HANCOCK — Hancock High School’s 76 graduating seniors were just days removed from their last assignments when Rhonda Britten gave them a new one: develop self-confidence.
Britten, the host of NBC’s “Starting Over” and a 1978 graduate of Hancock High School, delivered this year’s commencement address Sunday at the Sylvia J. Eskola Auditorium in Hancock Middle School.
At one point, she asked students if they’d felt unconfident. One raised his hand.
“The person who raised his hand is probably the one who’s going to be the most self-confident in five years, because he’s willing to say ‘I need help,’” she said.
For a long time, Britten wasn’t.
When she was a teenager, she witnessed her father kill her mother and then himself. She recovered to graduate with honors from Hancock High School and received a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Minnesota.
But while she was among the top 100 students in the country, she slid into alcohol addiction, and also attempted suicide.
“She looked good, and she did all the right things ... but she wasn’t happy,” she said of herself.
However, she said, she was ultimately able to pull out of her rut and begin again. Now, Britten is three seasons into her position as life coach on “Starting Over,” as well as a best-selling author and founder of the Fearless Living Institute.
It’s great to be back at her hometown, she said.
“No matter how far I get from Hancock, Mich., Hancock, Mich., is my home,” she said.
Britten canvassed her friends in the week before her speech for the most important qualities for a high school graduate. Along with self-confidence, they picked gratitude, passion and a clean slate.
While it’s never too late for a clean slate, Britten said, the end of high school is tailor-made for it.
“You want to keep smart, keep it,” she said. “You want to keep commitment, keep it. You want to keep devotion, keep it. You want to get rid of dumping your girlfriend in a really bad way, you don’t have to keep it.”
Students speaking at the graduation were valedictorian Jacki Anderson, salutatorian Trent Auguston, class vice president Marco Guidotti and class president William Pattison.
“For seven semesters, we couldn’t wait ... but for the last semester, we wished it would last forever,” Pattison said.
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> How old was she
>when this happened? Why
>did her father do that?
> Does anyone know?
I was curious as well. I found this from a magazine called Balance. It's from an interview with her from 2002.
A Defining Moment
Rhonda was only fourteen when she witnessed her father kill her mother—a fact remarkably not discussed more than once on the show (and only for two minutes, in the last season). Rhonda's two sisters were still in the house getting ready, preparing to go to brunch as a family for Father's Day, while Rhonda and her estranged parents were in the yard. Unbeknownst to anyone, her father had no intention of celebrating. He was furious that his wife had asked for the separation and was dating a new man, so he pulled a gun out from the trunk of his car and proceeded to shoot her in the stomach as Rhonda screamed and begged him to stop. Next, he pointed the gun at Rhonda. Time stood still. She knew her father hated her—he had tried to strangle her several times before but had been interrupted. This was it. She took a breath and…instead, he put the gun to his own head, knelt down next to his daughter, and shot himself. In a matter of a few minutes, Rhonda was an orphan.
The images of that fateful day would haunt Miss Britten for the next twenty years. After trying to kill herself three times and ending up in a psychiatric lock-down ward, Rhonda decided that she wasn't very good at ending her life after all. Being a truly smart kid (a real straight-A student), she became instead a self-help and spiritual book junkie and an expert at healing herself, creating and using many of the exercises she now uses on the women in the Starting Over house. "That's how I know my exercises work," she says. "They're the reason I'm standing here today."