How Is That Working for You: Overcoming Challenges When You Are Your Own Obstacle

by Demetria Cooper

Overview

Throughout life, we are presented with personal and professional opportunities, such as building relationships with others, pursuing a fulfilling career, and seeking financial freedom. These amazing open doors may also include trials and tribulations that come in the form of circumstances and individuals. Naysayers might deter you from chasing after a goal, or a truly amazing position might appear to be far off due to responses such as, “Thank you, but we went with another candidate.” People might convince you not to pursue a relationship or go after an educational, health, or financial target. These experiences and external obstacles are par for the course when living a life with an abundance of opportunities.

If—or rather when—you get knocked down while pursuing these opportunities, most times you can get back up and continue to move. But is that so easy when the individual or thing that knocked you down is internal? What happens when the obstruction is the individual gazing back in the mirror? Is it as simple as continuing to move toward the end state?

In How Is That Working for You: Overcoming Challenges When You Are Your Own Obstacle, Deidre “DeDe” Sanderson and Louisa Mae “Blu” Angel are two accomplished female military veterans who have had fruitful professions serving and empowering others. This book uncovers how both women came to realize that anxiety, fear of failure, self-doubt, and workaholism have brought them to be impediments in their personal lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798891382275
Publisher:	Mascot Books
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	8.25(w) x 5.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Demetria Latrice Cooper was born in Mississippi. She primarily grew up in Brooklyn, New York, but also lived in Oklahoma, Chicago, Illinois, Louisiana, Wilmington, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Demetria graduated from Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn in 1996 and is the second oldest sibling with an older half-brother and two younger sisters. Demetria is the proud mother of two daughters, ages twenty-four and twenty-one, and a seventeen-year-old son.

Demetria’s professional background includes service to the nation with twenty years of honorable military service as a medic/ EMT-B and a senior army leader. She served at nine duty stations, including Hawaii, New York, Fort Myer, Virginia (The Old Guard), Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Fort Riley, Kansas, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Eustis, Virginia, and Louisiana. She returned to Fort Jackson as her last duty station before she retired from the military in 2018. During her military service, she also completed two overseas military deployments. Her first was a fifteen-month deployment to Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq (2008–2009), as a senior medic within a military police company, and the second was a ten-month deployment to Camp Buehring, Kuwait (2015–2016), as the satellite site manager for clinical military operations. After retiring from the army, Demetria has served as a nonprofit regional program manager in both South Carolina and Hawaii and has been deployed overseas as a civilian to Kuwait and Iraq. She has also worked for the federal government as a civilian employee and a subcontractor. Demetria currently works for the government in the role of Training Specialist (Facilitator) for the United States Army Master Resilience School.

Demetria is a lifelong learner with educational accomplishments that include a master’s degree in public administration and a graduate certificate in health services management. She also holds various professional certifications as a Certified Associate Project Management (CAPM), Certified Career Coach, and Certified Life Coach with specialties in Confidence Coaching, Forgiveness Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, and Therapeutic Art Coaching. Demetria enjoys traveling, reading, writing, listening to music, and spending time with family (and a small core of key friends/extended family). She continues to work toward not being her own obstacle as she aspires to consistently live her best life through proper life-work balance.