Barbara Sher
August 14, 1935 – May 10, 2020

Barbara Sher left us on May 10, 2020. She always reminded us that Isolation is the Dreamkiller. Almost a decade ago, Barbara began preparing for a time when she could no longer gather people together around her. She wanted to leave us with programs that would bring you and other dreamers and Scanners together to do all the things we love. These remain, led by people she trained to carry on for her, in Barbara’s Club and Sher Success Teams, where Barbara will continue to speak to us for many years to come.
 
 
 
From Barbara’s son, Matthew Pearl:

Bonn, Germany
13 May 2020

Our mother, Barbara Sher, died last Sunday. She was one of the great thinkers of our time. She would have been 85 this August 14th.

She was born in Depression-era Detroit. Her parents, like many of their generation, lived in fear and believed that the American Dream would equally apply to all and protect them from the horrors of past generations in Europe.

Mom had other plans: she moved to 1960s New York and raised two little boys by herself, starting on welfare and doing social work to feed us. She knew that dreams are fragile and can easily go to their graves with their unfulfilled dreamers, unless they are nurtured and supported by others (“Isolation is the Dream Killer”).

She decided to stop allowing the people who came to see her for counseling to dwell in the rooms of their past—the going trend—and instead to focus on realizing their wishes. (She used our last money to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times in the late 1970s that read, “Realizing your dreams can be more therapeutic than analyzing them.” The giant photo of herself in the ad was beautiful and powerful. Mom was neither self-absorbed nor vain, rather fully engaged in every moment, especially when it came to Danny and me.

Barbara Sher wrote, “What you love is what you are gifted at, there is NO exception.”

She taught the world this simple truth:

We were put on this earth to do more than use up natural resources. You are here to do what you are—not what your parents thought you should be—and you owe your gifts to the rest of us for the gift of being alive. We need the LOVE you feel when you are using your talents, as if all our lives depended on it (which they do, now more than ever).

At every one of the many retreats she and I ran together, she would say, often with tears in her eyes, “One of the saddest things I have ever heard is, ‘most of us will go to our graves with our music still in us.’” Mom did not. She did not believe that anyone, regardless of where they came from, should be forced to dream for small things. What she loved what was she was gifted at, and the world is a better place because of what she brought to the party.

Rest in Peace, Mama
I love you,
Bunny
 
 
 
From Barbara’s business partner, Patty Newbold:

It is with great sadness that I report to you Barbara Sher’s passing on Sunday, May 10, 2020, of natural causes. Please know that Barbara cared deeply about your dreams and your unique genius. She spent the last decade preparing for this eventuality by creating Hanging Out, the Survival Guide for Dreamers, her Book Clubs, her Idea Party and WriteSpeak and by preparing coaches and Success Teams leaders and WriteSpeak coaches and Book Club guides to carry on her work. She wanted to be sure you will have even more of her thinking than she could share in her many books, as well as people she trusted to assist you.

Barbara would remind you in this time of awful changes due to the pandemic that “Isolation is the Dreamkiller, not your lousy attitude.” Please share your wishes, your plans, your obstacles with other people, especially now. Barbara and I could not visit each other since March 11th, due to Covid-19 security measures, but as recently as Tuesday, we were discussing her latest Barbara’s Club project — and her craving for peanut butter and strawberry jam — by WhatsApp.

Barbara Sher, editing her Survival Guide for Dreamers in her living room
Credit: Jennifer Blair, NYC, 2017

Barbara was a middle child. She would have turned 85 on August 14th this year. After spending her preschool years in Detroit (where one of her relatives ran a speakeasy), her family moved to Los Angeles, where her parents, Sam and Nettie, ran a bar. After finishing high school, Barbara discovered the fascinating assortment of people to meet and subjects to study at UC Berkeley in the 1950s. She wanted to major in math at first, but she switched to anthropology, which allowed her more variety in her studies and fewer tortured homework sessions.

She married and divorced twice. In between, she found herself a single mom with two young children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She loved New York City, but life was hard. I’ll let her tell you, in the words from her TEDx talk (I really hope you are among the almost 2.5 million people who have watched it):

When I was about 36, I had just gotten through a very bad year. I’d gotten a divorce, I had no money, I was in New York City, I had two very small children. I couldn’t get a daycare center, so I couldn’t take a job. We stayed in welfare hotels in New York; that’s worth writing a novel about. They have cockroaches, so I would tell the kids, we could name the cockroaches, and we played “early computer games” with cockroaches on the wall.

