Suzanne Paul's Your Time Is Now: Lessons From a Life Built on Rejection and Reinvention

On the wall of Suzanne Paul's office at her Red Beach home, above the water of Puawai Bay on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, hangs a manifestation board. It is covered in photos, magazine cuttings and inspirational quotes, and this year's version carries the cover of her new book, Your Time Is Now, with the word "Bestseller" pinned beside it. The book is not out until next week.

Paul turns 70 next month. She was expelled from school in England at 15 and says she has worked every moment since. She arrived in New Zealand in 1991 with $18 and a list of dreams and goals, and her first job here was selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Her breakthrough came with Natural Glow, the "luminous spheres" that made her a household name, when she was nearly 40. She is still on the frontline for its successor, Thin Lizzy, and works the motivational speaking circuit.

Her philosophy is that belief in the Law of Attraction is not enough; you also need the Law of Action. Nobody, she says, is going to knock on the door with a BMW. You have to put yourself in places, meet people and tell them your dreams. The 2026 board includes a new car for her husband, Patrick, a picture of her younger self windsurfing in a bikini as a reminder to stay fit, and a photo with Andrew Papas, her co-host on the podcast Fork's Sake. The pair have just recorded a second season of the food and lifestyle show, which adds Agony Aunt-style advice. Looking at that photo, she pictures them accepting an award, and she can see the dress she would wear. Another image is from The Traitors, a signal to its producers that she would take their call. She says she would rather be lied to openly than be stabbed in the back, as her own team did on Celebrity Treasure Island a few years ago, a betrayal she still feels.

Paul bristles at the idea that visualisation is magical thinking. You cannot pin up a picture and then ignore it, she says; the board keeps her focused and her dreams alive.

She does have form as an author. Her 2008 memoir, But Wait, There's More, topped the New Zealand bestseller list, a year after she won Dancing With the Stars and two years after a highly publicised bankruptcy. Your Time Is Now is pitched as an inspirational self-help guide drawn from her life, from working-class poverty to television fame. Its final chapter covers the art of selling, including building rapport by mirroring a customer's verbal and physical cues. Paul says she never sells a product she wouldn't buy herself. An index of sources sits at the back, and chapter three cites research by a psychology professor at Dominican University in California, which found people were 42% more likely to achieve goals they had written down.

Rejection runs through the book, and through its making. Every publisher she approached initially rejected or ignored the proposal. Then, while selling natural health supplements at a shopping mall, she learned one customer worked at HarperCollins, and gave an elevator pitch on the spot.

The new book picks up where the memoir ended: Paul at 50, bankrupt after her Māori village project at Northcote Point collapsed. "I lost my home, my business, my car and my jewellery," she writes, adding that she also lost her confidence, self-respect and dignity. Her 50s stayed hard. Her second marriage ended, her dog, who had been like a child after failed IVF treatments, died, and she went through menopause. The hardest blow was the sudden death of her mother, who had joined her from England in the mid-90s. Paul was then selling two clothing lines for petite women, one called Short & Sweet, and had a shop in Remuera; she closed the business. The Christchurch earthquake pulled her out of her grief. She arranged nappies for women who couldn't leave their homes and drove arrivals from the airport to homes offering shelter. Then her old business partner called, asking her to return to Thin Lizzy to train staff and write a sales manual.

She says she wrote the new book because she didn't want the old memoir to be her legacy, and because people in their 30s, 40s and 50s tell her their lives are over. Strangers still call out "Say it, Suzanne!" and she answers, "But wait, there's more!" Next year she will have lived in New Zealand longer than in the UK. Whether the book repeats the memoir's success will be known soon.