After three failed suicide attempts, Rhonda Britten decided to change her attitude towards life and truly began to live.

The Bermuda Junior Service League is hosting Miss Britten, who is an international speaker and fearless life and career coach. She the author of the best-selling book ?Fearless Living: Live Without Excuses and Love Without Regret?.

She is the founder of the Fearless Living Institute and has appeared on Oprah and Sally Jessy Raphael, as well as being profiled in magazines including Shape, You, Glamour, Marie Claire and First for Women.

Her articles have also appeared in the London Sunday Times and she regularly guests on numerous radio stations including FM89 in Bermuda.

Miss Britten also shares her knowledge and expertise as a life coach on the NBC syndicated show, ?Starting Over?, which airs in the US and Bermuda. In the UK, she is known as the Life Doctor in ?Help Me Rhonda?, which is a reality television show. She also has her own national PBS special based on her fearless principles.

Her clients include Blue Shield, Toyota, Southwest Airlines and Northrup Grumman to name a few.

Miss Britten will be conducting two workshops on Saturday at the Ruth Seaton James Centre for Performing Arts. The first workshop is ?Fearless Living ? What are you Expecting?? and the second is ?Fearless Leadership ? Mastering the Skills of Greatness?. They are designed to turn audience members from victims to victors.

Her motto is to live without excuses and to quit waiting and start achieving.

Miss Britten has not had an easy life, she watched the murder suicide of her parents when she was 14. She then went on drinking binges and attempted to commit suicide three times.

Up until ten years ago she lived a life of excuses bemoaning her lack of achievements. A life altering moment came after she failed to kill herself on a third try.

?When I realised that I had to start changing my life was after my third suicide attempt,? she said. ?I realised that I was not very good at killing myself and I?m not dying, so I better figure out way to live.?

That was not the easiest thing to do for someone who lived in the ?why me syndrome?.

?But, I had no ability and I didn?t take responsibility for my life and I didn?t know how,? she said, ?When you have such a good excuse, I was the only witness to watching my father kill my mother and then kill himself.

?And people, although they don?t mean to, validated that excuse. So, when anything bad ever happened to me, it was like ? well, you know.

?After my third suicide attempt, another way for me not to take responsibility by killing myself, I realised that I had to start looking at things a different way. I really didn?t know how, but I started creating exercises for myself.

DEFINING MOMENT

?It was really out of sheer desperation and that was my defining moment when I started to realise there was something wrong with the way I interacted with the world and maybe it was my fault after all. I think that was the moment when I went ?okay, this is not good,.?

Miss Britten suffered depression for almost two decades.

?What I had to face is that our parents are human, but often we don?t want to face that we want mom to make our dinner and be there when we come home. It created a pity party for me, because I had to take care of myself from 14 on.?

Her father was emotionally, verbally and physically abusive at times, but he was never physically abusive to her mother in front of the children.

?I just know that it happened based on interviews I had with my relatives,? she said.

?He was a man who was very controlling, very jealous, you almost want to say someone who couldn?t take criticism and couldn?t deal with his feelings. I started mirroring my father after that and my father did try to kill me when I was 12. He tried to strangle me.

?So, people would always say, ?you and your father are so much alike?. That was like the biggest curse, but then I had that as an excuse. My father killed my mother and so, I don?t have to be responsible for anything. It became this vicious cycle of being the daughter of a murderer, but also being his prot?g?, his twin. So, I was always afraid that I was capable of doing something irrational.?

People often think that they will feel in black and white ? ?I hate him so, I won?t feel anything? ? but that is not true, she said.

?We are human and because we love and hate at the same time,? said Miss Britten.

?That?s why we have children whose parents abuse them and they still want to live with them. When my father died, I had to face his humanity, but I also had to face that I loved him and that was the most difficult thing of all because it was easy to hate him, but hating him kept me stuck and when somebody that does despicable things dies there is a range of emotions.

