Profile: Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield is a well recognized American motivational speaker, trainer and author. He is the founder, and together with Mark Victor Hansen the co-creator of The New York Times No. 1 best-selling "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book series. The book currently has over 65 titles and 80 million copies in print in over 37 languages.

According to USA Today, Canfield and Hansen collaboratively were the top-selling authors in the United States in 1997.


Canfield has been a high school and university teacher, a workshop facilitator, a psychotherapist, and for the past 30 years, a leading authority in the area of self-esteem and personal development. He holds a BA from Harvard University, a Masters degree from the University of Massachusetts and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Santa Monica.

Canfield's accomplishments include the founding of "Self Esteem Seminars" in Santa Barbara, and "The Foundation for Self Esteem" in Culver City, California. Self Esteem Seminars trains entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders and employees on how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals, while The Foundation for Self Esteem provides self-esteem resources and trainings to social workers, welfare recipients and human resource professionals.

Jack Canfield is also the President of Souperspeakers.com, a speaking resource service that provides inspirational speakers for event planners worldwide.

A world traveller, Canfield has ventured to over 21 countries, delivering hundreds of keynote speeches, workshops and trainings each year. His presentation style is delivered in a way that uses inspirational, motivational and uplifting stories to help his audiences discover, experience and retain key concepts and approaches. He is so good at doing this that his audiences asked him to compile his stories into one easy resource. That is how his book came to be born.

In 1990, while on an airplane home, he felt that it was time to make the book a reality. He shared his idea with author Mark Victor Hansen during breakfast one day and Hansen liked the idea. That book was Chicken Soup for the Soul. Neither men knew it at the time, but their idea would become a phenomenon. It wasn't easy as the spoken word did not translate well when put into writing. After three long years, the two had compiled just sixty-eight stories — a far cry from the 101 they believed was the magic number for a successful book. Nonetheless, their successful partnership has spawned many other titles that have made them enormously famous.

Canfield has appeared on numerous television shows, including Good Morning America, 20/20, Eye to Eye, CNN’s Talk Back Live, PBS and the BBC. Today, he speaks shares his success strategies with companies and associations worldwide.

The most recent book Canfield has written was the 2005 publication of The Success Principles. In it he shares 64 principles that he and other people have utilized to achieve great levels of success. He is also one of the teachers from the movie, The Secret. Together with Bob Proctor and Rev Michael Beckwith, he put together a program called, The Science of Getting Rich.