“Don’t be afraid of change… We have to keep going because life is never going to go the way we planned. But those twists and turns might really surprise you. Change is inevitable, and I’m going to embrace it.”
Career Reinvention: Rebuilding After You Lose It All
Career reinvention is often talked about like a clean pivot. For former ESPN sportscaster Anne Montgomery, it looked more like a slow, painful rebuild — one that started with losing the only career she’d ever wanted.
Anne broke into sports broadcasting in 1972, when women reading sports stories on air was considered radical. She spent years being shut out by coaches who refused to speak to female reporters, eventually working her way up to five television stations, including ESPN, before her career ended in her late 30s. The industry’s target demographic skewed young, and once she crossed that line, the job offers stopped.
Career Change After 40 Starts With Grief
Anne didn’t handle the loss gracefully at first. She fell into debt, went through a difficult divorce, and hid from anyone who might recognize her. She took work as an amateur sports official, using her umpire uniform as a kind of disguise from her old life.
The turning point came from an unlikely source: her umpiring partner, a Vietnam veteran dying of Agent Orange poisoning. While Anne complained about her stalled career, he spoke about the beauty of Vietnam and the people he’d met there. His perspective forced her to reconsider her own.
From Sportscaster to Teacher to Foster Mother
That shift eventually led Anne back to school, where she became a journalism teacher — a role that exposed her to poverty, homelessness, and hardship she hadn’t previously understood. Getting to know her students changed how she taught, and it changed her life. She went on to foster six young people, two of whom became her legal children.
Alongside teaching, Anne kept writing — a skill built from a decade of writing broadcast scripts. That habit eventually became six traditionally published novels, many featuring children navigating hardship.
The Takeaway on Career Reinvention
Anne’s advice is simple: grieve the loss, then treat change as something to move through, not around. Her own reinvention wasn’t planned, but it became the most meaningful chapter of her life.
To hear Anne’s full story in her own words, listen to the episode: https://tinyurl.com/Progress-and-Purpose-Podcast
Episode Highlights:
01:48 Meet Anne Montgomery: From Locker Room Outsider to ESPN Anchor
06:42 Why Female Sportscasters Got Pushed Out at 40
19:51 Life After the Camera: Hiding Behind an Umpire Uniform
14:05 The Veteran Who Changed How She Saw Her Own Complaining
16:39 Becoming a Teacher in a Title One High School
21:22 From Sports Scripts to Six Published Novels
22:39 The Phone Call That Made Her a Foster Mom
26:06 Anne’s Advice: Don’t Be Afraid of Change
Resources:
📖 The Adventures of Harold from the Hood Book Series:
🚙A Trip to the Park: https://bit.ly/40Lvv6h
🤝🏽Friends Like Different Things: https://bit.ly/4ocAQxq
🍟 Fun Time Lunch Time: https://bit.ly/4odUCJ1
😤 When I Feel So Annoyed: https://bit.ly/4l6WSPt
Meet Anne:
Anne Butler Montgomery has worked as a television sportscaster, newspaper and magazine writer, teacher, author, and amateur sports official. Her first TV job came at WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia, and led to positions at WROC-TV in Rochester, New York, KTSP-TV in Phoenix, Arizona, and ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, where she anchored the Emmy- and ACE award-winning SportsCenter.
She finished her on-camera broadcasting career with a two-year stint as the studio host for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Montgomery was a freelance and/or staff reporter for six publications, writing sports, features, movie reviews, and archeological pieces. Her novels include Your Forgotten Sons, The Castle, A Light in the Desert, Wild Horses on the Salt, The Scent of Rain, and Wolf Catcher. Montgomery taught journalism and communication skills in a Title I high school for 20 years and was an amateur sports official for four decades, a time during which she called baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball games and served as a high school football referee and crew chief.
