About Dana

inspirational speaker & Author

I fired myself in a church parking lot.

It was a hot afternoon, and I was sitting in a car that smelled like stale French fries, waiting for my son’s Cub Scout meeting to let out. I was listening to a Dr. Phil CD—don’t judge me—when he asked a question that went through me like a knife: if you were paying someone to manage your life, and they were doing the job exactly as well as you are right now, would you give them a raise, or would you fire them? Alone in that car, out loud, to nobody at all, I said it. You’re fired.

And that was the day I set off chasing the great, elusive Holy Grail named Balance.

I chased her with my whole heart, for the better part of forty years. I had the planner. The color-coded pens. A system for my systems. One day I listed every role I played—every hat I wore—and came up with more than sixty of them. Somewhere on that list, dead last, almost as an afterthought, was me. Every Sunday I’d grade myself in living color: a little blue for family, a stripe of yellow for work, purple for church. I had set out to organize my life, and somehow ended up auditing my own worth, one colored day at a time. I ran system after system until I was tired in a way no good night’s sleep could touch—and then I ran clean out of systems altogether.

Then came the seasons no planner could survive. First, a grief that left me flat on the floor for years—certain I had failed at the most important thing I’d ever been given to do. I’ll guard the details; part of that story belongs to someone I love. But it was down there, on the floor, that I stopped chasing Balance and finally learned the thing she had never once taught me: that I was not the failure I feared. I was, against all my own evidence, a good fountain. And years later, when my husband fell and spent weeks in intensive care, I lived in that hospital room and turned everything else off—the business, the holidays, all of it—something the woman still chasing balance could never have done. The floor had already taught me how.

Somewhere in those years, I finally found the word for what the floor had been teaching me all along: harmony. I knew, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that I was never going to be balanced—it simply wasn’t in my wheelhouse, and it never was supposed to be. Balance is a scale, a ledger, a judge with a clipboard. Harmony is music. So I quit being the accountant of my life and became a musician instead—and I handed the baton to the only One who could conduct what I could only stumble through: my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I’m Dana Marie Palmer—a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, out on the farm roads of the Texas Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio. My teaching began years ago at youth camps and firesides, and it has never stopped being the same simple thing: one woman telling the truth about her own life—the planners, the magnet boards, the hospital room—with humor, honesty, and Christ at the center. She Tripped Me is my first book, the fullest telling of this journey, and it’s coming this fall.

I write and speak for the woman who is faithful and exhausted in equal measure—worn out from keeping every plate spinning, and quietly ashamed she can’t. If that’s you, whatever your faith, you’re in the right place. You were never meant to be balanced. You were meant to make music. Let me show you how I finally laid the scale down.