Shannon Watts on her new book 'Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age'

Shannon Watts led Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots group fighting the gun lobby, for seven years. After handing over the torch, she decided to focus her energy on a different challenge: encouraging women to overcome the societal expectations impeding the full realization of their ambitions.

Watts joins Jen to discuss the importance of women distinguishing between obligations and desires, what it means to be a “fire starter,” and the phone call from Maria Shriver that sparked the idea for hew new book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age.

Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action. With nearly 10 million supporters and a chapter in every state, Moms Demand Action volunteers have stopped the NRA’s priority legislation in statehouses roughly 90 percent of the time every year for the past decade and passed over 500 gun safety laws across the country. Watts is a former board member of Emerge America, one of the nation’s leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office. Watts is also the author of Fight Like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World (2019).