. I need to know what’s the best use of my time for the rest of my life. And then I go into my Nucalm meditation and I listen, right. And all these ideas pouring in and I just have more work than I can even accept, you know, and I’m 80.
Sharri Harmel: No, but that’s fantastic. I mean, you know, who knows? You might have more than one Encore, you know?
Diana Wentworth: Absolutely. Multiple encores. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I like to encourage people to not put a lid on themselves to ask. Knowing that they are here to light the world. I listen to something from Jan Phillips every morning. It’s called Think of Yourself. If you go to YouTube and put in, think of yourself by Jan Phillips, she goes into this most wonderful guided meditation. And she, she talks about thinking of yourself as a story. But at one point she says, remember, you came here to light the world. And I love that. I do think that’s our job. Every single one of us that were here to pour our consciousness and our abilities and our magic into the world. So that it works for everyone. That’s my passion is lighting the world.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. It’s kind of your mission and your core belief. But I want to differentiate and you did it a little bit about expect bag magic because I love the phrase, but there’s a part of me and I don’t know that many of our listeners won’t feel the same way. That’s sort of like, oh yeah. Expect magic versus what you described as fiercely expecting magic. And what the difference is you shared, but what the difference would be in from a manifestation standpoint, because one you’re absorbing it completely. And the other one you’re not.
Diana Wentworth: Well, I do think that magic happens for everyone and you, you may notice it sometimes, there may be synchronicities or odd things that happen or meetings or whatever, and you kind of take that casually, but I think that there is an alchemy involved in it. And I think that the more you trust it, the more you insist on it, the more you just claim it, that it grows exponentially. And I know that happens in my own life. There isn’t a day that goes by honestly that I don’t get some message on Facebook or something that is completely out of the blue connection thing, fun, something exciting to do some new project or person that comes into my life. And I know that that’s from being active in it. Making a role of action, you know, I think we were taught that action was all that mattered. And that’s true up to a certain extent, you know, all your consideration, all your doubts don’t count unless you take action, but there’s something that in taking action, you have to ask. So at the Inside Edge, I picked up the phone, I called Jack Canfield and I hardly knew him and asked him to be on the board of the Inside Edge. I did this with every speaker I ever hired. I’m really, really good at asking. That’s the action that takes place. So we have to ask the divine, we have to ask people if they wanna come and play with this in some way or hang out or do a new business or be on a podcast, you know, you’re asking all the time. So it’s just, there’s no limit to your imagination when it comes to asking.
Sharri Harmel: But you bring up a really important point here. And that is, and I think because a lot of women who start something of their own, they’re starting solo, they’re starting by themselves. And so what I’m also kind of sensing in you is that maybe we need to have more advisory boards. Before we got on this call, you and I were talking about Bloom TV and Monica Michelle, and being on her board. And so maybe there’s something to that that we need. Maybe it’s not an official board, but yet we create it, which does make it.
Diana Wentworth: Well, that kind of brings up two things in my mind. As I said, I’m creating wisdom circles of women of mastery so that they can move forward. And there’s something about everybody kind of rooting for each other and all of that, that’s fantastic. But back to the journaling, you can create a wisdom circle of the women you admire most or the men that have women you admire most.Actually I have a process that I put people through and I’ll just tell you how to do this. But make a list of the people you most admire in the world who just spark admiration in you. That just kind of light you up inside. And make a list of those people and leave a little room next to each name. And then next to each name, write down their qualities and characteristics that are what you admire, you know, that brought you to them, that spark you, and then look at those qualities and realize that those are your values. That’s you, those are aspects of your values that you resonate to and I would recommend that you create a wisdom circle in your own imagination and on paper of those people. So that you’re sitting at a round table and maybe you’ve got Oprah there and the Dolly Llama and Mother Theresa. I mean, I don’t know who your people are, but then when you are having an idea, you can say, I’m thinking of doing this specific thing, what do you think? And let each one listen. I don’t know if you’re really communicating with them, but you are communicating with their essence and you can get the best information about the way to move forward or have an insight about why maybe this isn’t really what you wanna do at all. But I mean, I think that we can access all sorts of wisdom circles in our own mind, if not in person.
Sharri Harmel: I love that. So talk about the wisdom circles that you’re creating. What is this ?
