About once a year since I moved to London someone will ask me if I know Allison Graham. When I say I don’t, they’re always surprised. Everyone knows Allison Graham! And if they don’t yet, they will once her new book gets around.
I’m deliberately leaving the title until later, so please be patient!
Graham’s a sales expert who advises businesses and grows them. She’s a keynote speaker, a coach, consultant, trainer, and writer. She ran for the Ontario PCs in London West shortly before my move from Toronto. She has been nearly inexhaustible in activism, volunteerism and serving on boards, fundraising – she’s who they mean in the old adage: if you want something done, get a busy person to do it. She’s a dynamo.
But what most people didn’t know is that for the past decade, she’s been working through excruciating pain from a botched surgery (and failed follow-up surgery) as well as an almost unbelievable string of deaths of people close to her and other fairly major incidents. Through it all her business experienced tremendous growth and she mostly kept pushing through the pain, hidden from everyone. Chronic pain is debilitating and consumes your life. This is one strong woman.
These experiences form the basis of her formula to become a Resiliency Ninja. She’s not perfect. She made personal and professional mistakes but learned a lot along the way and developed practical methods for facing the world when everything turns to crap. Part cognitive therapy, part personal journey, her experiences are life-affirming. She shows that behind the veneer of success, money and being a big fish in this city’s pond, there can be a lot of tragedy and heartache.
I love the way she writes. There isn’t a whiff of a “poor me” attitude but she still digs into what it means to feel defeated and worn out from trying to put on the big show every day, whether it’s for clients, friends or family. Choking back reality doesn’t always work and sometimes it backfires in a spectacular way. It takes guts to reveal a truth that so many don’t want to admit: everybody deals with crap, some more than others, but somehow we get on with it. This is Allison’s “somehow” and it’s an enjoyable, life-affirming read that’s more practical than your average self-help book.
Now, about the title. You’re guessing Resiliency Ninja, right? That would have been my choice. But in a world of a million self-help books, Allison wanted to stand out. Two decisions she made out of necessity form the basis for the title, Married My Mother, Birthed a Dog. The first, was having her Mom move in with her to be her chauffeur and caregiver at the zenith of her pain struggle. It became a joke among her friends with spouses that she “married” her Mom. The dog, Winston, is her number one pal and like a fur-baby, she also jokes that she “birthed” him. See past the title, like I did, and you’ll find the resiliency ninja revealed within!