Meet Sally Franz and Jennifer Webb

Q: What do a former stand-up comic and a former magician have in common?

A: A terrific new self-help/self-esteem book entitled Monster Lies : A Woman’s Guide to Controlling Her Destiny!

Sally Franz is president of Gerontos Communications, a motivational company that uses humor to train people from Newark to Uzbekistan. Her clients have included Chemical Bank, McCann-Ericksen Worldwide, The National Episcopal Church, Texaco, Coke, SONY and Intel, teaching management skills, communication, performance evaluation and goal-setting. She is a certified Myers-Briggs trainer.

Sally co-hosted "Still Crazy" on Santa Barbara, California’s KTMS 990 AM and guest-hosted a community affairs show on KDAR 98.3 FM in Oxnard, CA. She has appeared on NBC’s the Today Show, CNBC and Maury Povich representing various causes.

She is an experienced writer, having won the Santa Barbara News-Press Writers Award. Sally has been a guest humor writer on the Divorce Forum webpage and a parenting expert for their seminars. She wrote a humor book entitled The Baby Boomers to Menopause (a topic suggested to her by comedian Jonathan Winters) as well as an entire series of British books entitled The Baby Boomer’s Mini-Field Guide to... She also was a contributing author to The Book of Life’s Firsts and the Santa Barbara Writer’s Groups’ A Community of Voices Anthology. Recently, Ms. Franz contributed an essay for Chicken Soup for the Grandparents’ Soul. She is currently at work on an upcoming children’s book series called the Tales of Tashbekhel.

While attending a humor writing workshop, Sally and her class were taken on a field trip to an Improv club. The surprise was that the class was to be the entertainment. After getting over the initial terror, Sally discovered that making people laugh suited her. She performed stand-up comedy for several years in New York and California, sharing the stage for charity events with such talents as Rosie O’Donnell, Brooke Shields and Geraldo Rivera.

But eventually, she discovered that her work with charities—Sally worked in international development for women’s rights for Save the Children and was active in UNICEF with singer Judy Collins at the UN in New York—made a difference in how people thought about things. This, in turn, led Sally to understand that she could motivate people—and do that for a living.

Sally is also a lay minister and very active youth director at her church. She is a member of Toastmasters. Sally’s many adventures have included: smuggling bibles to an underground church in Uzbekistan, hot air ballooning into Tanzania, wind-surfing in Mombasa, skiing the glaciers in Innsbruck in July, a five week trip with her daughters "youth hosteling" Europe, and hiking the Great Wall of China. In June, she rock-climbed for the first time. She is the mother of two grown daughters, is recently re-married and lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Jennifer Webb is president of Magic Communications, a motivational company that uses magic and accelerated learning to train employees from the Americas to Europe. She has spoken in 43 out of the 50 United States. Her clients include Xerox, Revlon, Canon, Volvo, John Ascuaga’s Nugget Hotel and Casino Resort, the U.S. Navy and Dun & Bradstreet.

She currently appears on KTVN’s "Channel 2 News This Morning" in Reno, Nevada, twice a week with a feature called "Your Personal Power Coach."

Jennifer has extensive writing skills honed as a photojournalist. She wrote articles for magazines such as Redbook, The New York Times, and Ms. She was the editor of two trade magazines, one of which was Magic Manuscript—the only full-color magic magazine at the time. It was with this magazine that she interviewed celebrities who had some link with magic: Orson Welles, Dick Cavett, Doug Henning and David Copperfield. She has also interviewed other notables such as Muhammad Ali, Dixie Carter and Ted Kennedy. The last book-length project Jennifer was involved in was as a contributing author to Success is a Team Effort.

Despite growing up with an uncle who was involved in magic, Jennifer didn’t decide to go into a career in magic herself until her son became interested and they went to one of the largest magic shops in the world, located in New York City. With her new involvement in magic, she got to meet famous magicians like Penn and Teller, Lance Burton—and she even went to Siegfried and Roy’s house to watch their white tigers swim in the pool! She took her magic act from private parties for celebrities like Sally Jessie Raphael, to performing on Broadway, to doing illusions for corporate product announcements for Proctor & Gamble and Revlon.

She was in professional magic for about five years, but discovered that magic wasn't that satisfying for her emotionally. All of her life, she was interested in how thoughts impact our reality. Somewhere along the line she realized people actually earned a living telling people how to do this, and was fortunate to find a wonderful mentor who helped develop her talents. She still performs magic—but now she uses it to show that illusions are what hold people back from achieving their goals.