LoVERDE, Mary

PERSONAL:

Female; married; husband's name Joe; children: Sarah, Emily, Nicholas.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Aurora, CO. Office—Life Balance, Inc., 25066 E. Plymouth Circle, Aurora, CO 80016; fax: 303-766-9066. E-mail—connect597@aol.com.

CAREER:

Author, consultant, and inspirational speaker. University of Colorado School of Medicine, Boulder, CO, faculty member, director of Hypertension Research Center; Life Balance, Inc., Aurora, CO, founder and president. Camp to Belong, Highlands Ranch, CO, national spokesperson.

WRITINGS:

Stop Screaming at the Microwave! How to Connect Your Disconnected Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

Touching Tomorrow: How to Interview Your Loved Ones to Capture a Lifetime of Memories on Video or Audio, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

I Used to Have a Handle on Life but It Broke: Six Power Solutions for Women with Too Much to Do, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Overwhelmed by responsibilities at home and a demanding job directing the Hypertension Research Center, Mary LoVerde was intimately familiar with stress. To cope, she turned to the tried-and-true methods of business self-help books: time management, delegating, and simplifying. Nothing really seemed to work, and one day while screaming at the kids that she needed quiet while she tried to finish yet another article on her home computer, LoVerde had a revelation: in trying to become a "superperson" she had become disconnected from the people and things that mattered most to her. There and then she adopted a new motto: When you can't keep up, connect. That simple mantra changed her life and became the starting point of Life Balance, Inc., a company that LoVerde founded to help spread the message of the Connection Solution.

In Stop Screaming at the Microwave! How to Connect Your Disconnected Life, LoVerde explains her system for managing a seemingly unmanageable life. "As LoVerde makes clear, the key to finding balance and fulfillment is not doing more, but honing in on what truly counts," explained an Adolescence contributor. She emphasizes the need for establishing clear boundaries both at home and at work, so that constant interruptions cease to be a problem, and the truly important aspects of life have a chance to flourish. Throughout the book, LoVerde provides tips and hints for rekindling romance, nurturing children, and remaining close to aging parents. LoVerde "confidently and casually expounds her theory" of the good life, as a Publishers Weekly reviewer put it, and provides a method for reaching it, including simple questions to ask yourself about what's important, microactions you can take toward your goals, and clever ideas like a Memory Jar of notes on the important moments in life, which can be a nice gift for a parent or simply a reminder of what is truly important. LoVerde followed up with Touching Tomorrow: How to Interview Your Loved Ones to Capture a Lifetime of Memories on Video or Audio. Here, she expands the Memory Jar idea to the entire family, offering suggestions for getting parents, siblings, and grandparents to open up about their memories, their dreams, and their hopes. In I Used to Have a Handle on Life but It Broke: Six Power Solutions for Women with Too Much to Do, LoVerde provides further advice on bringing balance into your life, with a good dose of humor to make her points.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Adolescence, winter, 1999, review of Stop Screaming at the Microwave! How to Connect Your Disconnected Life, p. 808.

Air Cargo World, February, 2000, profile of Mary LoVerde, p. 42.

Publishers Weekly, August, 24, 1998, review of Stop Screaming at the Microwave!, p. 41; May 29, 2000, review of Touching Tomorrow: How to Interview Your Loved Ones to Capture a Lifetime of Memories on Video or Audio, p. 74; February 25, 2002, review of I Used to Have a Handle on Life but It Broke: Six Power Solutions for Women with Too Much to Do, p. 55.