Signe Dayhoff, M.Ed., M.A., Ph.D., is a Social Psychologist, cognitive-behaviorist, author of 19 books (12 self-help; 5 cat memoirs; and 2 novels), Social Effectiveness Coach, and an authority on alleviating social anxiety, removing social limitations, and becoming socially effective. She helps you break through to reinvent yourself. Specifically, you can overcome personal obstacles by removing limiting thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and fears; maximizing your confidence and interpersonal skills; and achieving your goals, dreams, freedom, and fulfillment. Some of her books, listed below, provide insight and show you how to eliminate what does not work for you and replace it with what does … for accessing relationships, business opportunities, and personal empowerment … for attaining personal success and satisfaction: Kissing Social Limitations Good-Bye to Reinvent Yourself.
Diagonally-Parked in a Parallel Universe:
Working Through Social Anxiety
NEW AND IMPROVED – 2ND EDITION
(1ST EDITION: A “4.8-Star Rating” on Amazon.com with 170 Reader Reviews) Praised by clinical social anxiety researchers and therapists.
Are you one of the twenty million people who suffer from terrible social fears? Is just being around other people, being observed, evaluated, or having to talk to them a torment, making you want to hide? Do you worry that things must always be this way … that you have to suffer, hopelessly, unnecessarily isolated and alone?
Then this breakthrough re-invention book comes just in time. It is written by a psychologist who is intimately acquainted with social anxiety, having struggled with it for years before discovering and applying the full range of clinical and interpersonal communication techniques presented in this comprehensive book … and recovering. Not merely a book, it is a social-effectiveness systematic plan for empowerment to enable you to satisfyingly take your life back.
- Alleviate your social anxiety and replace fear with empowerment
- Improve your daily functioning
- Reduce your fear of evaluation, negative thinking, anger, and embarrassment
- Raise your self-confidence and social-effectiveness personally and professionally
- Say good-bye to loneliness, make friends, and date more comfortably
- Create job, promotion, and business relationships and opportunities for yourself
- Find therapists, prescription drug assistance, and alternative treatments.
The book is 385 pages, jam-packed with clinically-tested and -proven techniques, key strategies, exercises, action tips, information, and resources. Written with humor and empathetic guidance, this book delivers the message and fulfillment of recovery for a happier and more social you.
Diagonally-Parked in a Parallel Universe (Paperback and Kindle)
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Scared Of Your Boss? Smash Through Your Fear Now!
18-20 million American workers are paralyzed by the belief that they are working for a boss who could easily kill their jobs, careers, and life!
If you feel intimidated by your boss or suffer from the fear of authority figures, you likely feel anxious, depressed, unassertive, and one-down. You likely don’t contribute ideas or promote yourself at work. Your productivity tends to go down because you are focusing on your anxiety. You anxiously worry that standing out from the crowd will put you at risk of being negatively evaluated which could mean rejection. You prefer invisibility and anonymity.
To counter and replace the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the 165-page book helps you
- Assess your positive work-related attributes
- Examine your role and boss’s role in the workplace
- Examine where “authority” comes from and what it really means
- Evaluate your physical, cognitive, behavioral response to your boss
- Create ways to change negative response habits to positive response habits
- Discover ways to confidently speak to and interact with authority figures
This is a thoroughly tested and proven method to help you turn fear, negative thinking, avoidance, and self-presentation anxiety into confident, competent conversations through strategies for analyzing past and present events and tactics for erasing fear. Loaded with techniques, tips, scripts, and templates, this is a step-by-baby-step method to help you experience your workplace with confidence and competence.
Scared Of Your Boss? Smash Through Your Fear Now! (Paperback and Kindle)
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How to Reduce Anxiety Through Nutrition
Wouldn’t it be great to reduce your anxiety without prescriptions? If you’re like most people who suffer from anxiety, you’d probably prefer not to take medications because they can be expensive, take 4-6 weeks to start to work, have unpleasant side effects, like lowered libido and weight gain, feel like a crutch, and be hard to get off.
Dr. Elizabeth Lipski, Ph.D., Board Certified Clinical Nutritionist (CCN), has the answer. Nutrition! Author of numerous books and an internationally-acknowledged expert in her field, she tells you, for example,
- How anxiety contributes to physical problems
- What vitamins are essential to reduce stress
- What foods and supplements help you fall sleep faster and sleep more restfully
- What foods should you avoid
- How caffeine affects your feeling anxious
- What effects blood sugar can have on your mood and thinking
- How Vitamin-B complex vitamins can affect your energy level and mood
- What herbs you may not even know about have been clinically proven to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression..
This is a 27-page transcript of Dr. Dayhoff’s Interview of Dr. Lipski.
How to Reduce Anxiety Through Nutrition (Kindle)
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Promote Myself? I’d Rather Eat Worms!