But we got a daycare center, I got a job, we got an apartment, and the kids were in school. And I was washing dishes when I was 36, and I thought, “By God, we made it.” The kids were great, I cried a lot, but we did it. We did it, that’s good, I’m proud of myself.

And then I had another thought. I thought, “Is this it? Is that what I get? Is my gravestone going to say, “Her house was frequently clean for very brief periods of time?”

It was still the era when the truly interesting jobs were almost all in the Help Wanted – Male column of the newspaper. She found one on her own, running confrontational encounter groups for a psychiatrist. In Barbara’s words:

I was in the group and he said, “You’re hired; you can be a leader.” Because I was good at it; in my family, we always hollered at each other. And it was a natural ability, I didn’t think much of it, and I had groups every night after work.

Then one day, working in a group with a longtime, challenging client she calls Ronnie (you’ve probably heard her tell his story), Barbara discovered something that worked a lot faster and better: Success Teams. Working together toward our dreams. Asking for help with obstacles. Holding each other accountable. Wanting each other’s success even more than our own. Pitching in where our talents could help another person get what they most wanted.

Barbara shared what was working in her very first book, Wishcraft. published in 1979. By the time the 30th Anniversary Edition was published in 2009, over a million copies had already been sold. More books followed: Teamworks! (the only one that’s out of print), I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (1994), Live the Life You Love (1996), It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now (1998), Barbara Sher’s Idea Book (2003) and Refuse to Choose! (2006).

Over the years, Barbara’s books have been translated into many other languages. Most recently, those in Russia and Eastern Europe, where people are now able to start their own businesses, have joined her millions of fans worldwide.

Barbara quickly became an in-demand speaker at corporations and conferences, a PBS pledge-week star, one of Oprah’s favorite guests of the entire year Barbara appeared on the show. She had never even heard of speaker as a career, but she nailed it, giving millions of people new hope and practical tools for making their craziest wishes come true. Barbara was one of the first life coaches, doing private sessions with many lucky people over the years. In 2006, she began running retreats in Europe and the US, starting with a Scanner Retreat on the island of Corfu.

Barbara Sher, outdoors at retreat, thinking
Credit: Tammy Garver, Corfu, 2006

Throughout all of this, Barbara fought back against numerous awful health issues, bouncing back again and again. She wrote I Could Do Anything while dealing with breast cancer and the threat of not finishing the book in time. She still wrote such an important, life-changing book that it made the New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2007, Barbara launched her WriteSpeak program, to help others with a message get their books and workshops created and promoted. She taught her last WriteSpeak Teleworkshops in March of this year, but we had already compiled enough recordings from earlier WriteSpeak classes that when she had to miss one of them, things went on just fine. From 2010 to 2014, Barbara taught a bunch of great people to use her life coaching methods.

In 2011, Barbara began a project that she had long dreamed of, called Hanging Out. She stepped back from her usual practical methods — and her focus on going after dreams — to invite us to just explore who we are and what delights us. Hanging Out launched in April of 2012, and it will continue as long as there are people who want to peel away a few more layers of resistance to uncover new interests and dreams. In 2014, her online Book Clubs began, a chance to do the exercises in her books with lots of support and company.

Throughout all this, Barbara had other hobbies, like any good Scanner. She was fascinated by the Silk Road and even built herself a model of its geography. She bought a farm in the Catskills and grew apples and chickens and fresh vegetables, nestled among dairy farms, with sunsets to die for. She bought a cave house in Turkey and invented what she called “plop philanthropy” — just plop yourself wherever you are and help. She created a place where women could learn the traditional weaving techniques of the region and gave them laptops and helped them set up a non-profit to sell their hand-loomed rugs. She discovered Usenet and The Source and the internet and kept finding new ways to connect people. She taught herself to paint by copying and recopying her favorite painting until she could reproduce it.

