Local author posits: Good things don't always come to he who waits

Sometimes playing the waiting game can bring an unwanted outcome: game over.

People who spend years waiting for their ships to come in may find hope in a new book by Conifer author Kristen Moeller, “Waiting for Jack: Confessions of a Self-Help Junkie: How to Stop Waiting and Start Living Your Life.” The book hit shelves on April 2.

Moeller will sign books from noon to 2 p.m. April 24 at Mountain Books, 25797 Conifer Road, Suite B-104. Already an Amazon.com bestseller in two categories, the book is filled with Moeller’s experience and knowledge about the rough road to recovery from being addicted to waiting.

Moeller begins with a story about when she was asked to read aloud from a book about the Windy City in her third-grade class. She came upon a word and slowly sounded it out: “Chick-a-go.” The class laughed in a way that only children can, pounding a nail into the heart of her self-confidence.

That moment defined her fear of situations in which she would be evaluated peers, a fear that followed her through her graduate studies in mental health counseling.

“I didn’t want to risk failure. … I played it safe,” Moeller said. “It kept me from doing the things I really wanted to do with my life.”

Addicted to waiting

Moeller believes there are defining events when we all make a decision to protect ourselves. Such was the inspiration for her book about waiting for good things to come or for problems to go away.

To help people with an addiction to waiting, Moeller has founded an organization called the Chick-a-go Foundation, named after her third-grade calamity. The foundation provides scholarships for educational programs in which people learn to identify events in their lives that limit them. Moeller said that helps people live freer lives.

“A parent’s divorce, trauma, moving around a lot, being made fun of,” Moeller said. “Everyone’s got something, and we make decisions and it starts to limit. People start living in a box and can’t get out of it. You can’t sit around waiting for what you want. You have to go get it.”

Her book helps people find their inspiration from within, not having to wait on or rely on others.

An unusual book title

The book’s title comes from her friendship with Jack Canfield, co-author of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and “Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.”

At a seminar in Denver in 2007, Canfield held up a hundred-dollar bill and asked a crowd of several hundred who wanted it. Moeller, seated in a front row, dashed up the steps to where Canfield was standing and grabbed the bill. Moeller saw that bold action as a metaphor for change.

Moeller struck up a friendship with Canfield, and, at one point, she was waiting for him to respond to her inspiration-seeking e-mails.

“Jack was first the catalyst, and then he was a metaphor,” Moeller said.

Choosing to react differently

One of Moeller’s favorite quotes is from jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Many people die with their music inside them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, times runs out.”

“I don’t want to die with my music inside me, and I don’t want others to either,” Moeller said.

Using “the lessons learned and the wisdom gained along the way,” she explains the importance of identifying those times in life when waiting for something good to happen can set people back. She shares ways to disrupt the status quo and to accept that there are good things we can have and active ways to achieve them.

For Moeller, it’s all about choice.

Choose that a criticism is a contribution, or that the driver who cut you off is having horrible things go on in his life, or the co-worker who snaps has something on her mind, she said.

“Choose another reaction to it,” she said of our negative reactions. “We can’t coast on the choice of yesterday. We often have to re-choose. Either you have a past, or your past has you. If you’re had by the past, there’s no choice, no awareness that there’s something else. That’s the people dying with their music still inside them.”