Former VP of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, Best-Selling Author & Accomplished Entertainment Executive.
After overcoming a childhood of adversity, Tara Schuster quickly rose up the ranks of Comedy Central where she rocketed upwards to become the youngest Vice President of Talent and Development at the network, overseeing all production and creative aspects of shows, such as the Peabody and Emmy award-winning Key & Peele.
What no one knew at work, however, was that, privately, she was battling crippling anxiety and depression. She was good at work but bad at life. After dealing with a particularly dark experience, Tara decided enough was enough and that she needed to take care and control of her mental health. She called upon the same talents she had used to launch hit television shows to begin a life-changing journey of self-healing and self-care. For five years, she researched how to both “be her own parent” and nurture her own wounded well-being—creating a 600-page Google Doc of her findings.
Tara studied and tested practical, easy-to-use, self-care tools that allowed her to create radically better mental health for herself while also thriving in the career she worked so hard to accomplish. She didn’t have to choose between her career and sound mental health and neither should anyone else.
Tara turned her struggle with chronic anxiety and depression into two bestselling books on self-care. Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies has sold over an astounding 250,000 copies and has been translated into five languages. It was selected as one of the Best Non-Fiction Books of 2020 by Goodreads and was selected by Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, Goop, Publishers Weekly and many more as one of the best books of 2020. Glow in the F*cking Dark was released in 2023.
Her humorous take on taking charge of one’s mental health—always backed by empowering action steps—has won praise from readers ranging from Wharton professor Adam Grant to Academy Award-winner Anjelica Huston and bestselling author Glennon Doyle who has said, “You’re going to want Tara Schuster to be your new best friend.” Tara has taught hundreds of thousands of readers about self-care and now hosts the wildly popular “Glow On” journaling club on Substack. Now, Tara has re-entered the corporate world to offer the help she so badly needed.
Tara understands the realities of working in a corporate environment and seeks to help individual contributors, managers and executives prevent and heal burn-out, have better inter-generational dialog, and create a culture where self-care leads to more self-esteem, innovation, productivity and less friction.
As an in-demand speaker, Tara has received invitations from the Fortune 100 and spoken to audiences ranging from Civic Nation to women’s and young professional groups. Bringing a winning combination of humor, vulnerability and hard-won wisdom to the stage, she does more than inspire and motivate audiences to create lasting change in their lives. She provides easy-to-implement tools to take better care of one’s spirit, mental and physical health, and relationships—as both an individual and a member of a workplace team.