As yogis, we have in fact learned to see our thoughts as thoughts, to calm and quiet them and to be more grounded with people. As a result, we’ve resolved old hurts and taken more risks. Not to mention the health benefits! These all help in creating happiness, but, alas, I am ever so present to how much more work a person really needs to do to feel free and happy as a regular way of life. And now I am writing not only as a yoga practitioner and life coach, but also as someone who started her journey of growth with spiritual work: tai chi, yoga, meditation, extended retreats with renowned teachers and of course seva, only to find that it wasn’t enough to actually get me sustainably happy. It wasn’t until I met the Handel Method® that I figured out what was missing for me and I think the world at large. (Though I am happily practicing yoga and meditation, too.)

Here is where I think yogic philosophy doesn’t go far enough to meet modern humanity’s issues.

1) Confessing to people around me. Yoga helps you discover the dark side of your mind and quiet it, but how do you actually root out and end negative traits and patterns? For me, it was not enough to just discover my jealousy, my judgmental-ness, my selfishness (to name a few). I had to feel the impact of the traits by discussing them with others, especially those near and dear to me and be willing to hear the impact it had on them. I even extended my awareness to strangers. Now I am rarely in a conversation in which I DON’T warn someone new about one or more of my bad qualities. For example: “I just have to warn you, I am a bit of a control freak, so let me know if I take over.” What purpose does this confessing serve?

- I can’t take this aspect of me too seriously. (Feeling bad makes you more likely to keep the trait, making fun of it makes it easier to stop.)

- Others are warned and empowered to call me on it. No victims around me!

- Because I’m up front about my issues and I’m able to feel the impact of them, I am able to catch them and keep them in check when they come up.

2) Clean ups from your past. Twelve Step Programs at least recommend this by devoting a step to it. In coaching we’re more adamant about the power of this tool. We also think the excuse of “sparing” another’s feelings is used far too often to simply avoid difficult conversations and admitting mistakes. Please, don’t go running out mending fences based on this coaching without supervision or clarity. There is a deep process to coming to your truth about something and then being able to say and own it in a way that can be heard by the other person. We’ve made it into quite the art and science by developing a very thorough technique for it. This is best handled with a very intelligent, objective coach who knows you well and wants your dreams to come true as much or more than you do. Clean ups are usually a necessary part of actually forgiving yourself and learning to trust yourself again at a deep level. It’s too easy to get out of those in a spiritual or religious practice, which is a shame given that clean ups are a great way to learn compassion along with self-love. Coaches remind you that you MUST and why, and then walk you through how.

3) Promises and Consequences. None of my yoga or spiritual teachers ever asked me to promise something or held me to account to do anything I was inspired to do. In the Handel Method®, we teach the alignment of heart, mind and body. This means we connect you to your soul’s deepest longings, help you make a plan to go after them and then hold you to taking the right (creative) actions to make your dreams happen. Spiritual practices can do a great job at connecting heart and mind. And action on the mat absolutely improves life, but we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to actions off the mat. In every area in which a person is weak at having their dream come true, they must make promises (not just set intentions!) and then be held accountable to keeping them by a person (someone who cares a lot, like a coach) and a consequence. There are consequences to every choice; we know this because we understand energy (cause and effect). However, we are still complacent if negative consequences haven’t become unbearable and so we continue to make bad choices with food, cigarettes, alcohol, not listening, flying off the handle, ignoring important deadlines or relationships. Promises and artificial/creative consequences interrupt this pattern completely. Have date night with your spouse or lose TV and internet until you do. Eat only whole foods or lose your wine on the weekend. Do your daily yoga practice or owe 100 pushups the next day. You get the idea. You’ve got to train your mind on each and every dream you care about and train it OFF its fabulous flow of excuses. This has to become part of your spiritual practice for the spiritual realm to expand into all areas of your life.

I am so happy to hear about people finding their bliss, connecting with the divine and learning how to be of service. Spiritual practices however, absolutely must be made practical, real and solid in all areas of life to get people launched into lives that feel and are sustainably happy.

