When Julie Laperouse was a senior at LSU, she took a personality test to reveal which animal she most resembled. The answer? A peacock.

“Not just a peacock, but a screaming peacock,” she said recently over coffee.

Years later, when Laperouse launched her keynote speaking and organizational consulting firm, she named it Screaming Peacock.

“Why would you ever name your company that?” asked one critic. “Haven’t you ever lived near a zoo? Screaming peacocks are horrible!”

Not so.

Laperouse’s recently published Are You a Screaming Peacock? reveals why we should all be a little more, well, screamy.

It’s a delightfully funny, inspirational, step-by-step guide to developing a few helpful peacock traits.

Peacocks, Laperouse explains:

• always put their best foot forward.
• are on a constant journey to better themselves by improving on even their best assets. (Did you know that peacocks molt their shimmering feathers, only to replace them with even more fab feathers?)
• live out loud.
• shake off the uglies. (In the wild, peacocks really do shake their tail feathers routinely, “getting rid of the little things that bother them,” Laperouse theorizes.)
• enjoy the party that is life.

Part self-help guide, part self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud romp through the wilds of Laperouse’s Jennings-bred, LSU-fed, chock-full-of-interesting-characters existence, Are You a Screaming Peacock? will have you rethinking your lot and re-tooling it so that you can have more fun while accomplishing what matters most to you.

Laperouse moved to Baton Rouge from Jackson, Miss. last fall. She’s balancing a very full schedule now, complete with speaking engagements galore and a new baby. But, being a peacock—a screaming peacock—Laperouse is thrilled with the mix and happy to be back on LSU turf.

She’s busy extending herself into the Baton Rouge bustle, all with the dream of inspiring others to find their own hints of blue-green-purple-translucent awesomeness.