Black MBA - Summer 2008 - (Page 106)

LIFESTYLE Stacey Tisdale Stacey Tisdale: Skating to Success After her Childhood Dream Ends, One Woman Finds Her New Calling in Sharing Financial Advice with Others By Charles McCauley YEARS OF PRACTICING jumps, spirals and other technical elements for regional ice skating competitions came to a halt after an automobile accident left Stacey Tisdale unable to skate. At age 18, Tisdale’s plan to become a figure skater melted away, and any thoughts of trying out for a Winter Olympics team evaporated. “That’s OK,” the business and financial issues journalist from Stamford, Conn., says 23 years later. “I was definitely meant to do what I’m doing.” Tisdale has now set her sights on helping other people manage their money. Tisdale, the co-author of the book The True Cost of Happiness: The Real Story Behind Managing Your Money (John Wiley & Sons), uses seminars, speeches, appearances on NBC’s The Today Show and a seat on a nonprofit financial independence group’s board to advance her campaign on eradicating financial illiteracy. Her message that attitudes and beliefs influence money management couldn’t be timelier – the nation’s economic pace is weakening. Signs of distress, including bankruptcies and home-loan delinquencies – ripple from the subprime loan crisis. 106 BlackMBA • Summer 2008 • www.nbmbaa.org BlackMBA Sum r 2008 www.nbmbaa.org kMBA Sum BA Summer 2008 u ww nbm aa.or ww nbmbaa.or b o Lenders are toughening loan standards. “Instead of people looking at the dollars-and-cents side of it, they have to look at what’s behind their behavior,” Tisdale says. “The true cost of happiness is not a monetary cost; it’s a personal cost to stop identifying with those tendencies that don’t serve you.” She suggests that people take an honest look at what they are doing, discover where their attitudes and beliefs originated and examine whether these influences work in their favor. Tisdale co-wrote The True Cost of Happiness with financial expert Paula Boyer Kennedy, a vice president at Cammack La-Rhette Consulting in Manhattan. The daughter of parents who grew up poor in the South, Tisdale shares her personal experiences with finances in the book, along with the knowledge she garnered from more than 15 years experience reporting for and anchoring business news shows on CNN, CNBC and CBS. Perhaps it was training six hours a day, six days a week, on ice that gave her the discipline and determination to decide what to do once she could no longer skate. She faced other tough situations, like when CNN, where Tisdale worked as a freelancer from 2002 to 2004, stopped doing business news and laid her off. A few weeks later, Tisdale’s mother passed away. Weeks later, Tisdale learned she was pregnant. Feeling it was going to be a challenge to get a job as a business news reporter with her pregnancy, Tisdale had to figure out what to do next. TAKING ACTION Tisdale is thankful that her freelance role enabled her to spend time with her mother during the last year of her life.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Black MBA - Summer 2008

Black MBA- Summer 2008 Contents Mailbag Up Front From the President & CEO Politics of Change Catalyst for Change: Results of our 2008 Political Poll Know Whose Shoulders You Stand On: The Legacy of H. Naylor Fitzhugh Howard University: Changing With the Times Straight Talk: CEO to CEO Creating Your Own Sandbox Dual Threats Avoiding the Faux Pa Invest in Your MBA Everything You Need to Know About...Estate Planning On Campus Plan Ahead The Big Show What's in a Name? On the Move Market Forecast Jeff Friday Keith Wyche Life Lessons On the Ground Real Biz A Golden Opportunity Entrepreneurial Institute Tech Tools Read for Success Stacey Tisdale Advertiser Index

Black MBA - Summer 2008

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