Sandra Joseph - Unmasking What Matters: 10 Life Lessons from 10 Years on Broadway

Praise for Unmasking What Matters

Theater fans will love the insiders stories culled from Sandras years on Broadwaybut absolutely anyone, regardless of their familiarity with theater, can and will benefit from the lessons contained in these pages. Its impossible to read this book and come out on the other side feeling anything but awakened.

Jack Canfield, Coauthor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Sandra Joseph is a tender and clear soul whose journey unpacks what it means to hear your voice, and whose voice touches the center we all share.

Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening and The One Life Were Given

As a speaker, a writer, a singer, and a deep soul, Sandra Joseph shares her authentic voice to transform peoples lives. Her message of Unmasking What Matters will give you the courage and conviction to play the leading role in your own life story. In this heartfelt book, she shares her own struggle to remove fear from center stage and instead put love front and centerand she provides you with the tools, and courage, you need to do the same.

Marci Shimoff, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Happy for No Reason and Chicken Soup for the Womans Soul

Have you ever wondered how some people get the courage to go after what they really want? They get it by identifying whats important and persevering in their pursuit of it DESPITE doubts and disappointments. Sandra Joseph pulls back the curtain and dares to reveal what really happens on the long road to success. Youll appreciate her honest insights, her put-you-in-the-scene storytelling and her inspiring wisdom about how she unmasked and honored what really matters - and how you can too.

Sam Horn, author of Got Your Attention and SOMEDAY is Not a Day in the Week

Drawing on her personal experiences on and off the stage, as well as cutting edge research, Sandra Joseph provides the information, tools, and loving support needed to move through blocks and take your life to the next level.

JJ Virgin, New York Times best-selling author of The Virgin Diet

What does it take to claim a new story and live the life we came to live? In Unmasking What Matters, Sandra Joseph shows us it is possible to release the roles weve been assigned to take center stage in our own lives. Whether shes sharing her message on the page or on the stage, she will take you by the heart and guide you home to your own center and your own voice. Here, you learn it is safe to love who you already are and lead your own life, unmasked.

Gail Larsen, author and teacher, Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story

Full of compassion and hard-won wisdom, Unmasking What Matters is a gentle, uplifting road-map back to the self.

Barnet Bain, director of Miltons Secret, producer of What Dreams May Come

Copyright 2018 Sandra Joseph

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-397-7 pbk
ISBN: 978-1-63152-398-4 ebk
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958666

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr
Mask Logo Debbie Prinz, Prinz Marketing Communications

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Photos used with permission from Joan Marcus, The Really Useful Group, The Phantom Company

For my dad, whose care made everything possible.
For my mom, whose sensitivity is her strength.
For Monica, whose heart holds up the world.
For Ron, whose superpower is love.

We never know when we will blossom into what were supposed to be. It might be early. It might be late. It might be after thirty years of failing at a misguided way. Or the very first time we dare to shed our mental skin and touch the world.

Mark Nepo

It is clear that I have traveled through life thirsting for what was inside all along, while focused externally on the ever-changing horizon of achievement and opportunity. I have identified with my changing roles more than with the Inner Light, which is immortal. I have suffered from a case of mistaken identity.

Joan Borysenko

T he year after I left Phantom, two things happened that reshaped me: I was diagnosed with a tumor at the entry point of my brain, and my beloved fathermy first and biggest fandied suddenly. I found myself immersed in a felt sense of the unpredictability of life and a renewed awareness of limited time. The urgency I experienced surprised me. It had nothing to do with playing another role in a Broadway show. What I wanted more than anything was to be able to fully inhabit the role of Sandra Joseph, without embellishment or apologysomething I had never quite known how to do.

From the start, I was a most unlikely Broadway star. A shy, highly sensitive kid who went out of her way to avoid being the center of attention, I didnt find the courage to step into the spotlight for years. But after decades of personal development, singing and acting training, and more rejection than I care to remember, I became the leading lady in Andrew Lloyd Webbers The Phantom of the Opera, Christine Daaa role in which I would make history.

The fact that I hold the record as Broadways longest-running female star is still hard for me to wrap my head around. I played Christine some 1,300 times, performing six nights a week for nearly a decade. Many of those nights, as grateful as I was to have achieved my childhood dream of performing, my insecurity robbed me of feeling worthy of my position; I often went home after the show feeling like a failure and a fraud. The unhealed wounds of my past were just as present in the star dressing room as they had been on the playgrounds of my youth. As the years went by, I learned firsthand the truth in Jon Kabat-Zinns wise words, wherever you go, there you are.

I know Im not alone. All too often, many of us make the mistake of thinking that some future accomplishment will somehow change the way we feel about ourselves. We tremble in the wings, paralyzed by self-doubt and fear. We feel stuck and small, lacking the self-confidence to move in the direction of what we really want. Or, if we do have the confidence, we work and struggle and achieve, exhausting ourselves with all of our emotion and activityand yet somehow, no matter our level of outer-world success, we come up short. The happiness we were sure would accompany our success just isnt there, and we are left wondering what all that striving was for.