Diana Wentworth: Well this is called Encore wisdom circles and I have a partner named Robin Mullen and the website isn’t officially up yet. This isn’t something that we just throw out to everybody in the world. I mean, I do coaching where I can, I work with people individually, but these wisdom circles, basically, we’re going through people that we know who are or have been masterful in some way in their life. They’ve already achieved some sort of accomplishment that they love and that they identify with. Then we invite them to come into this nine month program where it’s almost like three trimesters of inception to birth where we actually together, all of us brainstorm and come up with the encores that these people have inside of them but hadn’t thought of yet. And man, I tell you, it is so stimulating to do. To do this work and to watch the women and people enjoy. We’re just doing it for women right now, you know, I don’t have anything against men. I had two of the best husbands in the whole world and I love men. I have had a lot of men advisors in my life who’ve really helped me but I just like the idea of bringing forth something in people that they’ve not recognized in themselves yet.
Sharri Harmel: I think that’s quite interesting to do even with on a local level with people who you trust. Yeah. It might be women, it might be men, it might be a mix, but certainly women that you, or people that you trust that know, who truly know you and say, What’s next? What do you see? It’s almost a, you know, designing your life kind of exercise. How bizarre can it be? What could I do that I might be not be thinking about because often we think very in a linear fashion. I’m here, I’m here. So I can only do this. I can only do that. And what you’re saying is the wisdom circle.
Diana Wentworth: If that trust is present, it allows all kinds of crazy magical ideas arise in that environment. It’s true. And one thing about the Inside Edge that was fun. We would do the morning meetings. We met weekly but the members themselves were so vibrant that they started inventing sub edges. And one of them was called the business edge. So they would meet at someone’s home and you could be in the spotlight, bring your business there and everybody in the room would be brainstorming with you about your business and maybe things you hadn’t thought of or ways that they could support. And I think that’s why it grew so quickly. There was so much selflessness in wanting. Everybody was there to succeed. We had a film edge where we showed really conscious movies. We had a men’s edge, they called it the Razor’s edge and they would pretend to be on Harley’s and make their announcements. I mean it was a very crazy vibrant place.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. And you did that with your first husband, correct?
Diana Wentworth: Yes. He passed away four years into it and he was fabulous. He loved to make the room happen and run the sound and everything. He didn’t so much like to be in the spotlight. And luckily, I could choose different people to be the MC and we were just making it up all the time. It was a blast.
Sharri Harmel: So how, how much of it do you think could be replicated online? Because it, you know, geographically, you were in a phenomenal creative hub of the United States and obviously had some great people to pull upon to join the group. How could you, how could you do this? Do you think it works online?
Diana Wentworth: The difference is that in those days, if you wanted to hear Wayne Dyer, I mean, he was somebody, I just wrote him a letter and asked him to be on the board of Inside Edge. And he says, count me in, you know, I mean, he didn’t know me from Adam. But if you wanted to go hear him or somebody else, you had to go somewhere, right. You had to actually physically buy a ticket and be present somewhere. And now you can go on YouTube. You can put in, Art Toley or anybody else, and there’s an incredible amount of content. So I noticed that even with Zuko, he’s Oprah’s favorite counselor, we didn’t have that big of an audience because you can see him all sorts of other places and maybe you don’t have to pay for it. And I think there’s something about being in the presence of people where you can hug and you can just hang out and let serendipity take place. You know, I mean, I think there’s so much structure in a zoom meeting. It’s being run in a certain way and you might be in a breakout room with somebody, right. But you can’t just all of a sudden have somebody pull you by the arm and go off and have a conversation. So I’m not sure that it’s replicable in that way. It certainly was great and it served its purpose fantastically.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. So also, I hear throughout your conversation and your sharing, which thank you so much for all of this, is the importance of who you surround yourself with, the people you surround yourself with. Can you talk a little bit about that and how possibly at times you had to recalibrate who you were spending your time with or who you were allowing into your life?