Barbara Sher and her dog Buddy by Mindy Stricke
Credit: Mindy Stricke

Barbara’s love extended to a number of dogs who were family to her and lived and traveled with her throughout her life, including Fipo, rescued in Greece, and Buddy, a tiny rescued Yorkie.

Many of you have written to Barbara about your dreams, your relief at discovering her books, or the ways in which she changed your life. She has boxes and boxes of these letters and many folders full of emails on her laptop, too. Your letters meant the world to her. She felt so connected to you. She wanted so much for you. Jennifer Blair, who was her co-author and editor for the Survival Guide for Dreamers, reminded me today that she dedicated the Guide to Eleanor F, “who sent me this letter many years ago and whose voice is always in my mind when I write my books.”

This is Eleanor’s letter:

“Dear Barbara,

Thank you. Although your book may have come too late for me (I’m 74). Why did it take me so long to find your book? Why didn’t I hear about it? I wish I knew. It should be required reading in our schools. Kindergarteners should know parts of it, and it should be part of teacher education. It should be required reading for every expectant parent, or a hand-out in every gynecologist’s office.

I could have been an architect, an interior decorator, a health care professional, a writer, a linguist, a world traveler and an instigator of individual cultural preservation around the world. I could have had a house which I designed high on a cliff overlooking any view of my own choosing! I could have been a member of the medical team on the ship HOPE! I could have had my own wild animal preserve in Africa, devoting my life to care and preservation.

When I longed to enter a nurse’s training after high school, it was forbidden by my stern but caring parents. “You’ll have to see male body parts, and that’s unlady-like” I was told. So I remained a “lady” and sold flowers in flower shops, worked as a sales girl in other stores, was a typist, a “secretary,” a file clerk.

I’m still trying. I’m half-way through my first novel, but I’m acutely aware of what the odds are for a first novel.

Thank you again for your book. It kept me awake all night choosing my colors (yellow and purple), etc. etc. I still feel defeated, but I’m happier because I finally know why I was such a failure when I had such dreams -SUCH DREAMS!”

Do what you love! All of it. It is the heart of Barbara’s message to us. If you are looking for a way to honor her life as you grieve her passing today, that is the way to do it. And if you’re a Hanging Out member, maybe stick a twig of rosemary in your pocket to remind you.

Barbara leaves behind her two brothers, Arthur and Kenneth Sher; a talented and adventurous grandson she adored, Leo Sher; and two sons. Her firstborn, Danny Pearl, is a musician who cared for Barbara through a difficult illness last fall. Her younger son, Matthew Pearl, many of you know from WriteSpeak, her Scanner retreats in Europe, or from his skillful editing of Refuse to Choose!

We will miss her infectious enthusiasm, but Barbara’s work will continue. I (Patty Newbold) will continue to work online with the brilliant and talented team Barbara chose: Doret Jordaan, Tammy Garver, and Patrice Jenkins. Matthew Pearl and Gundrun Schwarzer will continue her work in Europe. And her many Success Teams leaders and Barbara Sher Coaches will continue her work all around the globe.

Barbara Sher, smiling, in a blue shirt, holding a book
Credit: Matthew Pearl, Saarbrucken, Germany, 2018

Let me leave you with a few great quotes from my very dear friend, Barbara.

“When you play it too safe, you’re taking the biggest risk of your life. Time is the only wealth we’re given.”

“Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren’t.”

“Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do — can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music.”

“The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.”

“You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning.”

Patty Newbold

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126 thoughts on “Barbara Sher
August 14, 1935 – May 10, 2020

  1. I just discovered Barbara today. I was at work watching her YouTube videos and I felt so free to hear that there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a 24 year old Scanner with so many ideas. “Time is the only wealth we’re given.” <3 how powerful! I can only imagine how difficult her loss was for her friends and family. Her legacy continues <3

    • Dear Vicki,
      good to read your comment. I just checked this Website toay, to remember Barbara, who died exactly one year ago now.
      Have you already found her book “Refuse to choose”? It is such a relief to read that there are more people like you – and that there are ways to deal with being a scanner 🙂
      love
      Astrid

  2. Thank you Mathew and Patty for your very thoughtful words in honour of Barbara Sher. I have not met Barbara in person; but I consider her my friend. Barbara had an undeniable intelligence that wowed me over and over again. Her ability to call to and speak to that truest place within my being, would lead me to ask myself very important questions about what I wanted for myself, and urged me to step toward my possible purposes for being on the planet. Fortunately, Barbara’s books and videos allow me and others to continue to experience her love and wisdom, at any time. Just as the words to the song “Daisy a Day” say, “I feel all her love walking with me, and I smile at the things she might say.”