Love,
Laurie

P.S.- The Life Coaching Crash Course, is a powerful weekend workshop that will wake you up to the spiritual context of your very own life. If you’re reading this, it may be a sign from the Uni-verse to take this course. Use promo code Daily100 to save $100.

We spent time convincing the couple they’d be safe in that room and that they’d be coached to some satisfactory resolution. At our direction they prepared for this weekend of work, but likely that preparation was driven as much by the recognition that they’d hit rock bottom and felt they’d run out of options to save their marriage. Now, weeks later, I am still re-living the triumphs we experienced in that room. I already knew our method worked, but I didn’t really understand how well, or how fast, or how powerfully, when embarked upon by two people, simultaneously. My hope is that sharing the experience will help you work on a relationship and help distinguish coaching from therapy, something people ask me about all the time. The couple has given me permission to share many aspects of their story as well as their testimonials. They both feel that coaching saved not only their marriage, but also their relationships with others including their children.

It turns out that not only were we able to bring resolution to a long list of hurts and disagreements, we were able also to help each individual come to terms with their own patterns and life lessons, brought to them courtesy of their lineage. Mini-lesson: Every human being has traits that they get from their parents, whether they like it or not. Right now, think of your parents’ worst traits (cold-hearted, superficial, negative defensive, argumentative, vain, disconnected, addictive, violent, moody, morose, critical, overly-analytical, martyr, selfish, etc.). You probably don’t think you have those same traits. But, not only do you have them (your own version) but you’ve probably found the perfect mate (or if you’re single: date, friend, boss, employee) to trigger these traits. Both the husband and wife, when they actually saw this phenomenon in their marriage, had cathartic experiences that allowed them to see and feel the fears, bad traits and habits they each had brought, albeit unknowingly, to the relationship. With that recognition they were able to own the damage they had done and start the work of changing immediately.

The man in this relationship, an extremely intelligent, stoic surgeon, who loves quiet and order, married a free-spirited, boisterous, outdoorsy woman who brought with her three young kids. (He also had two older children; later, they had a child together.) The different opinions each held about how quiet the home “should be” by itself could have been enough to break them up. Of course, when they married, she loved his sense of order, control, integrity and how he played with the young kids. He loved her laughter, spontaneity and openness and her love of him. As anyone who has had a relationship can predict, what was once what they loved about each other turned into what chafed the most and what resulted in growing more distant. They both wanted love, but had stopped feeling it and had managed to push the other’s love away, justifying it all with fear and blame. Over time, they stopped working at all the practices that had kept love and sex hot and exciting, simple things like being honest, making time for each other, laughing together, gift giving, apologizing and forgiving.

Our comprehensive process with the couple included a review of every complaint, each betrayal, each trait and each unspoken, broken rule. Each of these was questioned, explained and debated until all could agree on how to see it. It was a rigorous process. In the most critical moments, feelings were unleashed. So often people seek resolution to betrayals through the mind (asking and seeking explanation) as opposed to truly feeling the hurt so it can be expressed and felt by the other person. To do this effectively one may need a coach and a cheerleader to facilitate. It may be next to impossible for a couple to do this effectively by themselves. With therapy, the focus on how it feels may begin the process, but it is the rare therapist, if any, that would demand she sit on his lap while she is crying and that he respond in a particular way. It was a risky, bossy coaching move, but it paid off. For that, I thank god I am a coach, not a therapist, because being bossy, pushy, vulnerable and completely available, including after the session, are what made the weekend successful.

These people, like most, could not see their role or the roles of their worst traits and how they contributed to the deterioration of their marriage, but they theatrically displayed them for us as they spoke about their lives in front of each other. As a coach, I was able to point out emphatically how unacceptable their behavior was. Just like a sports coach, I was not helping them figure out how they felt so much as telling them a new way to think and act, after showing them how their current behaviors failed them. The wife ultimately discovered a mannerism of defensiveness as well as dismissiveness that she was completely unaware was ruining their relationship. Ironically, she sees and dislikes both of these traits in her own mother. The husband discovered that coldness and negativity were absolutely his go-to modes and this recognition gave him the tools to shift them. Though these might not be your traits, everyone has their set of negative traits that work to destroy or diminish relationships.