Diana Wentworth: Yeah. One great thing I noticed that a friend, I run a circle in person out here in Palm Springs called Expect Magic. And I noticed that one of the women had on like this purple bracelet and she said that she had just read a book called A Complaint Free World and that she was making a decision and a commitment to not complain at all. And if she did complain, she would take this bracelet off and put it on the other hand. And I love this concept because I remember Paul saying to me, when we were first married, I was such a kid. I was only 22 and I was complaining about something. And he called me kitten. He said, kitten, never complain. It doesn’t change anything. And it makes everyone around you feel awful. That just kept me in my heart. You know, it was like, yeah so I have a sign up here right here, it’s got that circle with an X through it. And this complaining, this is a complaint free zone. So if somebody comes to my desk and they have a problem, I make them leave. I take them somewhere else. I said, no, this is a complaint free zone. I think that those are the people we want around us. We want the people who really sense that everything that happens no matter what is for our good and for furthering our life in the right direction. It might be a course correction, but this is something having lived as long as I have, I can look back at every tragedy and difficulty in my life as teaching me something amazing. And having me choose again in a new way. I do not, I cannot be around people who are negative. I’m sorry, it’s just not my company, not my job. This is probably inappropriate, I won’t name the country, but anyway, Paul used to say, let’s do the blank army retreat. I said, what’s that? He said they never turn their backs, they just back away. And every time you look at them, you’re smiling, but they’re backing out, you know, they’re just backing out. They’re not doing any damage. And I think that’s a really important thing. I love to surround myself with the most joyful, encouraging, empowering people and I have no tolerance, I mean I absolutely don’t have tolerance for people who will not get out of com of just will always meet.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. So that means you’re not on social media?
Diana Wentworth: I’m on. That’s one thing I understand. I can’t say that Instagram is my skill at all, but I love Facebook. I love posting on Facebook and finding all sorts of fun memes and digging up old pictures and stuff like that. And I love to read about other people. It’s a fun way to stay connected.
Sharri Harmel: But that’s important because I do hear a number of clients of mine who talk about how, if they will go down the social media hole and social media can be incredibly negative. Monitoring, that’s what I’m hearing you say is monitoring your own. What am I engaging with? Who am I engaging with?
Diana Wentworth: I would just unfollow anybody that’s, you know, spouting political hatred or anything else, you know. I have no interest in it. I don’t even wanna see it come up.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. But, that’s important, not just for sense of oh, I don’t know happiness, but also your wellbeing or your ability to go forward. Because those synchronicities you talked about throughout today’s conversation happen because of positive events, or of positive conversations, like whining or not complaining?
Diana Wentworth: Well, another secret of mine really is what I call quintessential questions. So I wake up in the morning, I get back in bed with my earphones on and I really ask questions that I want the answer to. So where is the most joy to be found today? And think about the feeling that you wanna experience joy being the highest vibration. How are you encouraging that to come into your life? So are you asking for it, are you wanting some insights about where that can exist? I always start the day that, you know, where’s the most joy to be found today. What steps can I take that will be life enhancing for everyone around me? You know, these kind of open ended questions that can give direction. I think that’s the mindset that I want to live in always. Before your feet hit the ground in the morning.
Sharri Harmel: You’ve set it all up, so right. You know, first make your bed should have been written a little bit differently, right? So in closing today, who would you, if you were to have your own created advisory board, that is, you know, people maybe who were not even on this earth anymore, but people have been influential in humankind who would be in your circle? Who would you love to have?
Diana Wentworth: Obviously Oprah would, I think she has done so much to open our eyes to our power and our, you know, she’s been an amazing force in the world.
Sharri Harmel: Your advisory board. I want you to focus in on you.
Diana Wentworth: Well, Oprah for sure. I often talk to Louise Hay, who was a close friend. Amazing what she did. I went to a birthday party and we weren’t supposed to bring presents. And I said, but I really wanna give you something. What can I give you that you would like? She says, I wanna come and stay with you. So she came and stayed and that was fabulous. You know, I just would choose Wayne Dyer. I think he was somebody that always uplifted me. There’s a new book The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. He wrote a follow up book to the Untethered Soul called Living Untethered. Oh my. So he would really be there. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, I may not need to read another book. What he just wrote, what he just published is so amazing, and answered just about every question and gives me the work to do that. I need to clear all of my old wounds and things that cause me to make bad decisions and to process those in a way that I never saw before. So definitely him. I guess I’d have to think more about it. I don’t currently have like this inner wisdom circle and it changes from year to year, really, as far as where you feel that you are in your own path.
