Heather Saffer | Stop Telling Her to Be Grateful

Heather Saffer won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2012, used the prize money to write The Dollop Book of Frosting, and turned a Rochester cupcake shop into Dollop Gourmet, a low-sugar, vegan frosting brand that landed a deal with Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank and put her products in Whole Foods and on QVC. She has a psychology degree from SUNY Brockport, two published cookbooks, and the kind of resume most entrepreneurs in this city would trade for. Today she advises startups from Canandaigua and lives with her dog Donald. In January her husband died, and she started posting unfiltered videos about grief to an audience that had only ever known her for frosting.In this episode she gets into the toxic positivity she has been fielding ever since, the decade of therapy that stopped working, why every group therapy session leaves her feeling worse, and the theory about new souls and old souls that almost nobody but her husband knew. She talks about bailing on a cruise a week before it sailed, booking a one-way ticket to Portugal to find out if she could move there, and disliking nearly every place she landed. She and Fitz also get into her husband's death by suicide, why she thinks people are so afraid of negativity, and what a person does with themselves after admitting they have no professional ambitions left. She is not selling anything, which is exactly why the conversation goes where it goes.CONNECT Heather Saffer on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/realheathersaffer Heather Saffer on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersafferROC Vox → https://rocvox.comNew episodes every Tuesday.Recorded at ROC Vox Recording & Production in Bushnell's Basin, NY.Learn more at https://rocvox.com