Had I been a therapist, I would not have been able to lay out exactly what a creep I myself had been with my husband when we nearly divorced six years ago. As a coach, having “been there” was incredibly valuable. I could “feel their pain” and their trust in me steadily grew because of this. I also knew both the effort it would take to overcome ego and righteousness and the enormous pay off that would ensue. It was almost as if I was standing at the finish line shrieking at them to keep running, no matter how labored their breathing became. At times they wanted to stop and turn back. They couldn’t initially see that there was still so much love between them and that they both wanted the same thing, but I could.

As a therapist, I would not have invited communication with my husband and me between Day 1 and Day 2; boundaries, you know? As a coach, I knew I needed to be available at all stages and thank goodness I was, because around 10pm after the first day, the wife “freaked out.” She had not been ready to take responsibility for her part of their marriage and she was scared and angry about it. Thankfully, the husband reached out to me and I was able to spend an hour on the phone with her that night, just listening, feeling her, getting her and then after all that, knocking some sense into her!

Her thinking and her perceptions were just plain wrong. For example, she thought her husband hadn’t been emotionally engaged that day. She was shocked when I pointed out that he had been crying continuously throughout the day. (Based on the angle of her chair, she hadn’t seen any of it, telling in and of itself.) For a therapist, I fear it would have been a slow process of figuring out errors in thinking. As a coach, I am allowed to argue and teach and I do, as quickly as possible, while right in the midst of the turmoil. Most of what our minds feed us is based on our history and some really bad and faulty theories. We expect things to go a certain way, not understanding we have within us the power to change outcomes. When you learn how better to discern your pattern, where it really comes from, you learn how it holds you back and how to change it. This is what Will and I were able to accomplish with this couple in two days’ time.

Coaching is about challenging you to look at what you fear most and to see and admit how you are stuck. It asks you to be brave and face your worst traits without judgment or censure. We guide you to see yourself through an objective lens. And when you do, we are there to continue to guide you into a new paradigm. Coaching asks you to DO things differently: to speak in a new way, to think in a new way and to take certain new actions every day.

In therapy, you examine and ultimately, if successful, come to your own conclusions. In coaching, we push a bit harder; we act as witnesses and guides and assert opinions that may, at times, be difficult to swallow. Yet it’s the only way to create a definitive shift in that very moment, not sometime far in the future.

This couple came to see and own the harm of their body language, how they spoke, what they assumed of each other and what they held against each other. They had never seen or understood this in therapy, which had only focused on who did what to whom. With us, they came to see the silent negative messages they were constantly sending, which they neither recognized nor meant to send. For them, there was total, dawning enlightenment. They learned how to stop and reverse the pattern of negative messages and conversely to give each other what they each really needed.

Our coaching process is not about blame. We start with the premise that all of us may be a bit messed up from our legacy or childhood, but evolution beyond that legacy is possible. We all go about sabotaging ourselves without thinking. In the end, we all want simply to be loved and to love despite our fear. So we must be taught or re-taught how to do this. That’s what we do in coaching. We teach the precise actions and steps you need to take every single day of your life in order to have this. We give you a roadmap, something that therapy is neither designed nor intended to do.

Coaching shifts consciousness in real time and promises results because of promised actions. The light at the end of the tunnel is planned actions, also known as promises. (You know, like the ones you make in front of everyone when you get married? But these are even more specific.)

Listed below are some of the promises made by this couple during our session.