Montgomery is a foster mom to three sons and a daughter. When she can, she indulges in her passions: rock collecting, scuba diving, and playing her guitar. She splits her time between Phoenix, Arizona, and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Quotes:
05:38 “Sometimes in life, some strange thing occurs that you didn’t expect, and it changes everything.” —Anne Montgomery
11:59 “If you want to stay in the game, you’ve got to think beyond your playing days… Even the ones that do make it, it’s going to end, and we have to be prepared for that. And most of us are not prepared.” —Anne Montgomery
18:08 “I made it a priority to get to know [the students] and to know what they were dealing with. There was abuse, neglect, drugs and alcohol, gangs and guns, and foster care and all of these situations. If a kid is dealing with all that, homework doesn’t matter. We had kids who were hungry all the time.” —Anne Montgomery
26:06 “Don’t be afraid of change… We have to keep going because life is never going to go the way we planned. But those twists and turns might really surprise you. Change is inevitable, and I’m going to embrace it.” —Anne Montgomery
27:37 “You can overcome obstacles if you put action steps into overcoming those obstacles. We go through to grow to.” —Dr. Jim Price
transcript:
Anne Montgomery: I understand it. I do because if this is the one thing you always wanted, and then you got it, and then it’s over. I would be a teacher, end up being a teacher for 20 years, and I would talk to my students, I was a high school teacher, about what they wanted in the future, and I can’t tell you how many young people, especially young men, boys, wanted to be professional athletes. I said, that’s great because I’ll never tell anybody that can’t be something, even though I know the chances of them being professional athletes are pretty miniscule. I said, great. What do you want to do after that? And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, those careers are very short. And if you want to stay in sports, do you want to be a sports journalist? Do you want to be a trainer? Do you want to be a coach? Do you want to be a sports attorney? If you want to stay in the game, you have to think beyond your playing days.
Dr. Jim Price: Hello, I’m Dr. Jim Price, and welcome to The Purpose and Progress Podcast. This is the place where we explore how purpose can guide our actions, and how growth can become a part of our everyday lives. On the show, I talk with amazing guests, from educators and creators to everyday people with extraordinary stories about the challenges they face, the lessons they’ve learned, and how to keep moving forward. My goal is to share conversations that inspire you to live intentionally, embrace growth, and take meaningful steps to your own purpose. Let’s get started.
Hello, and welcome to The Purpose and Progress podcast show. I’m your host, Dr. Jim Price, and we’re here again. We have shared inspirational, motivational stories of amazing individuals from different industries who are doing amazing things, and influencing, impacting people from all walks of life. And today’s show is no different. We have a wonderful guest here. She is a former television sportscaster, newspaper and magazine writer, teacher, author, and amateur sports official whose career spans broadcasting, journalism, education, and publishing. After working for 5 TV stations, including ESPN, where she anchored the Emmy and Ace Award-winning Sports Center, and served as studio host for NBA’s Phoenix Suns. She transitioned to teaching journalism and communication for 20 years at the Title 1 High School, an experience that reshaped her priorities and perspective. And is an author of So today, we have an amazing guest, Anne Montgomery. Nice to have you here. How are you doing?
Anne Montgomery: I’m good, thank you. And I appreciate you inviting me to join you today.
Dr. Jim Price: It’s such a pleasure. I think about in the morning when I’m having my coffee and stuff like that, I probably should be so. But sometimes, I take a peek at ESPN in the morning and should be saying that my boss is all gonna be like, yeah, that’s what you’re doing. But I definitely admire all the work you’ve done in terms of all the things. I’m definitely a sports person too.
Anne Montgomery: And we’ll have a lot to talk about.
Dr. Jim Price: So for you, in terms of your journey to success and stuff, where do you feel like it started? What influenced you to go down that path toward success in that way?
Anne Montgomery: Well, I’ve had a number of lives, so it depends on what you mean by success. As far as sports broadcasting is concerned, when I was 17, I was in a broadcast crew in my high school. And accidentally one day, I got handed a sports story. I went in and decided I was going to read that sports story. We had a half hour show that we did, and the boys got very upset. They said, you can’t read a sports story. You’re a girl. And then the teacher, who was the head of the group, said, we got 5 minutes to air. If Anne wants to read the sports, she can read the sports. And they got angry. But then I did the same thing the next day, and I kept doing it. So they gave me theme music. They played Mission Impossible, and then they called me Big Anne with the sports up next. And they thought that would offend me, but I liked it. So when my mother marched up to me at the beginning of my senior year and said, we have to pick a college. What do you want to do? I said, I’m going to be a sportscaster. Now remember, this was 1972, and women simply didn’t do those kinds of things then. So it was quite an uphill battle.
