Q&A With Doug Lawrence 

My latest Q&A is with Doug Lawrence who is an author and a speaker. Doug is the author of You Are Not Alone Mental Health Mentors Take The Journey With You. 

Q: So Doug tell the readers of the blog why you chose to write a book about Mental Health? 

A: There were a number of reasons. It was suggested by colleagues that I write a book about mentoring and mental health. I am a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer having served for 25 years and ending up with PTSD. There was no support structure in place to help us deal with the trauma so that is one more reason for writing this book. It also helped me when I lost my wife to cancer in February of 2021. Writing this book about Mental Health helped me see that I could do more and could help more people as a result.

Q: You are an author and a speaker. What do you speak about at events? 

A: I share my lived experiences which touch on mental health, grief, PTSD, and the coping mechanisms that we need to navigate through all of this. I have done approximately 130 podcasts and sharing my grief and my story is actually very therapeutic for me. Being able to openly share my story in a relatable fashion is of great value to those who hear me speak. I quite often get the response that, “when you told that one story that was me you were talking about”.

Q: Are you currently writing a new book right now? If so what is the topic? 

A: I am writing a new book. It is about mentoring and grief. It also talks about cancer and how COVID was recognized as a “pandemic” but yet cancer is not. That is despite it being the #1 or #2 leading cause of death.

I talk about grief and how one can be experiencing grief even though there has not been the loss of life. You can be grieving a broken relationship or other things and feel the effects of grief. The book title at this stage is “The Silent Pandemic” and refers to cancer. It is important or significant to me as I lost my wife, Debra to cancer in 2021. She is my inspiration.

Q: What is your advice to anyone wanting to be an author and a speaker?

A: Choose something that you are passionate about. Openly share your story. You will have more followers if you share that passion. I went away to a place in the mountains to begin my writing of my current book. I have also found that sometimes you need to record what you are thinking rather than writing it. I hit the wall with writing and was surprised how things flowed when I reverted to recording.

As a speaker share your passion and your story. It’s okay to be a little nervous when speaking.