1) Connection
- Nightly ritual in which they review successes from the day, open issues, own up to traits and deeply appreciate each other
- Go to bed/sleep together at least once a week

2) Kids
- Weekly family dinner
- Bedtime is enforced by husband

3) Home
- All complaints about the house go in a special book to be discussed at weekly meeting, no other time

4) Money
- Both spouses get accountant statements
- Expenditures over a certain amount need to be signed off by the other
- Weekly meeting to discuss goals, progress and big financial decisions

5) Visitors
- All visits to the home must be pre-approved by both spouses. Once a “yes” is given, it’s all about hospitality and honoring the “yes.”

It’s amazing how much of a difference rules make. It’s what keeps us all alive (mostly) on the highway while we’re driving so fast. Because partnerships usually dissolve slowly over time, we can’t feel the true consequences of our ongoing bad (un-loving?) choices. Rules remind us what we are committed to, of our dreams. Naturally we do not stay present to our dreams! We can barely stay present to the speed limit and our lane and that’s literally life and death. This is nothing to sigh over; it’s the human condition and it provides an amazing opportunity for US to hone OUR power to create exactly what we want. Our upcoming 4-week teleseminar series will give you back the power to design your partnership, whether it has just lost a little of its pizzazz or it’s on the brink of disaster. Please join us. You can use the discount code EB254PLAY until Feb 3rd to save $25.

I’ll end with the letters the couple wrote to us after the weekend, so you can hear it in their words, though they also helped me write the article.

From the Wife:

Dear Laurie and Will,

Thank you.
-LS

From the Husband:

It is hard to put into words how meaningful I found this weekend and how much the two of you have helped LS and me find the path back. It has been a long time since I have felt this good, and for that I thank the two of you. I truly believe I can do anything when LS and I are together. She truly is the love of my life and the thought of losing that was devastating to me. Thanks to you we have the tools to really make a difference. I will be forever grateful to both of you. (just as long as you don’t let anyone know that I cried or that I actually need affirmation). All kidding aside, this goes down as one of the greatest weekends I’ve ever spent. Thank you, thank you.
-LK

Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to get thin. I wanted to be thin more than anything in the world. Although, for some reason, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stay on a diet. It seemed impossible. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had a huge obstacle blocking me on my weight loss path. Her name was Lucy.

Who is Lucy? She was then and still is my “brat.” Until I got her under my control, she was a major force in my life. She would have me readily blowing off workouts, oversleeping, hating my promises, manipulating men, blowing my money and missing my writing deadlines. Lucy had been an instigator of or the main contributor to every major catastrophe in my life. She had also kept me fat for more than 25 years.

I first became aware of Lucy when I started working with my Handel Group® Coach in August 2007. I was still 75 pounds overweight and trying to diet. After one of my sessions, my coach gave me a homework assignment, to keep a thought log. The thought log made me pay attention to the thoughts flying around in my head and write them down. Almost immediately, I heard Lucy. She was loud, annoying, bossy and manipulative. All she wanted to do was eat junk food, watch HBO and complain about everything that wasn’t working in my life. She would go on tangents about how I was never going to be thin, it was hopeless and I should just eat the pizza. No wonder I didn’t stay on a diet. I had a terrorist in my head, brainwashing me 24/7.

After I realized I had Lucy in my head, I knew that if I kept listening to her, I was never going to lose weight. My coach told me the best way to take her down and silence the voice of my brat, was with promises and consequences. I made several food promises and implemented consequences if I broke any of my promises. Because Lucy was used to convincing me to blow off commitments, she did not like my new promises and she let me know it by yelling at me daily about how she needed birthday cake with pink icing or she was going to die. I started to ignore her. The more I ignored Lucy and kept my promises, the quieter she became. Then one day, she just gave up on trying to get me to cheat on my diet. She knew it was a lost cause. I had stopped listening to her. Eight months later, I reached my goal weight.

It’s been almost four years since I dropped that weight and Lucy has not reappeared in the area of food and body. I still eat healthy and never cheat on my diet. I don’t even consider it. I won’t allow the thoughts in my head. Even though she stopped sabotaging me about my body, I must confess that sometimes Lucy appears in other areas of my life. Lately, she has been rambling about men. My friends even call me Lucy when they hear her words come out of my mouth. The truth is, I know that I can quiet Lucy. I did it with food. I lost a total of 130 pounds and learned how to manage my mind in the process. Now it’s time to manage my mind in other areas of my life.