I was 28 before I got my first job in television. Because even in college, I went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which is a small school, but a big sports school. And senior year, they said, you want to anchor this sports show on the PBS station? I said yes, and I had a male co-anchor. And what I didn’t realize was that the football coach, the baseball coach, and the basketball coach all refused to speak to me. They wouldn’t let me interview their players because they weren’t going to talk to a woman. And I was like, what am I supposed to do now? I had this thought. Well, wait a minute. They’re not the only sports on campus. There’s ice hockey, and there’s archery, and there’s swimming, and there’s wrestling, and there’s all these other teams no one pays any attention to, and they were thrilled. They didn’t care that I was a woman. They’re like, you’re going to do a story on us. And so that’s what I did. But I got out of college, and nobody would even talk to me. I spent, I don’t know, the next couple of years working in a bar in Georgetown or Washington DC, late 70s, early 80s, and I will say it was very much fun. I’m very thrilled that there weren’t people running around with cameras back then because I wouldn’t want the evidence of those years.
But how sometimes in life, some strange thing occurs that you didn’t expect, and it changes everything. I’ve had a couple of those moments. This moment was a Washington Capitals hockey game. I was invited to go. My aunt, who was more like a sister, said, come with me. She had a date. He was an amateur ice hockey official. Now, I have grown up ice skating. I was a figure skater and a nice dancer. No talent, but I grew up in an arena. And he’s bemoaning the fact that there aren’t enough officials to work kids’ games, or even high school, or whatever. And my aunt goes, yeah, Anne can skate. And I said, yes. He goes, you want to be a referee? And I said, sure. Well, I did that first game at like 7:00 o’clock in the morning after working in the restaurant till, I don’t know, 3:00. And I don’t remember much about the game except it was the first time I ever put on hockey skates in my life. I grew up on figure skates, and I didn’t realize that hockey skates did not have toe picks, and so I fell. The first three times, I’m taking my face off. And they’re these little children, 6 years old hockey players. You know the little tiny ones.
Dr. Jim Price: Yeah.
Anne Montgomery: Their jerseys are at their ankles, and they have little sticks. And their helmets are all crooked because their heads are so little. And they’re all staring at me like, what’s wrong with the ref? I don’t remember anything else about that game, but I do recall the ride home. I realized that because I grew up before Title IX, I hadn’t played all those sports. I didn’t know enough about sports to be a competent sports reporter. So I realized that after taking the hockey test, and the classes, and learning about how to be an official, the only people that really read rule books are officials. And so I decided I would become a certified amateur official in the 5 main team spectator sports, football, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball. And I would do that for 5 years. I worked in the bar to pay my bills, and they were very kind and scheduled around all my games. And I believe somewhere that there would be a forward thinking news director who would give me a chance. And that’s what happened. And I ended up going from Columbus, Georgia, to Rochester, New York, to Phoenix, to ESPN, back to Phoenix where I worked for the Suns for a few years, and then my career was over. I wasn’t pretty enough to be in front of a camera anymore. When you’re pushing 40 as a woman, you know it’s different. If I had a gold medal in the Olympics, they wouldn’t care how old I was. But to be a regular sports broadcaster for all sports, it’s like if I played in the WNBA today, they’d go, oh, yeah. Sure. You want to be a sportscaster? My age probably wouldn’t matter. Back then, it was all about what you look like. The target audience was 18 to 34 year old males. So the attitude was, once you’re 35, you’re over the hill. I couldn’t get a job anywhere. It was horrible.
Dr. Jim Price: I would never have thought that that’s the thing. People will see success and what’s going on, but they never know what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s stories like that, yours is a story, definitely of perseverance to continue, to push forward in spite of everything that happens.