?There is compassion, empathy, anger, sadness, elation, so you have so much guilt about all these different types of feelings and nobody says, ?it?s okay?.

?Everyone says, ?what do you care? The guy was a bastard?, but it is like, ?wait, no, I loved him.

?This gives me more compassion and more freedom in my own life to see our humanity and this is one of the things that I support people in doing, because what people don?t understand is that our ability to forgive others is our ability to forgive ourselves. I know that is a clich?, but until you experience it, you don?t get it.

?And then you realise however you judge someone else is your portal to your own larger freedom. Well, it is like the minute we judge, or put someone down and say, ?well I would never do that? ? is the minute you put yourself in a box.?

Her real changes began when she left her history where it belonged ? in the past.

?It really came, shockingly enough from people seeing my change and people starting to notice that I was changing my life,? she said.

?The first moment was the third suicide attempt, but the real turning point was when I left my life behind and when I forgave my parents. It was the 20th anniversary of their death.

?After I forgave them I only had me to blame, so in those years between taking responsibly and really forgiving them, I started taking responsibility for my life and as I let them go it was like the last bastion and I noticed a drop in my shoulders.?

She said people said she looked different because she was no longer trying to be responsible ? she was responsible.

FORGAVE HER PARENTS

?I wasn?t trying to forgive my parents ? I did,? she said. ?And I started running grief groups, and as I ran them I began to open up, because I didn?t tell people how my parents died unless they were really close.

?People were fascinated how I changed my life and the people who knew me when I was drinking and having nightmares were also fascinated. It really came from that ? people wanting to have what I have, shockingly enough, and that?s how it all began.?

Now a famous author and television personality, she said she did not just wake up one day and decide to write a book about her life, instead, she said: ?It was a process. I began working with mentors, I started studying, I did all this stuff at the same time. I started teaching workshops and having clients and everything I have done has been an answer to someone?s request.

?So, in my workshops someone would say, ?oh, I want my sister from Missouri to read this?. And it became clear to me with the more requests I got to write this stuff out and people saying, ?Rhonda this is so great?, that it was like, okay, I?m going to write a book.

?It wasn?t like I had this grand scheme of my life, like I will now write a book and I will now get on TV. It was not the way it worked, everything was an answer to somebody?s request.

?I really stay open to possibilities in my life. I mean, you know ? I am looking for a husband, so maybe I?ll meet someone in Bermuda and settle down there.?

Miss Britten has been helping to change her life and others for ten years.

?I wrote my book 25 years after my parents died,? she said.

?I needed perspective, I needed to live it. And I needed to ask, ?what do I do with this now???

When asked is her book similar to ?Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway?, she said: ?It is a wonderful book and it has definite value, but it is beyond that ? it?s not that simplistic.

?We are all run by our emotional fears, our fear of looking stupid, our fear of being rejected, our fear of appearing selfish, our fear of being inadequate. Man, woman or child alike ? our fear of being unlovable ? all of us have a fundamental fear that runs us.

?And so, what I?ll be attempting to do while I?m in Bermuda is supporting you by giving you the tools to start really recognising those emotional fears because usually we don?t see them.

?That?s where we blame, that?s where we trigger and make excuses, so it never really looks like it is really us. ?So our emotional fears are very insidious, very invisible almost and those actually make a lot of decisions for us. And so, until you are really ready to face the fact that you have emotional fears that stop you from full self expression, whether it?s in the creative department, whether it?s at work, whether it is in love. I really have come to believe in the last few years of my life that the definition of success is full self expression.

?That is the name of the game, because if you are not fully self expressing how happy can you be, so you have got to fully self express.?

Tickets can be purchased online at www.boxoffice.bm, CellularOne on Reid Street, or at the Rosemont Guest Apartments. Tickets for each workshop are $50 or $75 for both. For more information visit www.bjsl.bm, e-mail bjslnorthrock.bm, or ( 292-4060.