So, this year on January 1st, I made the New Year’s Resolution to “leash” Lucy everywhere and for good. I’m taking down my brat. I’m tired of listening to her rant about how there are no single men in New York and I’m never going to fall in love. Wait, I just realized something. Maybe she is the reason I don’t have a boyfriend. Huh.

Here is a summary about the brat, so you can recognize your own:

* The brat is the voice in your head that is an annoyed, entitled child. It’s the adult version of a 4-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.
* The brat is always running a scam, manipulating situations to get what it wants.
* The brat is not fighting for your happiness. It’s fighting for the Tiramisu.

Finally, here are the basic steps I followed in taking down my brat around food. Though it’s straightforward, this process is not easy. I’d have never succeeded without the help of my coach, which is what I recommend for you, too.

Four Steps to Leashing Your Brat

1) Listen to your inner dialogue. Pay attention to your thoughts and find where you are a brat in your life. What does it say to you that sounds so convincing? How does the brat manipulate you? How is the brat stopping you from achieving your dreams? (Hint: The brat will say things to make you quit pursuing your goals, cop out on plans and not keep your word, especially to yourself. Where there are abandoned dreams, there are always the ramblings of the brat.)

2) Make promises to stop the thinking and the behavior. Make specific promises to stop your brat. Make sure your promises are well defined about actions you have to take and thoughts you cannot allow. Beware: Brats love loopholes! (My brat, Lucy, is an expert at finding loopholes; she should have been an attorney.) A good example is a promise that specifies the intensity of a workout, for how long and how frequently you must do it. Then add a promise about not being allowed to negotiate your promises once they’re set. Again, a coach can really help you design custom promises for you!

3) Implement consequences for breaking promises. Design and implement strong consequences that will make you want to avoid breaking your promises. Make the consequence good enough so you keep your promise. Consequences are not to punish you, but to make you feel the immediate effects of breaking your commitments. Start with something you’d hate to give up: TV time, wine, money, etc.

4) Be accountable to someone. Tell everyone about your brat and how it’s sabotaging your life. Everyone in my life knows about Lucy and my friends nail me whenever she enters the building. Next, it’s important to work with a coach or a reliable friend to help you be accountable to your promise. It will make the process easier.

Peace,
Katie Torpey
@katietorpey

P.S.- Leash your brat in one weekend, at the Life Coaching Crash Course workshop. It covers the four steps mentioned here and so much more, packing a year of coaching into two intense days.

Lying may be the reason that you feel so bad. Yes, I said it. I’ll go even further and say that almost everyone lies every day, often all day long; it’s as natural as breathing or eating for most people. It’s an epidemic. Most of us don’t even realize we are lying half the time. We stay quiet, manipulate situations, tell people what they want to hear, don’t express our truth — no wonder we all feel so bad.

Just to be clear, I’m grouping a bunch of different human phenomena under the general heading “lying”: exaggerating, withholding information, white lies, justified lies (e.g., “No, Honey, you don’t look fat in that”), fooling ourselves. All have some form of stretching, hiding, ignoring or avoiding the truth.

From coaching thousands of people over the last 20 years, I have found a definite correlation between happiness and truth-telling. When what we say does not jive with our true sentiments, it causes a cognitive dissonance that wreaks havoc on our emotional well-being. Lying is essentially stifling our true selves and real personalities, which makes us humans feel terrible and causes us some serious mental anguish. Lying, in any form, is honoring fear.

Why isn’t anyone tackling the effects of lying on a person’s emotional well-being? Where is the lying section in the bookstore? Did they forget about it? At my coaching company, the Handel Group®, we don’t believe lying is this dark, heavy, taboo subject. We get our clients to become aware that they lie and gain a sense of humor about it. Come on, when was the last time you lied to someone and said you loved their haircut? Or made up why you were late with a project? Or why you haven’t emailed someone back yet? Yesterday? Today? An hour ago? Don’t worry. You’re not alone. It’s a way of life, but you can change it. First, notice how you do it.