Anne Montgomery: You don’t realize it’s going to end. It’s kind of like a pro athletic career. You have football players, guys who wanted to play football, wanted to be in the NFL their whole lives. And then they get there, and the average career is 3.6 years. So now you’re 26 years old. Now, what are you going to do? I was almost like that. I didn’t expect it to end when it did, and I was depressed. I was in the middle of what was going to be a bad divorce. I was in debt because I had to live off credit cards because I now didn’t have a job. When I worked with the Suns, it was just seasoned. I didn’t have a full time job so it was very difficult, and I felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew. And one day, I went into a sports bar. I figured they needed a bartender, and I went to the manager and said, look, I can entertain your patrons with sports stories and discussions, whether they’re sober or not. And I can make a great cocktail. And he looked me up and down like I was a piece of meat. He said, I don’t think so. And I realized that he wanted a 20-something in a push-up bra and a short skirt.
So you know what I did? I went and pulled out all my officiating gear because that was the one thing I could do that someone would pay me for. I live in Arizona, and there’s sports year-round, constantly. And so I put my umpire gear back on, and I got my football officiating out. Those are the two sports I did primarily, football and baseball. And I went back to officiating, and I live. I hid behind my uniforms. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I didn’t want anybody to say, so what are you doing now? I umpired little league in high school, and I’m doing Pop Warner football. And not too long ago, I was on national television. And then one day, I walked into the grocery store. I really was trying to hide. I just umpired a baseball game, and so my hair’s in a messy ponytail. I’m in my blue umpire shirt, and I’m all sweaty in my gray pants and my plate shoes. And this man is staring at me, and he walked up to me and he looked at me, and he goes, didn’t you used to be somebody? And I was horrified so I spent the next 3, 4 years feeling sorry for me calling ball games.
Dr. Jim Price: That is something. A lot of people just don’t understand how that feels. When you were talking about athletes and how they go through that too, like it’s only a shelf life, it’s only a small portion of that life that is dedicated to that. Then after that, what are you doing for the rest of your life?
Anne Montgomery: They go through a horrible change, and I understand it. I do. Because if this is the one thing you always wanted, and then you got it, and then it’s over, I would be a teacher, end up being a teacher for 20 years, and I would talk to my students, I was a high school teacher, about what they wanted in the future. And I can’t tell you how many young people, especially young men, boys, wanted to be professional athletes. I said, that’s great. Because I’ll never tell anybody that can’t be something, even though I know the chances of them being professional athletes are pretty miniscule. I said, that’s great. What do you want to do after that? And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, those careers are very short. And if you want to stay in sports, do you want to be a sports journalist? Do you want to be a trainer? Do you want to be a coach? Do you want to be a sports attorney? If you want to stay in the game, you have to think beyond your playing days. Because I know what that feels like, and I wasn’t planning for that. I wasn’t planning for life beyond sports casting.
Dr. Jim Price: Even with myself, I played basketball too. It’s like once I got to college and the season’s over, everything was done. It’s like, hey, that’s the last hurrah right there.
Anne Montgomery: How long did it take you to get over that?
Dr. Jim Price: It took me a little bit of time. It’s like how they say the game passes you by. Now, you see the younger people play and stuff like that, but you still support it. But it will never just be the same.
Anne Montgomery: And most people will never play after high school. We have men’s leagues. I’ve worked in a lot of men’s and women’s leagues, and that’s cool. That’s relatively new, but it’s very hard to give that up. All of us who participated in sports, when I was an ice skater, I had these ridiculous visions of gold medals in the Olympics. I was not very good. But I’m guessing, maybe when you were playing in high school, you were like, I’m going to be in the NBA. We all did that. But even the ones that do make it, the minuscule number of people that do make it, it’s going to end. And we have to be prepared for that. And most of us are not prepared.
Dr. Jim Price: It seemed like you definitely went through a lot of obstacles. How do you feel? I know you were talking about dealing with depression. How did you handle that in terms of trying to pull yourself forward out of that?
