'Dear GMA' Advice Guru Search: Spotlight on Fran Harris
'GMA' has narrowed the search for the 'Dear GMA' Advice Guru down to four.
Jan. 25, 2011— -- From 15,000 applications, the search for the "Dear GMA" Advice Guru is down to the final four candidates. We're searching for someone to join the "GMA" team and answer questions about love, work, family and much more.
The Advice Guru candidates have answered your questions online, shared their holiday advice and faced-off in Daily Guru Duels on viewers' questions.
This week on "GMA," we're spotlighting one of the finalists each day, taking you into their homes, work and lives.
CLICK HERE to ask Fran Harris and the other Advice Guru finalists a question.
Fran Harris of Dallas, Texas, is a speaker and life coach whose varied experience also includes work as a fitness expert, relationship coach and entrepreneur. She says the best advice she has ever given is, "Don't make your stuff about the person you're having the problem with. Our experience -- whatever we're feeling about or towards a situation or person -- is about us, not them."
Harris describes herself as spontaneous.
"My favorite quote is, 'Well behaved women rarely make history.' I love that because it reminds me every day that, if I'm not shaking the branches, if I'm not doing things a little bit different, then I'm not really standing out," she said.
Sports and family are two things that have helped define Harris from a young age. At 15, she began playing basketball and during her senior year, her college team became the first undefeated women's national championship basketball team.
Harris took her college career to the next level, winning a championship as part of the WNBA's Houston Comets. But it was tragedy that shaped Harris' future more than anything else.
"I lost my mom when I was 16. I'd gone to Mexico as an exchange student. I left one day, my mom died the next day and it was traumatic. It was certainly the most defining moment of my life to this point," Harris said.
"What really happened with my mom's death, I think it really accelerated me, in terms of my life purpose, because I realized, more than most people do, that when someone dies, you have no guarantees. And I learned that at age 16."
With her mother's death, Harris said she became a non-traditional "teenage mother," helping to raise her then 10-year-old little brother.
"Now, my life has come full circle because my brother -- the same brother I helped raise -- has a 10-year old and he's asked me to help him raise his son," Harris said. "That's not a job that I take very lightly. But, it's a difficult job. So, even though I didn't give birth to my nephew, I'm very much in the day-to-day of his life, and feel very much like I'm a parent to him."
To Harris, the secret to living a good life is "knowing that you have the ability to make the world a better place."
Related Stories
ABC News Live