Queen Lessons: What Stand-up Comedy Taught Me About Dealing With Life’s Hecklers and Finding Courage in Your Queen Years

At an age when some women feel like they have to begin to cover themselves up, Holly Shaw, a performance coach and hypnotherapist, did the opposite, taking the stage as a stand-up comedian. In this book, hovering between memoir and self-help, Shaw invites readers into the wild world of comedy, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her, the victories and the trauma, and expertly extracts the wisdom from them into lessons for women entering their “queen years.”Do you feel like your life has changed since you hit your forties? Are you done with being “nice” and pleasing everyone else? Do you feel ready to explode with fury and the injustice of it all?Queen Lessons hands you the mic. Read it and you will:Learn practical ways to cope and grow as your body changes and the world begins to treat you differently.Pick up simple strategies for dealing with everyday hecklers.Strengthen the Five Muscles of Stand Up Comedy Courage. Caution! These may make other people not like you as much, but you will like yourself more!Explore your relationship with attention and how you can change it for the better.Meet Holly’s inner Earthquake Woman, Wise Woman, and Comedian (who might just be inside you, too.)Say goodbye to “Nice Girl.”Change the temperature of a room and shamelessly ask for what you want.Harvesting the juiciest moments from when she was just a pre-teen growing up in Indiana and catfishing boys at the mall, to being a grown-ass woman fleeing from angry girlfriends at the comedy club, Shaw’s whimsical and astute observations track her soul’s evolution through stories and deliver an intelligent look at the world of comedy and what it means to be a performer and a queen.There are thousands of books on courage and self-confidence, but how many of those were written by someone trying to make it through mid-life while bombing in front of an audience? No one is more suited to tell you how to take it on the chin and keep going than a stand-up comedian experiencing hot flashes.Before you make one more vision board, read this book!