Anne Montgomery: I didn’t handle it very well at all. It’s funny. Two things happened. One, because I was a woman official. There weren’t many women officials then either, so it was just as bad as being a broadcaster. I didn’t fit in. I was always the only woman around, and men didn’t want to work with me. And both careers were very difficult in regard to being a woman. Now, we see more women officials. But back then, I was always the only woman on the field, and very often the only woman in the room when we were having classes and that kind of thing. So I walked onto a baseball field one day during this period. And sometimes, you don’t know who you’re working with. They just paired you up with somebody, and I walked towards the field, and the game was finishing up. And this white-haired gentleman with a beard and a very pronounced limp saw me. I waited on the side to introduce myself when he was done. He was doing two games, and he seemed thrilled to see me. And I’m like, wow. Most guys don’t really look depressed when I show up because I’m a really good umpire. But it didn’t matter that I was a woman, right? So we ended up Don Clarkson, and I ended up umpiring baseball for 5 years together. We were partners, baseball partners. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen where umpires get to the game. We dress out of the back of our cars. We have our folding chairs and our water bottles, right? So we spent a lot of time together. And what did I do? I bitched the whole time about, I couldn’t get a job, and my husband was an alcoholic. And poor me, poor me. Well, Don was a Vietnam veteran.
Dr. Jim Price: Oh, wow.
Anne Montgomery: He limped pronouncedly because he’d been shot. He was dying from Agent Orange poisoning, and had terrible post-traumatic stress. I didn’t understand any of these things, really. I was so busy complaining. Yet, he would tell me stories about Vietnam. He would tell me about how beautiful the country was, and he was like an advisor. He was in the jungle. He was in bad, bad situations, and he would tell me some of those stories. But then he told me how wonderful the people were, and how beautiful the country was. And here was a man with 8 kids. He’s dying, and he’s being the most positive person around. And I did nothing but complain. And slowly but surely, I started to think, hmm, maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about, poor me, I can’t be on TV. And poor me, my marriage is falling apart. And poor me, I’m in debt. I’m not dying, and I’m not going to leave 8 children and a wife behind. And Don kind of changed my perspective to a certain extent. All during this time, other people I knew kept saying, you should be a teacher. I’m like, I don’t want to be a teacher. They’re going to hire me back on TV. I know they are. So finally, like four years later, I decided to go back to college. I had a journalism communications degree, got me nothing. I went back two years to college, became a teacher, and ended up being hired to teach journalism and communication skills in a Title 1 high school. Title 1 means the vast majority of my students lived in poverty. I’m a middle class kid from Northern New Jersey. Both my parents had college degrees. I got my college, got paid for it. I did not live in this world.
Dr. Jim Price: Yeah.
Anne Montgomery: And I went in as the biggest hard ass you could ever be. They hired me to teach a number of things, but one was a video production. We did TV shows every week. My kids screwed up constantly, and I was like, you got to be on time. You have to do your work. This is the most important stuff. And one day, a little girl stood up in my classroom, and she goes, we don’t like you. None of us like you. And I just paused. I’m in front of the room. I didn’t know what to say. And she said, we’re leaving. And every kid in that class walked out. And I’m a pretty tough girl, but I stood in front of that classroom and cried. I’m in front of an empty classroom, and all my kids left. And another teacher, shortly thereafter, came up to me and said, have you ever considered being nicer? I said, what do you mean nicer? There’s nothing nice in a newsroom. There’s nothing nice on a football field. What do you mean nicer? She said, these are kids. I still didn’t get it. I still did not get it. And then one day, I dragged this kid out of class, 14 years old, late every single day. And I’m just horrible. And he’s looking at his shoes, and he said, I’m so sorry Miss Montgomery, but I had to sleep on my uncle’s couch last night, and I don’t understand the bus system from there. And so that’s why I’m late, and I don’t know where I’m sleeping every night. And I went, holy. Oh, my God, this child is homeless. From that day forward, I became nicer.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have high expectations for my students. I did, but I made it clear. I made it a priority to get to know them, and to know what they were dealing with. We had kids who were abused and neglected, and drugs and alcohol, and gangs and guns, and foster care, all of these situations. If a kid is dealing with all that, homework doesn’t matter. If a kid is hungry, we had kids who were hungry all the time, and we would send food baskets home on the weekends so they could eat. We had a room right off my classroom where the social workers, other people put together a room where any kid could walk in at any time and get a shirt, a pair of pants, some shoes, a backpack, toiletries, no questions asked. And it was eye opening to me. I made it a point to get to know what they were dealing with. If I could help them, I did. I couldn’t always help them. I tried, but it made me realize what a jerk I was. How I cared so much about things that were not the least bit important, like me being on television.
