In this very exciting interview today Mark stamped his passport in his #1 destination, Amsterdam. On today’s podcast, we brought in author, Lisette Schuitemaker. Born in the Netherlands, Lisette is the eldest of four children which is the subject of her 2016 book The Eldest Daughter Effect. She also wrote in 2017 The Childhood Conclusions Fix and Childless Living (2019). 

In this episode, Mark and Lisette discussed Lisette's inspirations and conclusions for creating her books, writing non-fiction, and the inside tellings on her new book she's working on, The Inner Life of Money.

In the first part of our interview, Mark asks about “alleviating loneliness and how we feel we are the only ones”. Lisette mentions attending the Barbara Brand School of Healing where she learned about the insightful theory of psychiatrist William Reich. She breaks down his 5 conclusions that people come out of childhood with. 

• I should of not been born, I am different
• We are not good enough
• Being ashamed of ourselves 
• We should be in control
• We should be perfect

 Her insightful feedback around these childhood issues coming from the eldest child is that even though we think we are not good enough, we end up trying harder and we wanna do better. She says that kind of makes it the “positive side of it”. And in turn, the negative side of it can be self-destructive and you end up starting over and over again.

Observing patterns in firstborns like Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Cheryl Sandberg, JK Rowling, Beyonce, and many many more that her main key takeaway was “responsibility”. 

She says alleviating loneliness, is also a “kind of freeing ourselves up to be our true selves and not be at a mercy of patterns that we learned in our childhood”.

Lisette's “Hero’s Journey” in creating Non-fiction 

“You have to know a lot about your material, and at the same time, you have to have some distance from it so that you can kind of be a bit more abstract in a way, whereas you're still factual.” 

The book that's always on her table is The Grounded Theory and it says, “look at your data, keep looking at your data, because at some point, a pattern will emerge.”

She describes writing as:

• It isn't always writing
• It’s also reading, 
• Writing is also despairing. 
• Writing is going back to notes, and then going back to previous versions. 

“I think my imagination is not as large as my curiosity and my wanting to know how things are and my kind of empathy for people in certain situations. And then that's what I write about.”

Lisette is currently working on a new book, The Inner Life of Money. She talks about currently co-writing on the topic of money and how she shares her ideas back and forth with her partner. 

Listen towards the end as she discusses her new book and to learn more about Lisette and her books go to her website at lisetteschuitemaker.com/en/

You can also find her on Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram. 

 Copyright 2026 Mark Stinson

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