  3. Thank you so much for this opportunity.. For years I had wanted to write to Barbara, and then when I went to search for a way to do so, I was faced with that door closed to me . In the early 1980s a friend pushed me to travel to Manhattan to spend time meeting Barbara. There was no charge, just her willingness and desire that new life be instilled in a new totally destroyed single mom of five. My friend and I read Wishcraft repeatedly until we breathed Its every word and followed daily its suggestions until I completed my necessary degree while caring for the 3-13 year olds, working part-time and maintaining our home in and out. Commenting on my weekly posted refrigerator calendar, my twelve year old said. “It’s the slow way to get everything done fast!” , words that capture the heart of Barbara’s message, and words I still use to push through my life’s obstacles to establish and work until I reach each of my dreams. She was and remains my blessing. As frequently as I have opportunities I shall continue to introduce her to others in need of supportive love.

  4. I just wandered by the site and found out about Barbara’s passing. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones to have had a private coaching session with Barbara. I can’t remember the exact date, but I do remember that it was a day or two before New Year’s Eve, probably in the early 2000’s. I made my way to her place in Manhattan, from my home in NJ. We talked about lots of different things. She was just as kind, cool, and brilliant in person as she was in her videos. Even though the session was scheduled for an hour, she must have spent close to three with me. Rest in Peace, Barbara and Thank you.

    -D

  5. Two days ago I suddenly discovered Barbara through TikTok, somebody mention her book. The moment I started to read about a Scanner idea and it hit me, in a positive way, that somebody helped me understand myself. I started to binge watch the video’s and bought book ( which will come in few days) and ebook ( cause I could not wait for the book, I need it now ;)). Founding out about her passing, did hit me pretty bad. I can not imagine the loss people felt who were so close to her. My deep condolences to family and friend’s of Barbara.
    Her passing away hit me like a passing of a friend I knew my wholelife. So weird even that I never met her in person. But in last two days she helped me understand myself and my life (I’m 32) and that is amazing.
    Barbara if you read it somewhere there, I THANK YOU! <3
    And thank you to everybody who is still going to continue the work of Barbara and share her message and knowladge she left for us <3 I'll do it as much as I can!

  6. I am so sorry to hear of Barbara’s passing. She really inspired me in her TED talk. Her wisdom was and is profound. She has changed me a little late in life, but never too late. She was one of a kind.

  7. I miss Barbara so much! We are quarantining since March and miss our friends, yoga classes, our family, the library…we miss people!
    We live in dread that perhaps we will not outlast the virus since we are both in our 80″s. Please help! Thank you.

  8. Hi, I recently rediscovered Wishcraft and feel ready to use the tools to reach my touchstone goal of recording and releasing an album with my band. The problem is, I don’t know what deadline to use because I can’t practice in person with my band right now because of the pandemic and I don’t know when it will be possible. In normal times I would have given myself until December 2021 to finish the album. I hope you can offer some advice.

  9. Thank you. I only wish I had had the courage to follow up when I first read Wishcraft so many years ago. I am now 78 and have depression and so regretful and now it is such a challenge to stay connected to people for so many reasons.

    Gloria Heywood

    • Fight the depression, Gloria. So many people have written to Barbara about going after their dreams at your age or older and not regretting it for a minute!

