Amanda Forrow arrived in South Africa with a suitcase, R1 000.00 and lots of hope in 1981. Having been a secretary and secretarial teacher both in England and Germany.  Amanda Forrow spent 5 months in the United States but they were not persuaded to give her a green card – so she left!

Amanda then lived in Pretoria where she taught word processing, sold word processors and then, almost bored into a coma, threw caution to the wind and opened a boutique, thus satisfying her lust for clothes.  After three years she sold up so that she could audition for TV advertisements and because the director thought she had an “interesting face” he cast her in an “Eno’s” advertisement.  She then made Martin Bailie an offer he could not understand and joined Radio 5 on the Breakfast Show  for 3 years.  She was approached to do a fun cookery show on TV1 and Graffiti Gourmet was launched.  Most of the SABC management suffered coronaries!

To add insult to injury, Amanda Forrow started “The Buck Stops Here” a consumer programme on Radio 5, and at last some consumers were getting what they paid for.  During this time Amanda became a popular MC and after-dinner speaker, often putting women’s thoughts across to men for a change, something that she still believes is not taken seriously enough.  Pick & Pay and Amanda then teamed up every Saturday morning, which proved to be the most popular cookery show yet.  She then launched her “Girl Talk” radio show where she really let the guys have it.

 “How to be Happy” Presentation

Over and above her television work, radio and voice-overs, Amanda also delivers presentations specially designed for Women’s Groups.

After the death of her sister from cancer and then her mother a year later from the same, she decided to take a sabbatical from radio and TV and concentrate on writing.

It seems to me that these days one can buy a ‘How To’ book on everything except “How To Be Happy”. So often Amanda is asked how she appears to stay happy in the face of all the difficulty and sadness she has been through.  Her answer is that she spent four years analysing this and preparing the answers in an effort to help people not be afraid of what life throws at them.

In her motivational presentations, Amanda shares her ideas on how to get happy and stay happy in the face of adversity and how to effectively handle regret, fear, change and criticism. In fact, all the emotional scenarios that plague individuals and bar their journey to happiness.

“CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE - ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?”

In Amanda Forrow’s new talk “Change Your Mind, Change Your Life” she has pinpointed, with much humour, why people are de-motivated, why they don’t seem to have enough hours in the day to achieve all they want to, why fear of change cripples them and why they are negative and unhappy about their lives.

In this thought provoking and fun talk she shares with us how she has managed to stay a happy, successful and motivated person after much personal loss and tragedy.  How to overcome our fear of change, our negativity, how to build relationships at home and at work and how to achieve anything we set out to by building a credible bridge to that dream.

Amanda says that South Africans are incredibly talented we just lack the inspiration to believe in ourselves, sometimes thinking that imported is better!  We cannot be negative about this country or ourselves, so we need to Change our minds to change our outcomes!  As Einstein said “Doing the same thing time and time again expecting a different result is a sign of madness”, so we have to change the way we approach things to get a better result/life.

Amanda is a talented, fun speaker who keeps the audience interested all the way through the twists and turns of her talk having been an Emcee and after dinner speaker for the past 22 years.