Sharri Harmel: But that’s good thoughts, you know, from the perspective, both of what can I use today as well as today and in this short time period, cuz sometimes we, how do I wanna say it, kind of what keeps us from moving forward is it has to be big or it has to be, you know, 10 years or 20 years out or whatever. That’s too far for most of us. I don’t care if you’re 30 or you’re, you know, 60 it’s too far out. But that five year frame, what do I need now to get to even that idea of who am I gonna be in five years? Who do I want to be? Like your question, the five year question, which I love. Who are the advisors I need to help me to embrace that woman?
Diana Wentworth:. Right. I know Gary Zuko talks about aligning the personality with the soul and in my keynote the other day, I thought, well, what if this were a Ted Talk, if this were my last statement, what would I wanna say in 20 minutes? And I thought, okay, I would wanna give the three most valuable lessons I’d learned and I would wanna share what I think is the meaning of life. And I’m telling you, you could hear a pin drop.
Sharri Harmel: Can you share?
Diana Wentworth: Yeah, I think aligning and the funny thing that I did on stage was I would notice myself moving into my persona. And then I would tell them about this. I said, no, no, that’s my persona. And then I would go over here and I would go into my soul. So I would be going from ego to essence all the time visibly for them, because I do think that’s the most valuable work we can do. Tuning into what our true nature is and our true essence. So I’ll try to go through this really fast. Number one, I already told you about asking, that was number one. Number two was expect magic and I went through a variety of different things that we talked about here, but about living in that expectancy of good and empowerment and having that, you know, what’s next for yourself. And then I talked about Encore and having expanding your idea of what kind of a legacy you can leave in the world. And I talked a little bit about that, and then I told a story at the end about the meaning of life. And, you know, there used to be a cartoon when I was a kid that we would laugh at. Somebody would crawl up to this guru and ask the meaning of life. And we thought that was the most hysterical thing, because how does anybody ever put that into words? But there was a time when Paul and I were attending a seminar, we went to lots of self growth seminars and they were doing that question that I think other people do too, of what do you want? And then when you have that, what will you have? What do you want? And you’re digging deeper. It’s almost like a trap door question where you have to keep going until you finally get to the place of what you want. And one thing that we learned through that, that what we want is not financial security or anything. What we want is a feeling, a lasting feeling of some kind, and we kept doing it and doing it. And I remember the moment when we were getting close to the end. And when we got our answer and I remember crawling into his lap and we had our arms around each other and we had arrived at what we felt was what we want. And that was shared love and shared love to me is the essence of the meaning of life. That just says it for me. And I always want that feeling. Every decision I make is based on cultivating that feeling and being of value to each other. It’s just what works for me
Sharri Harmel: Yeah. Operate in a place of shared love. And now all of a sudden we have the ability, I’m assuming if I’m thinking right processing, what shared of compassion and vulnerability and all of these kind of emotions that make us loving humans.
Diana Wentworth: Yeah. And just being as pure as we possibly can be. I’m going to be doing a keynote in September at something called The Love Event in Florida. And hopefully it’ll fill and people will show up and it’ll be one of these hybrid events where people can be on Zoom as well. But I really want it to be all about that shared love and what can be cultivated through that.
Sharri Harmel: That’s beautiful.
Diana Wentworth: So it’s the love event.com and they have something up right now about it in September.
Sharri Harmel: Wonderful. Well, you are a loving, giving, forward thinking woman. I truly, I’m blessed to have crossed paths with you. I’m so appreciative and the listeners, because you just shared so many things that honestly, we all need to get quiet to think about a little bit and think about how that might shift or pivot in some ways the choices we make and the life we’re choosing to live and the way we’re choosing to live, to look at ourselves.
Diana Wentworth: Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that. It’s so great that I get to talk about these things.
Sharri Harmel: Yeah, very much so. Thank you, Thank you Diana.
Diana Wentworth: Thank you.
Sharri Harmel: Thank you, everyone for joining us today. So many amazing nuggets of wisdom, right? That if you’re like me, might have given you pause to think about and to kind of make some changes in your own life. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to step into my five years from now plan. I hope you do too. And ask those mindset shifting questions that Diana mentioned before I get out of bed in the morning. If you liked this conversation, please press the like button, subscribe and share this podcast to other extraordinary women like you, who you might think would enjoy this conversation. And join our community of truly extraordinary women. We might seem to be a group of just average kind of gals, but we are doing extraordinary things and isn’t that the key to creating a magical and a purposeful life. So I hope you join us. Take good care. And as I say, in Paris, À bientôt.
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