Karen Salmansohn is a self-help book author and designer with approximately two million books sold nationally and internationally. She is the founder of notsalmon.com, a personal development site, which offers books and video courses on topics including anxiety, toxic people, emotional eating, relationships, meditation, and happiness. Her website also includes many of her viral quote posters that she writes and designs.
Salmansohn was formerly a senior VP ad creative director (at age 26) who left her job to pursue writing. She has been profiled in the NY Times, Business Week, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Magazine, ELLE, Marie Claire, and Fast Company. She also appeared in television shows and was a regular lifestyle reporter for Fox TV. [1] [2] [3]
From 2005-2008 Salmansohn offered monthly seminars at THE SOHO HOUSE in New York City where she lives. In 2007-2008, she had her own SIRIUS radio show called Be Happy Dammit, inspired by the title of her best-selling book. She gave a Tedx Talk titled "Fun is a High Performance Fuel." She also gives seminars nationally (at places like NAWBO, Gen Art, and Media Bistro) and internationally (in Canada, Germany, and elsewhere).[ citation needed ]
She is a regular columnist for Oprah, CNN, Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and MSN. She also wrote a career column for amNY, one of New York's largest newspapers, called "The 1 Minute Career Therapist". [4] She is a relationship expert for msn.com, match.com and Lifetime TV and had previously been a career coach for AOL (alongside Tom Peters and Brian Tracey). She has nearly 40 books, five TV development deals, two film deals, and one perfume named "Unavailable: it's more than a perfume, it's a philosophy." [5]
She is most known for her self-help books — like the titles How To Be Happy, Dammit, Think Happy, Life is Long, Prince Harming Syndrome, Instant Happy, Friends Forever, and The Bounce Back Book. On her website, she describes her books as being "self help for people who would never be caught dead reading self-help books" or "self-help books you can give as a gift and not get slapped because they look kinda cool".[ citation needed ]
Her most recent books are: Listen To Your Heart Journal, Happy Habits, Instant Calm. And Karen Salmansohn is publishing a new book in the summer of 2025 about the benefits of mortality awareness - and reverse engineering your life with the ends in mind. You can read about it here: https://mortalityaware.com/
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington is a Greek American author, syndicated columnist and businesswoman. She is a co-founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books. She has been named to Time magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list.
Caroline Myss is an American author of 10 books and many audio recordings about mysticism and wellness. She is most well known for publishing Anatomy of the Spirit (1996). She also co-published The Creation of Health with Dr C Norman Shealy MD - ex Harvard professor of neurology. Her most recent book, Archetypes: Who Are You? was published in 2013. Myss describes herself as a medical intuitive and a mystic.
Wayne Walter Dyer was an American self-help author and a motivational speaker. Dyer completed a Ed.D. in guidance and counseling at Wayne State University in 1970. Early in his career, he worked as a high school guidance counselor, and went on to run a successful private therapy practice. He became a popular professor of counselor education at St. John's University, where he was approached by a literary agent to put his ideas into book form. The result was his first book, Your Erroneous Zones (1976), one of the best-selling books of all time, with an estimated 100 million copies sold. This launched Dyer's career as a motivational speaker and self-help author, during which he published 20 more best-selling books and produced a number of popular specials for PBS. Influenced by thinkers such as Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis, Dyer's early work focused on psychological themes such as motivation, self actualization and assertiveness. By the 1990s, the focus of his work had shifted to spirituality. Inspired by Swami Muktananda and New Thought, he promoted themes such as the "power of intention," collaborated with alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra on a number of projects, and was a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Martha Nibley Beck is an American author, life coach, speaker, and sociologist.
James Christopher Frey is an American writer and businessman. His first two books, A Million Little Pieces (2003) and My Friend Leonard (2005), were bestsellers marketed as memoirs. Large parts of the stories were later found to be exaggerated or fabricated, sparking a media controversy. His 2008 novel Bright Shiny Morning was also a bestseller.
Sharon Salzberg is an author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practice in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanā (insight) and mettā (loving-kindness) methods, and she has been leading meditation retreats around the world for several decades.
Byron Kathleen Mitchell, better known as Byron Katie, is an American speaker and author who teaches a method of self-inquiry known as "The Work of Byron Katie" or simply as "The Work". She is the founder of Byron Katie International, an organization that includes the School for the Work and Turnaround House in Ojai, California. Time magazine describes her as "a spiritual innovator for the 21st century."
Feminine psychology or the psychology of women is an approach that focuses on social, economic, and political issues confronting women all throughout their lives. It emerged as a reaction to male-dominated developmental theories such as Sigmund Freud's view of female sexuality. The original work of Karen Horney argued that male realities cannot describe female psychology or define their gender because they are not informed by girls' or women's experiences. Theorists, like Horney, claimed this new feminist approach of women's experiences being different than men's was required, and that women's social existence was crucial in understanding their psychology. It is suggested in Dr. Carol Gilligan's research that some characteristics of female psychology emerge to comply with the given social order defined by men and not necessarily because it is the nature of their gender or psychology.
Victoria Moran is an American author and speaker. She has written a number of books specializing in both spirituality and veganism. Moran hosts the "Main Street Vegan" radio show and podcast on Unity Online Radio.
Kathy Freston is an American author and promoter of plant-based nutrition. Her books include The Lean, Veganist, Quantum Wellness, Clean Protein and 72 Reasons to Be Vegan.
Paul Wilson is an Australian meditation teacher, columnist, and author of two novels and 19 self-help and spiritually-oriented books, including The Calm Technique, Instant Calm, The Little Book of Calm, Calm at Work, The Little Book of Calm at Work, Calm for Life, The Complete Book of Calm, Perfect Balance, The Quiet, A Piece of the Quiet and "Calm, No Matter What" – mostly around the topic of finding peace of mind in everyday life. Because so many of these books had 'calm' in the title, the Times (UK) nicknamed him The Guru of Calm.
Valorie Burton is a life coach, author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute (CaPP).
Samara O'Shea is an American author, blogger, and professional letter writer.
Oprah Gail Winfrey, known mononymously as Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
Olivia Mellan, was an American therapist and consultant, specialized in money conflict resolution. Since 1982, she has been a leader in the field of money psychology. She is the author or co-author of five books about money and relationships. She is also a monthly columnist for Investment Advisor magazine. She has been interviewed frequently on The TODAY Show, Oprah, and ABC's 20-20, as well as on nationwide TV, radio and in the print media. In 2006, Investment Advisor magazine named her one of the Top 25 – those leaders who had the most influence on the financial advisor industry.
Dr. Gail Saltz is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, columnist, and television commentator. Saltz is the author of several self-help and psychology books, including Anatomy of a Secret Life: The Psychology of Living a Lie (2006) and The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorder and Genius (2017).
Vicki Lee Lansky was an American author and publisher, best known for her cookbook Feed Me I'm Yours.
Susan Horowitz Cain is an American writer and lecturer.
Debbie Ford was an American self-help author, coach, lecturer and teacher, most known for The New York Times best-selling book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers (1998), which aimed to help readers overcome their shadow side with the help of modern psychology and spiritual practices. In following years, she went on to write eight more books including Spiritual Divorce, Why Good People Do Bad Things, and The 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse, which have sold over 1 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. She led workshops on "Shadow Process" and hosted TV and radio shows, and also established the "Ford Institute for Transformational Training".
Emma Johnson is an American journalist, blogger, author, shared parenting activist, and media personality. She is best known for her blog Wealthysinglemommy.