21 Simple Steps to Confidently Tooting Your Own Horn to Achieve Your Career and Life Goals
- Are you uncomfortable presenting yourself to others?
- Do you watch relationships and business go to others because you just can’t toot your own horn?
If you answered “YES,” you are not alone. What many—if not most—people don’t realize is that achieving important goals requires your promoting yourself successfully.
This 188-page course shows you systematically, step-by-step, in detail, through exercises and guidance, how you can create opportunities for yourself as well as present and promote yourself comfortably, confidently, with dignity in your business, career and personal life.
You’ll learn how to
- Know your strengths, abilities, talents, experience
- Know your goals
- Create a detailed plan to achieve those goals
- Know what resources you need to achieve them
- Determine from whom you are most likely to get them
- Make connections of those most likely to be of help
- Achieve your goals.
Promote Myself? (Paperback and Kindle)
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What No One Has Told You: How Insiders Really Get Jobs
If the job you want is hard to find and you are making do with whatever … now is a great time to prepare yourself for when things are better.
While knowing generally what you want and finding something that seems to match it is necessary, it is not sufficient. You need to determine, understand, and consider so much more before your write to a company’s personnel department, make an application online at monster.com, talk to a decision maker, or set foot in an employment agency or headhunter’s office to explore job-opening opportunities.
In six comprehensive chapters, this 182-page book takes you systematically, step-by-step, through the entire job-getting process from a success-engineering perspective. It shows you how to discover the many less-obvious personal, job- and company-related factors that can come into play as you look for a position, how to research and match what you have and want against each job opening and company, effectively presentment and promote yourself before, during, and after the interview, and how to decide if the job offer and all that entails offer is what you truly desire.
You will learn through exercises, guidelines, tips, examples, and abundant resources precisely what works and why and how to apply it to yourself. This book is designed to give you the greatest amount of control in this important evaluation process—control over what you want and how your wants match what you have and what’s available.
What No One Has Told You: How Insiders Really Get Jobs (Paperback and Kindle)
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Growing Up ‘Unacceptable’:
How Katharine Hepburn Rescued Me
Not all bullies are children who cruelly attack, intimidate, and reject other children. Most bullies are emotionally-abusing adults who frequently lurk in the child’s home! Imagine you are a 7-year-old who believes you’re loved. But then you’re rejected, told you’re “unacceptable,” and blamed, belittled, criticized, and emotionally-abandoned by the one person you want most in the world to treasure you: your father.
The consequences of this problem can be serious and long-term, leaving deep scars. Children and adults alike may experience social anxiety, depression, anger, and lack of assertiveness, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Bullying hinders their ability to trust and form happy relationships. They may not even know why this is.
In this autobiographical novel, I spend the next 20 years digging my way out of my deep pit of rejection and self-criticism with the help of my inner voice, my role model, Katharine Hepburn. Conquering rejection, I ultimately forge a compassionate recovery, empowering myself with kick-butt possibilities. (212 pages)
Growing Up ‘Unacceptable’ (Paperback and Kindle)
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Attracting and Dating the Wrong Men? Tips and Insights to Free Yourself
Most women who didn’t marry in high school or go directly into a religious order afterward have experienced attracting or dating at least one “wrong” man. The reason he was “wrong” is less important than how you responded to the situation. If you had any difficulty with:
- Being socially anxious about what you should do or not do
- Asserting yourself to be treated with respect or
- Being empowered to escape the relationship if you wanted to,
This autobiographical novel is a series of personal short stories detailing my 15-year journey from doing everything wrong to doing things right and confidently dating those I wanted to date. It’s an outrageous, lively, humorous, and sometimes scary journey, that gives you relevant tips and insights on how you can alleviate the “wrong men” problem. (242 pages)
Attracting and Dating the Wrong Men? (Paperback and Kindle)
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Why Should I Make Small Talk? Interview Transcript
I interviewed Drs. Judith Sherven and Jim Sniechowski, who are experts in Relationships, to get their take on why and how anonymous communication technology has unfortunately replaced face-to-face small talk as the way to meet and get to know others. They demonstrate how only small talk can most easily and quickly help you determine shared interests and opportunities, and develop fuller, more meaningful personal and business relationships.
The interview covers simple ways to alleviate fear of meeting strangers for small talk and provides on-point anecdotes and professional advice. You also receive a BONUS list of 21-plus small talk tips. This 67-page interview transcript introduces you to the subject of small talk in preparation for learning more through the “How to Speak Without Fear Small Talk Course.”
Why Should I Make Small Talk? Interview Transcript (Kindle)
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How to Speak Without Fear Small Talk Course
As has been demonstrated repeatedly, fear of speaking in front of others is Americans’ #1 fear. Fear of speaking publicly is so strong that it leaves fear of death well behind it in seventh place. Now, that is saying quite a bit about its significance. Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “At a funeral most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.” As you know, this applies to making conversations as well.
