Honolulu-based Alice Inoue, a former news anchor and columnist, is now a life coach and astrologer. She is also the author of 10 books, including her most recent one, published on March 20: “Daily Mindful Moments: A Year of Life Wisdom.”
On June 18, she became a first-time winner in the “Inspiration” category of the National Indie Excellence Awards.
She got the idea for this book from a column she wrote for MidWeek, called “A Mindful Moment,” which she penned for about 10 years.
“What happened was people would stop me on the street and show me that they had cut out so many of these passages or they would send me pictures that they were on their refrigerator,” Inoue told Aloha State Daily. “It was just quite shocking how people gravitated toward these and so I thought: What if I compiled them?”
“Daily Mindful Moments: A Year of Life Wisdom,” includes fresh words of wisdom for each day of the year. Some of her favorite column passages are included in the book, along with new ones, written specifically for this publication. The book is available at Barnes & Noble at Ala Moana Center, as well as amazon.com.
“I'm hoping that this book can also create a sense of community,” she told ASD. “I've heard of people wanting to use it for book clubs and that sort of [thing]. It’s a great book for topics of discussion around the family table with your friends, because life is so real. We live it every day. I think sometimes we just hope things will get better, but often times we need to take action for things to get better, like change our thoughts and change our perspective and change how we look at things.”
Inoue encourages people to be in contact with others.
“The need to connect with human beings is more important than ever — to share challenges with each other, to support each other,” she said.
Inoue drew inspiration for the book from her work as a life coach, where she talks with about 100 people each month, many of whom call Hawaiʻi home. Her clients range in age from 20 to 80 years old. Some are entry level interns and others are high level executives.
“Every single thing in that book comes from someone's problem,” Inoue said. “I'm a life coach, right? I'm a life guide. ... It was the weirdest thing — there would always seem to be a weekly theme or a monthly theme or people were going through kind of the same thing. ... I would notice that people were feeling insecure about certain things, and so I would just take the advice that I gave to people and put it into a passage.”
In 2013, she opened Happiness University, which offers classes on personal growth for individuals and organizations with a mission to “help people find answers to their life’s challenges in order to experience more peace, joy, freedom and love in their lives,” according to its website.
“I think the key to happiness is just finding what's good in your life right now,” Inoue said. “We so naturally gravitate toward everything that's not the way we want it — what's going wrong, what could be better — and we sort of overlook what is going well and what is present in our lives. I always say to start with that. I really think that gratitude and appreciation is at the root of happiness.”
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Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