Dr. Jim Price: And I think that’s something a lot of educators deal with. I’m an educator too. I counsel kids and stuff, so I resonate with that idea. Sometimes, you don’t know what the kids are going through, and what they bring into school with them, what’s on their mind and stuff like that. That could be something that could profoundly impact their time on learning, and their ability to focus, and a lot of other things too. But I know you did publish some books too, and I wanted to have you touch on some of the books.
Anne Montgomery: It’s funny, people don’t understand that when you watch a news show or a sports show, it’s not like you’re calling a ball game, right? You’re on an anchor desk. You write all that. That’s all written ahead of time. Now, people can add a few things. But the bottom line is you’ve got so many people working on that show, a director, producer, camera people, and they need to know what you’re doing. So we write all these. Stories. Now, it’s ironic that when I was in my 50s, I found out I’m dyslexic, and I was just called stupid and lazy when I was a kid. I was not a very good student early on. It’s very funny. I started writing sports, thousands of sports stories. And when you’re doing local news in a small mart, or a Phoenix, even if you did two shows a day, you maybe wrote 25 stories a day. When I got out of television, I couldn’t. I mentioned that I couldn’t find the job I applied for. I saw an ad in the paper, and it said a sports reporter wanted to be at the little newspaper. I ran over there. Said, I like to be your sports reporter. And the editor went. I gave him my resume of the 5 TV stations I worked for, and he said, I don’t think so. I said, what do you mean? He said, you don’t know how to write about sports. I said, I wrote everything I ever said for 10 years, everything. So he said, we’ll give you a chance. It was a 7-dollar an hour job, by the way, and I started writing stories. So when you go from TV, they’re shorter. Then now, I’ve got a couple columns to write, and so my stories just got longer, and they kept ending up on the front page of the paper. So then another newspaper hired me, some magazines hired me. I was a staffer or a freelancer, but it was never a full time gig. But I was writing stories now, and for magazines that might mean 2000 words. The jump to novels was just a longer form of storytelling. So yeah, I have six traditionally published novels. None are about sports.
Dr. Jim Price: Oh, okay.
Anne Montgomery: Almost all of them have children in them in some capacity. Children that are struggling, and that’s from, of course, my time teaching. And I’m going to add that something else happened while I was teaching that changed my life completely. At the end of the school year, I worried about my kids. Because you got 10 weeks of unstructured time for kids living in very precarious neighborhoods, and I worried about them. And sometimes, the kids took my classes over and over. I was taught the newspaper class, and I might have a kid for 4 years, so I got to know the kids pretty well. And I would worry about them. So even though they said to never do this, I did it anyway. I would put my phone number in the board, and I said, look, if you get in trouble, don’t know what to do, call me. I will do my best to help you out. And one summer, this young man called me. I really, I hardly knew him, and he called me to chat. And I said, is there anything wrong, Brandon? Can I help you? He goes, no, no, I’m okay. It’s fine. He was 14. And then I said, I put you in my newspaper class, so I’ll see you next year when you come back to school. So we chatted a few times. I sensed something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.
So school started, and he didn’t show up for two weeks. I’m worried, but I called his number, and it had been disconnected. And honestly, in that school, that happens frequently. Kids just disappear. Then one day, I got a call at school, and it was him. And he said, Miss Montgomery, I’m hungry. I said, what? He said, well, I’m in foster care now, and they lock up all the food in the morning. The school doesn’t have my paperwork, so they won’t feed me lunch. I was so pissed. I said, honey, can I call you back? This number is good. Yeah, I’ll call you back. And I’m lucky. I had no students in my class. I’m swearing like a sailor, pissed off. And the teacher who told me to be nicer wandered over, and she said, what’s the problem? And I explained. And she said, well, if it bothers you so much, call the people at foster care and say he can live with you. And I said, don’t be ridiculous. I said, I’m 55 years old. I’ve never had any children. I wasn’t able to have any children, and so that bothered me for quite a while. And then I put that out of my life. I’m never going to be a mom. And she said, then stop complaining. Well, two weeks later, that young man was dropped at my doorstep.