The speaking situation can be formal … giving a speech or report to a group or individual … or informal … meeting new people, networking, and making small talk.
This 10-module, 196-page systematic, guided course provides you with outlines, exercises, examples, scripts, templates, techniques, strategies, and tools. As a result, you can
- Minimize your physical symptoms
- Eliminate your fearful thoughts, erroneous beliefs, and negative expectations
- Create your conversational confidence
- Master self-presentation skills and situations quickly and easily
- Increase your control over the situation
- Skyrocket your personal, business, and promotion opportunities.
How to Speak Without Fear (Paperback and Kindle)
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What Faust the Dancing Cat Taught Me
I had no idea what adventures were in store for me when a skeletal, moth-eaten-looking gray cat with vampire teeth oozed out from under my car in the dark library parking lot, rubbed my ankle, and looked deep into my soul with glowing amber eyes. I was trapped, commanded to adopt him.
From that moment he became my alter-ego—and, sometimes, my “evil twin.” We were inseparable and everywhere we went, his personality drew an astonished audience. But it was his fancy footwork that made him a photo magnet. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille.”
The result is a roller coaster ride of fun, wild-and-woolly escapades with a twinkle-toes cat who acted as if he were Gene Kelly and Lassie combined in a cat suit. (204 pages)
What Faust the Dancing Cat Taught Me (Paperback and Kindle)
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Faust the Dancing Cat Tackles Strippers, Scammers & Bears
The wild-and-wooly exploits of the famous (sometimes “infamous”) Faust the Dancing Cat continue as this vampire-toothed, shoulder-traveling rescue feline goes to Boston University as a volunteer instructor to challenge freshmen in behavioral psychology. Because of his training repertoire, he is a master demonstrator of what works and why. As Mary Tyler Moore’s “Chuckles the Clown” would have said before he “bit the dust,” all it takes is “a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”
With a developing lawless bent, he physically attacks an unsuspecting victim many times his size, participates in breaking and entering at a nursing home, all in the name of his personal quest for his “holy grail,” creates a breast-clutching event at a funeral home, and uses his extra-sensory perception and superior cat tactics to protect his human companion. And so much more. (280 pages)
Faust the Dancing Cat Tackles Strippers, Scammers & Bears (Paperback and Kindle)
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Faust the Dancing Cat Does Vegas
Faust the Dancing Cat Does Vegas has his nibs once again up to his amber eyes and vampire teeth in new, wild-and-woolly, un-cat-like exploits. If there’s a way for this shoulder-riding cat to turn a situation around into a laugh fest or a looming disaster, Faust demonstrates he’s a past master at it. This time his escapades occur not only on land but also in the air and on water. When he’s not slogging through sand dunes looking for lizards, he’s scrambling up slippery canyon walls or trying to tip-toe around sharp halite crystals in The Devil’s Golf Course. When he’s not experiencing close encounters of the dangerous kind with rattlers, cougars, and raccoons, he’s outwitting pervert dogs and malicious teenagers.
When he’s not being baptized in an airplane bathroom, he’s emulating Dracula to “terrorize” children or practicing to become the first feline Flying Wallenda. After years of perfecting his audience-adoring performance magic, he gets his chance at the Big Time! And … it’s no surprise that he charges ahead with fearlessness and Gene Kelly-inspired gusto. (240 pages)
Faust the Dancing Cat Does Vegas (Paperback and Kindle)
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Remarkable Tales of Cats Who Whisper to Humans
Everyone has heard of “horse whisperers.” Some humans claim to “whisper” to nearly any kind of animal. But humans are not the only ones who claim to whisper to other species. Perhaps, not so surprising, cats claim to do it too … but to HUMANS! Unfortunately for cats, too often humans are not sensitive and attuned to hearing and understanding what these cats are communicating.
These tales are funny, touching, and uplifting stories of cats who used their natural, but sharply-honed, human-whispering abilities to influence chosen people to take them from the dangerous subsistence life of homelessness to loving homes. Yes, cats choose humans, not the other way around. These true tales, which are transcribed word-for-word by a human cat-whisperer, the “author,” show the many ways these cats “talked” to specific people to hopefully break through to achieve their individual rescue-related goals.
