Debra Ponema in the 'i am gr
ful club'
At the age of 19 Debra spent many months in Europe training to become a teacher of meditation with the great spiritual master Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. After completion of her training, which included daily meditation sessions of up to twelve hours, she spent the next nine years alternately teaching meditation and attending spiritual retreats with Maharihsi in India and Europe.
One evening in 1981, Debra was invited to a seminar called "Money Magic" where she sat transfixed as the speaker shared radical ideas about how prosperity and success are really created – ideas that had nothing to do with working hard or investing wisely but rather with the thoughts we think and the energy we put out. She knew that night that her life's work was to go more deeply into this knowledge and share it with the world.
The next morning she quit her job and began studying the laws of manifestation expounded on by such icons as Napoleon Hill, Wallace Wattles, and Earl Nightengale. In early 1982, she founded Yes to Success Seminars, Inc., a company dedicated to teaching enlightened, timeless principles of how anyone can effortlessly create true success and prosperity.
By 1983, Debra's seminar was being taught in over a dozen major US cities. By 1984 she had reps teaching her ever-growing body of knowledge in seven countries.
Her seminar was the launching pad for numerous now-renowned transformational leaders including Marci Shimoff, Janet Attwood, Peggy O'Neill, Steve Farber and many others.
Debra soon became a favorite talk show guest and appeared on radio and TV from coast to coast. As a sought-after speaker, her client list included Mattel Toys, McDonnell Douglas, the Xerox Management group, Women in Management, Women in Banking, and many others. Her infomercial appeared in 46 markets and was the first self-help cassette series ever sold through this, then brand new, long form commercial format.
By 1987 Debra was being represented by a top literary agent and had a book deal in the works with a major publisher—and she was in the middle of negotiations for her own day-time talk show.
In 1988, her world changed forever when the mid-wife handed Debra her new baby girl. Being true to her own teachings, she followed her heart and put her career on hold. For the next twenty years she devoted her life to being a mom-at-home to her daughter and her son who was born three years later.
Although she fit in a few local keynotes, published What, No Meat?!?! on how to cook for your vegetarian children and the best-selling Chicken Soup for the American Idol Soul,
and ran a successful home-based business, she only worked when there were no basketball games to cheer at, recitals to attend, or birthday parties to throw--and she was almost always home to tuck her children in bed.
Fast forward to 2011. With her baby girl off to college and her son running his own successful business, although she took a break from being a professional speaker to be a professional mom, the timeless principles of her Yes to Success.jpg)
seminars are as useful today as they were in 1981.
Adding richness to her already vast knowledge is the incredible wisdom and insight into the human spirit she gained from being a wife and mother.
Debra is now again helping thousands more say Yes to Success.
.png)
"If you are truly ready for illumination, look no further than the knowledge you will gain from my good friend Debra Poneman."
