COMMUNITY
Leslie Gilbert, who is originally from Jones County, recently published a book titled You Are The Expert. The author said the book is a guide to help people question things and become experts of their own lives.
Gilbert grew up in Jones County and graduated from the Jones County High School in 1993. She said for the last 10 years she’s been living in Montgomery with her husband, but she comes back to Jones County quite often.
“I like that there’s always someone willing to help here in Jones County. Everyone here always asks who your grandparents are,” she said. “Everyone knowing everyone is a curse, but also a blessing at the same time. The thing that makes something home is the people who know you. I still think of Gray as home.”
The author said she hopes people in Jones County get something from her book. She said she wrote her book, because she had a nagging thought that told her to. She finally gave into that thought.
“ You Are The Expert is about my health journey. Every time I went to a doctor’s appointment, it was a slow accumulation of symptoms and conditions. It was another problem each time, so I started questioning what people were saying to me. I started doing my own research and turns out I didn’t have some of the things they said,” Gilbert said.
She said she was getting worse and not better by listening to her doctors and taking the medications they recommended to her. She said everything came to a head when she was told she had cancer about 10 years ago. She said the doctor jumped immediately to wanting to do surgery, but Gilbert wanted to do something different and not go to the extreme right off the bat.
“I said I’d think about everything, then left and never went back. I am obviously well. I started realizing no one knows me better than I do, and I realized I am the expert,” the author said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t seek guidance, but it’s important to look into who you’re seeking guidance from. The book turned into a guide on how to trust yourself, give you confidence and give you the tools on how to make the best decisions for yourself.”
She said people should read her book, because she feels they are living their lives on autopilot and waiting for others to tell them what to do. Gilbert wants them to question things. She said the purpose of her book is to help people realize they are responsible for their lives, results and they are the experts of their lives.
“My grandmother was a longtime columnist with The Jones County News. She was Mildred Dye who wrote Minglin’ With Mildred. If you ever went back to look at those columns, you’d find my family as the stars for some of them, along with some good people here in our community. She looked for people doing interesting things and wanted to tell their stories. She wasn’t scared to try; most people are scared to try,” she said.
Gilbert said she watched her grandmother seek out people doing things people usually didn’t do. She said she looks back on it now that she’s written her book. She didn’t set out to write a book just because her grandmother was a writer. She said her grandmother did have influence over her in a way, because she was able to do something untraditional in life and go down a different journey with her writings.
The author said You Are The Expert just came out at the end of December in 2022, so she doesn’t want to jump right into writing another book yet. She said she’s excited for people to give her book a read and learn how to trust themselves.
“I’m thinking of writing another book, but I want to spend some time on this one first. I want to spend time putting everything under one umbrella,” Gilbert said. “A lot of my work going forward is about overcoming fear and helping people harness that personal empowerment.”
The eBook version of Gilbert’s book can be found at https:// www.lesliegilbertwellness. com/pages/you-are-the-expert and the Kindle version from Amazon can be found by visiting https://www.lesliegilbertwellness. com/pages/ you-are-the-expert.