From the cats’ own lips the reader learns how these felines interpreted each human’s feelings, behaviors, and body language; how they used their own body language and thought to dynamite their way to the human’s conscious awareness; how the humans responded to the cats’ communication efforts, for good or ill; and how the cats then worked to foster respect and affection required for their ongoing, mutually-beneficial, human-cat relationships. (152 pages)
Remarkable Tales of Cats Who Whisper to Humans (Paperback and Kindle)
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How Intrepid the Disabled Kitten Triumphed to Help Others
Being homeless is a challenge for any adult cat, but for a kitten only a few months old that has lost its mother, it is like scaling the Matterhorn without climbing gear. It needs to learn to stave off hunger, find safe shelter, and protect itself from constant danger … of else. And if that kitten has a congenital abnormality which makes it somewhat uncoordinated, that calculates its odds of survival as even lower. Yet, somehow this black, long-haired, honey-eyed kitten perseveres. Intrepidly and cleverly he navigated his almost-insurmountable world of slavering dogs, territorial cats, raccoons, BBs, teenagers, and Firestone radials to survive and thrive with an abundance of luck that made his blossoming and journey possible.
As he relates his story to “cat whisperer,” Dr. Dayhoff, he describes his sometimes-harrowing experiences as well as his conflicted and contradictory feelings of sadness, beauty, pain, gratitude, and delight. He rejoices in how his last-minute rescue saves him from an inevitable death from a severe injury, alters his perceptions of the world, and ultimately focuses him on his unique purpose of sharing himself with others in emotionally difficult circumstances. (82 pages)
How Intrepid the Disabled Kitten Triumphed to Help Others (Paperback and Kindle)
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Outrage, The Final Straw
What happens when a long-time animal lover, -advocate, and -rescuer confronts a situation that pushes her animal-protection frustration to the breaking point? When Dr. Kiri Sumner, a practicing clinical psychologist and educator in the Albuquerque, NM, area, witnesses shocking animal abuse, she’s outraged. This is the final straw for her. It’s clear that something must be done about this perpetrator (after she saves the badly injured dog). And it must be done NOW, especially after the authorities don’t appear to be acting to apprehend the abuser.
Despite her desire for unfettered revenge, she knows that whatever she does has to be legal … although, it might be off-the-wall and pushing the envelope a little. But, most importantly, it has to have a significant psychological and public impact on the abuser. The situation demands retaliation in some fashion but executing the blood-thirsty physical revenge her heart desires is ethically problematic for her. What she finally decides to do is mostly legal and straightforward, albeit a little dissembling. Notwithstanding her cautious planning, the situation turns out to have unexpected and increasingly perilous consequences for her. (329 pages)
Outrage, The Final Straw (Paperback and Kindle)
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Secrets, Lies, and Promises
Deceptive political tactics, art forgery, delusion, artistic cats, and genetics join together seamlessly with memorable characters in Secrets, Lies, and Promises. When political marketing consultant Charlotte “Charley” Eyre promises an old friend and painting mentor to keep her desperately-held secret, she discovers she has stepped into a quagmire. Her promise carries negative consequences and implications, as well as ethical problems for her. Soon she is no longer just the keeper of the secret but its owner. This means she has to deal with all its inherent lies, awkward situations, and unexpected life-threatening reprisals. (322 pages)
“Well-written. Its deeply compelling challenges captured and held my interest! Dayhoff truly understands tension, complexity, and joy. It’s a great read, a page-turner, with an unexpected ending!” – Judith Sherven, PhD, co-author What Really Killed Whitney Houston
Secrets, Lies, and Promises (Paperback and Kindle)
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The Journalist’s Tail
What if a newborn kitten magically fell from above into your hands in your bathroom? And what if she then amazingly demonstrated skills that you could use in your work? Meet Boudica, the Ragdoll cat. Named for the Celtic warrior queen, it’s she who narrates this humorous, and sometimes scary, chronicle of her unusual, close-bond relationship with a New York Times medical science writer, Cordelia Falk. It’s Falk who catches, saves, and employs this astute feline. When she is not introducing Cordelia to new, sometimes absurd, and unexpected life situations, she is striving to collaborate with and protect her human.
Despite beginning her own literary career as an unassuming, but observant, spiky ball of pale fluff, this talented cat has the uncanny ability to understand human body language and, using it, detects the truth, deceptiveness, or falsity of what people say. In the article interviews they conduct together, she shares this valuable information with Cordelia to help direct the conversation, whether it’s about zombies, Tesla self-driving cars, GMOs, wig-hair from corpses, or other novel topics. In only a few shakes of her plume-like tail, Boudica becomes her human’s alter-ego, confidant, mentor, and secret journalistic partner. (330 pages)
The Journalist’s Tail (Paperback and Kindle)
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Further Adventures of the Journalist’s Tail
Boudica, the Ragdoll cat named for a Celtic warrior queen, possesses unique, uncanny feline abilities in deciphering human nonverbal communication. She is the partner of journalist Cordelia Falk, former-New York Times Science Writer. Together they write investigative articles for national newspapers and magazines on a wide-range of unexpected topics, such as cannibalism, plastic-eating fungus, and restaurant sex. Boudica narrates this often-humorous foray into their sometimes-frightening exploits and unusual lives together, which includes the wild-and-woolly escapades of Cordelia’s Three Pashmina-teers. (383 pages)