Cindy Villanova is an author, consultant, entrepreneur and public speaker. She’s also a seventh degree black belt, master instructor and the owner of a martial arts studio in Austin, Texas.

Cindy’s parents were a mixed race couple in the early 1960s in southern California. They faced prejudice but stressed to Cindy and her brother the importance of an education, and growing up to be ‘good’. Cindy worked hard and was an ‘A’ student. She had big dreams to be a lawyer and to enter politics, but instead she became pregnant as a teenager by her boyfriend, a very troubled young man. She chose not to give up the baby. It was one of many forks in the road of her life.

While there were two “failed marriages”, many physical injuries from her martial arts practice and financial troubles along the way, there were also triumphs and turnarounds. Her book Don't Fight Mad generously chronicles these many painful twists and turns. She parallels what mixed martial arts taught her about digging in, when she most wanted to give up.