  10. Hi, I found Barbara’s Ted talk about isolation, rather than attitude, being the dream-killer several months ago. I loved it, but then, with other stressful things going on, I forgot her name and couldn’t find the talk again.
    Today, while googling a YouTube clip about Native American Indian leaders, what should I see but the very clip that I had, by now, forgotten I had lost.But it wouldn’t play, so I tried googling her name – of which I made careful mental note this time! It turned out that I chose to watch several other of her videos before getting to the one I was supposed to be wanting to watch.
    Strange that I should find the Are You A Scanner? clip when, only two weeks ago, maybe less, I had confessed to a friend my deepest fear – deeper, I had realised than my fear that I was bad (because deep down, I knew the person who had told me that was wrong, even though they got to me).
    My deepest fear is that I am predestined to become disenchanted with that which now enchants me.
    I actually thought Barbara had said “…if you’re a scammer..” in one video clip and was surprised that she sounded okay with that being true!! Then I saw the title of another clip, the Are You A Scanner? one, and thought, “Ohhhh, she said “scanner!”, but didn’t know what that was and decided to watch something else anyway.
    However, the clip I decided to watch involved Barbara doing a video late at night, I think, because she couldn’t contain herself. She was reading back an online conversation between her and a blogger(?) called NowIKnow, in which he was talking about the changes to his life that happened after he realised that he was a scanner. He said something that sounded like me and I suddenly got curious about the other video. My confession popped into my head immediately.
    Anyway, long story short, I have just filled one side of A4 paper with my crazy scanner dreams! A couple of them aren’t career dreams, but I was on a roll, so stuff spilled over! Here they unashamedly are:

    I want to write a beautiful book.
    I want to record people’s stories and dreams.
    I want to help kids and adults with maths anxiety. (I’m from the UK – we say maths 🙂 )
    I want to be an art therapist.
    I want to write a song and hear it set to music and sung.
    I want to make marbles and work with stained glass.
    I want to be a bubble magician.
    I want to rescue seals and play harp music for them.
    I want to help people who suffer from facial differences/facial trauma.
    I want to be a clown doctor and make people smile through whimsy and wonder.
    I want to work with animals – especially birds – to help people with anorexia learn better ways to feel weightless.
    I want to nourish people with food that is hearty and made with love.
    I want to bring together, therapeutically, girls who need dads with fathers who have lost daughters.
    I want to open a puzzle parlour.
    I want to work with angels.
    I want to open a skirt shop for spiritual mermaids who have earned their legs, and put the dull, boring, so-not-me skirt I hid in for years in a display cabinet on the wall! As a warning!
    I want to fly owls.
    I want to be Mary Poppins and turn up where I’m needed. Or Willy Wonka! No – AND Willy Wonka!
    I want to re-awaken people’s sense of child-like wonder.
    I want to help people to develop an instinct for numbers – on a boat called The Floating Decimal!
    I want to be a story-teller.
    I want to teach people who absolutely can’t have sex that real, deep, physical, sexual and spiritual connection is still absolutely possible for them.
    I want to come out of nowhere to win a race, with an aerial consort of crows that swoop and whirl around me as I approach the finish line!
    I want to sit up all night, stroking and cradling abandoned animals that just need some love, even the ones I know won’t make it.

    The above list is chock full of me-ness, and I am so not ashamed of it. I am just going to revel in that and I wish Barbara could have read it, but maybe, through those who carry on her work, she will still read it and smile. 🙂
    I’m 50 now, and it isn’t difficult to think of obstacles – age, lack of money, lack of confidence, zero experience, don’t cook, can’t play the harp (or any other musical instrument!), the little problem of a pandemic…
    But last night, the little problem of a pandemic was making me feel that all dreams were dead or greyed out, and now I see that dreams don’t die that easily. So, any ideas, folks? 🙂

    • I am so thrilled you discovered Barbara! We all miss her so much.

      Suggestion: make a 2-year or 5-year calendar and plug every one of these great dreams into it. During the year you write your beautiful book that helps children or adults overcome maths anxiety (or people with facial deformities) through your story-telling, schedule some of your weekends for learning to fly owls and for making marbles and for racing somewhere with lots of crows. The next year, plug in learning art therapy (perhaps as an apprentice, because you’ll be too busy to make it a career that requires a college degree in it) and being a bubble magician and a clown doctor and playing harp at a seal rescue center where you volunteer once or twice a month. Start scheduling events for girls without fathers and fathers without daughters–you might even invite them to the seal rescue center to volunteer or entertain them with story-telling. Or you could record their stories. Just keep going–there is enough time for all of this. And ask for email addresses from everyone you meet or entertain or help, so you can tell them when your puzzle parlour is ready for paying guests.

      And if you want any help with that book of yours, please consider joining us for WriteSpeak Online next year. Registration opens during the next Dare to Soar Telesummit on February 6th.

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