That’s the core message of Rose’s new self-help book, No Plaid Suits: How Not to Have a Boring, Normal Life. The book is the culmination of her time working as a life and career coach, when she developed her program and website, An Unstoppable Life. She’ll be reading from No Plaid Suits at Longmont Books on Friday, April 14. The event, which includes a Q&A with the author, is free and open to the public.
So how does someone become an adviser in living extraordinarily? “I’m the product of college teachers who taught art,” Rose says. “Drawing and painting. So I grew up as an art brat.”
That inspired her to follow a similar path as an adult, getting an art degree and eventually teaching. “I got to a point where I was done with academia," Rose recalls. "I’d moved on, and didn’t know where to go next. Finally, a friend of mine said that everything I’d been doing my whole life was teaching people how to see the world in a different way, literally and figuratively. Photography, drawing, painting, yoga, meditation, writing, whatever. She’s the one that first said it: 'You should be a life coach.'”
Rose’s reply: "What the hell’s a life coach?"
Later that same week, she got an offer from an old friend to participate in a life-coaching certification workshop. “I went, thinking, 'Well, clearly the universe is sending me a message here. I’ve always loved learning, so it’ll at least be interesting,'" Rose remembers with a laugh. "But I ended up loving it.”
Rose will read from No Plaid Suits at Longmont Books on Friday, April 14.
Amrita Rose
That experience was something she would directly draw upon as a coach: “Life and career coaching is essentially all about listening deeply to what someone is saying and how they’re saying it," she says. "And then asking questions that allow them to see things in a new way, from a different perspective.
“It’s also about being an effective observer of behaviors that a person might not be able to see," she continues. "We all have blind spots; we all have behaviors that we do over and over and we don’t recognize we do them. We’re human. But it’s easier for someone on the outside to say, 'You know that thing you keep doing? You’re doing it again.' And then to ask how that’s really affecting them.”
Rose says that people often ask her how life coaching differs from traditional therapy. “The biggest difference,” she says, “is that if you go see a therapist, they’ll spend a lot of time with you figuring out how you got to the now — all the backstory. It’s very useful for certain things. Positive psychology coaching, which is what I do, starts with the now and asks, Where do you want to be?”
The answer to that, according to Rose, is nothing more than systems analysis: “What’s getting in the way of you moving forward? What are the beliefs that you have, what are the actions you’re taking or failing to take, how might you be talking yourself out of it? So I’m a systems analyst. Always have been.”
No Plaid Suits might never have become a book, however, without Rose’s decision to start writing her blog. She made a deal with herself that she’d write something new every day for three years — and sometimes she felt like she didn’t have much to say. “So when I got stuck for a topic, I’d ask the people around me what they wanted to know that they didn’t know now, [and] I’d write about that. And the more I wrote, the more people began to ask when I was going to put all those blog posts in a book,” Rose says.
When she began her blog, she lived in Asheville, North Carolina; she moved to Colorado just before the pandemic, and like the rest of the world, suddenly had a lot of free time. “I figured, well, this is a great time to write a book," she says. She pulled together the best of her writing from the blogs and, on the recommendation of some friends in a writing group, added memoir elements to prove her bona fides. “And then I kept throwing things in," she admits. "There’s downloadable meditations, there’s cheat sheets, there’s all kinds of stuff. It was a lot of fun to write — and the perfect time to do it.”
But what’s that title about? What does Rose have against plaid suits?
“It came from one of the original blog posts, one that I actually renamed for the book,” she explains. It’s a metaphor for the story we not only tell ourselves constantly, but that we live out there in the real world — the thing that we’re showing to everyone we meet, even if we don’t realize it, the thing defining and limiting us and clashing with everyone else’s plaid suits.
As for that old plaid suit? “Burn it,” Rose advises.
She'll give you the lighter.
Amrita Rose will read from and discuss her book at Longmont Books, 624 Main Street, Longmont, 7 p.m. Friday, April 14. The event is free; for more information, see the event website.
