Welcome, everybody. This is Jane Gardner, and welcome to Finding Your Purpose TV. I’m Jane Gardner. And welcome. We’re so excited today because we have another Purposeful Entrepreneur today and we’re going to be chatting with her about how she found her purpose. Her name is Dorothy Anne O’Dell, and she was born and raised in Ontario, Canada. So we have a lot in common because we’re both Canadians. We talk a lot about that right now. And she’s turned her love of books into her next career writing them and she loves to help people succeed in life. And when she’s not writing or reading, she’s helping her community. And actually remind me, Dorothy, we have to talk about your charity concept at the end. So I’ll write a note for that because it’s a really exciting one. And she’s also a life coach and speaker. And her life’s purpose is to make sure that people feel that they feel worthy and that they don’t feel unworthy. She believes every life matters and has dedicated herself to helping others overcome their own obstacles and learn to feel empowered to move forward in their life. And, Dorothy, we’re going to be talking a lot.

Let’s get ready. So, Dorothy, tell me, how did your purpose in life make you become the entrepreneur you are now? Welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Jane. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you. I guess my purpose all started at the beginning of The Pandemic, and I’ve always loved helping people growing up and things like that. But I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to do that. And I wrote my first book, The Overcomer, facing challenges with faith and courage because I knew that I had a lot of challenges that I had overcome in my life, like bullying, low self esteem, abusive relationships, and family trauma. And I knew that I wasn’t the only one out there. And I also knew that in those moments when you’re going through those times that it is very challenging and that you feel very alone and sometimes you feel like you don’t matter. So I decided that my purpose was to make sure that people knew that they were heard that they mattered and that they never had to feel alone. So that’s when I came up with my purpose at the beginning of The Pandemic, wrote the book in no time at all and had it out for the world to see January of this year. And it’s been an exciting adventure. And I thought, why stop there? Help people overcome their obstacles, coach them on how to have fun, how to have some what’s the word? I’m looking for time to themselves and just really selfcare. Selfcare was key. It’s something that I never had growing up or I never took the time. Didn’t think about it. We weren’t educated in school, and I had a grandmother that said, you need to take care of your man. And it’s basically selfish to take care of you. And she’s old school and love her to death, but I didn’t know any better. So I was always giving, giving until I hit a wall. And my dad was diagnosed with cancer for the first time two and a half years ago, I met a counselor at the cancer clinic in here at Windsor. And the first question she asked me was, what about yourself? Care? And I said, there is none. I don’t have time for that. I’m planning a wedding. My dad just got cancer. Just that got diagnosed and work was insane at the time. So there was no time for me. And that’s when she said, well, you better make a time because if not, you’re going to crash and you’re going to burn hard and she was right. And I decided to put some tools into place to bring the fun back into my life because growing up there was fun and things like that. But there was also a lot of times where it was like I would call it adult times, I guess, where a lot of the time that was taken up was worried about parents that were sick, things like that. And it was a serious time. I took life way too serious, I guess, is the proper word I should use. And so growing up way too serious and being helping around the house my entire life. And I didn’t really have a lot of friends growing up. It’s funny because I talked about that this morning in a conversation with somebody else. And it was a lonely time. And I thought I hit my forties and I’m like, fun is it? And that’s been my word for the last five years. And for my I think it was my 43rd birthday. My husband says, what do you want? And I said, I just want a family balloon fight. Family is everything to me. And what better way. My birthday is in July. So it’s not like it’s cold months. So I said, that’s what we’re going to do. And everybody was receptive. We had my husband’s family over and we had a barbecue. We had a water balloon fight. And he just had some amazing fun.