BIO

Winter, the author of Making a Living Without a Job and Jumpstart Your Entrepreneurial Spirit, is a self-employment advocate who travels the world encouraging and inspiring people through her writing and seminars to choose their right livelihood. Her newsletter, Winning Ways, which helps readers “turn passions into profits,” is now in its twenty-first year. For more information, visit www.barbarawinter.com.

STORY EXCERPT

The experience only lasted a couple of minutes, but the residual effects lasted for hours. We got to my parents’ house and it was like I was in a different state of consciousness—I was sensing everything differently. My sister Margaret and I were playing Scrabble, and at one point I looked at her and said, “Oh, I see how come you’re such a good Scrabble player; you can look at your tiles and rearrange them in your mind.” She just looked at me like that was the oddest thing. But all of a sudden I understood that she did this differently than I did. I was having all these insights into the people around me, people I had known all my life. And it was very noticeable. I remember Margaret looking at me and saying, “I don’t know what you have, but I want it.”