Dr. Jim Price: Wow.
Anne Montgomery: I went to foster mom school, which is a thing. 10 weeks of foster mom school. I ended up having six young people live in my house. Not all were my legal foster children, but two were my legal foster children. Two just decided I was mom, and one was homeless. Later on, there were two others. So six young people have passed through my home needing a place to figure life out. And my oldest son, Brandon, the first one who called me, has a 9-year-old son. He called me to the hospital when that little boy was born, and handed him to me. He goes, now you’re a grandma, mom.
Dr. Jim Price: Wow.
Anne Montgomery: And none of that would have happened.
Dr. Jim Price: Yes, yeah.
Anne Montgomery: None of it would have happened if I hadn’t become a teacher, and if I hadn’t changed my attitude about what was important.
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Dr. Jim Price: So in terms of the audience, I’m sure, they would definitely love to get a hold of some of your novels. How can our audience get a hold of your novels?
Anne Montgomery: Very easy. My name, annemontgomerywriter.com, is my website. Everything is there. annemontgomerywriter, that’s Anne with an E, .com. and they can just put my name in Amazon. All my books, you can buy them anywhere, pretty much. And again, many of them have children. And it’s not the main theme. But many of the themes are about difficulties in life and environmental issues. I do have one that’s about World War II that’s totally different. But yeah, the kids always end up in my books somewhere.
Dr. Jim Price: So this is such an inspiring inspiration. It was just a story of perseverance pushing through, and overcoming obstacles and challenges. And it’s just so amazing that you were able to learn and grow from all those experiences. If you were to give advice to the audience watching who are going through depression, and going through their hardships and stuff, what advice would you give the audience?
Anne Montgomery: Don’t be afraid of change. I didn’t pick what happened to me, and I spent way too much time feeling sorry for myself. I really did. The only thing I regret in my whole life is that I waited a little too long to move forward. I don’t know if you ever saw Finding Nemo. I’m a scuba diver, so I like Finding Nemo. Where Dory goes, just keep swimming. So we have to just keep going, because life is never going to go the way we planned. But those twists and turns might really surprise you, and you might find something. Today, honestly, I would change nothing. But going through it was extremely difficult.
Dr. Jim Price: Yes.
Anne Montgomery: And I think we deserve a little time to grieve, because losing a job is like death in a way. But then we have to find out what else we can do. And again, I think we just have to keep moving forward. And I know how hard that is to do, but I think we can do it if we just say, okay, change is inevitable, and I’m going to embrace it.
Dr. Jim Price: Wow, that is so amazing, and definitely words of wisdom, nuggets of truth. Wisdom all rolled into one. All of it is so inspiring, and you definitely were this guest today. I’m just so blessed and happy that we are able to connect and have such a wonderful conversation in this way. But like I always say, we’re always about motivation, growth, expansion, understanding self, understanding self love, self worth, and understanding that you can overcome obstacles if you action steps into overcoming those obstacles. So once again, great for having you today. And I always say, we go through to grow, and everything’s like that. So the audience, I know you’ve definitely pulled a lot of wonderful things out of this conversation. And once again, that’s what we do. We look to inspire change through growth and understanding of just not self, but the world that we live in as well. So until next time, this is The Purpose and Progress Podcast Show. I’m your host, Dr. Jim Price. I always say, stay prayed up and stay blessed. Thank you.
Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Purpose in Progress Podcast. I hope today’s conversation gave you insight, inspiration, or a fresh perspective to help you move forward with purpose. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could use a little encouragement. You can also support the podcast through the donation link in the show notes. Every contribution helps us keep sharing stories that uplift and inspire. Remember, your purpose is waiting, and progress never stops. I’ll see you next time.