Here are several different ways that we lie:

1. Being nice: Most people really want to be perceived as “good people,” so instead of telling the truth, they tell nice white lies to make others feel good, or rather, not feel bad. For example, you have lunch with an old friend you haven’t seen in months. When you see each other, you tell her she looks fantastic. But you’re really thinking to yourself “uh oh…she’s put on at least 15 pounds.” You justify the lie with the excuse of “I don’t want to hurt her feelings; it’s none of my business.” The problem is that the whole conversation is fake. If you really are good friends, wouldn’t you want to know what’s going on in her life that could be causing her to put on weight? Is she okay? Did something happen? Find out what’s going on. Be real.

2. Not speaking up: Many people are afraid to express their true thoughts and feelings because they are worried about how people will react, so they don’t speak up at all, or they say the “safe” part of what they really wanted to say, leaving out the important parts, the parts that could get them into “trouble.” Say you have a new boyfriend you adore. He brings you to a Thai restaurant, but you hate Thai food. You don’t tell him. Then later, you become intimate with him, but the sex isn’t that great. You pretend everything is fine, afraid to say something that might hurt him. By staying quiet, you’re eating food you hate and having lousy sex. You’re not in a relationship with this person; the fake you is in the relationship. Your boyfriend has no idea what is going on. You are unhappy because the fake you and the real you are two different people. And the real you is frustrated and has no voice. Of course you feel bad!

3. Covering your ass: These lies are about trying to cover something up so that we don’t get into trouble. They usually start with, “I’m sorry…,” plus an excuse. In my 20′s I was great at these lies. I would be running late for a meeting and plot in my head the reason that I was late: “I’m sorry I was late, but traffic was horrible,” or “The babysitter was sick,” or, “Did you know there was construction on I-95?” But it was all BS. I was late because I left 20 minutes later than I should have. Often these lies are completely false, or they just have a dose of fabrication in them to throw people off the truth. These lies become second nature. All of a sudden you don’t even realize you’re telling them.

4. Hiding the truth: When you intentionally withhold information from someone, I call that lying, even if you think there’s a good reason not to tell the person. For example, let’s say you have a friend whom you just don’t like that much anymore. Most people would just not say anything and let the friendship die away. Imagine if you said, “I’m really not liking you lately.” Now, this conversation might end with the same outcome, the end of the friendship, but at least you would have expressed yourself, and your ex-friend would have to deal with the consequences of their actions. It ends honestly and cleanly, after a real discussion. But the more likely scenario is that you would have a great conversation, clean things up with each other and end up feeling closer than ever. Hiding the truth keeps you from being totally connected to people and takes away from the quality of your relationships.

5. Big secrets: Many people have big lies in their lives that are slowly killing them, but they’re too afraid to confess them. So instead of telling the truth, they live with the lie, convincing themselves that it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you cheated on your partner. It was just a drunken make-out session in another state. You come back from your business trip and life goes on, right? You go to dinner, watch The Good Wife together. You think that if no one knows about what happened, then nothing has changed. Wrong. Everything has changed. You can’t honestly have the same close, connected relationship with your partner after that. And do you really think it’s not affecting how you feel about yourself? It is. You can pretend, but you can’t truly be free and happy in your life when you’re hiding a big secret. Sorry.

6. Spewing bad theories: Throughout our lives, we have created negative theories (lies) that we believe about ourselves that we state like they are facts. For example, “I can’t stay on a diet,” “I’m horrible at dating,” “I’m not smart enough to get an MBA,” or “I’m too old.” People act like these lies are the truth and they have no power over them. They are not true! They are just excuses not to diet or find true love or go to graduate school. The lies you tell yourself about yourself are the ones that kill you the most. They keep you stuck, believing your BS and they stop you from changing and growing.

I have found that once people start becoming comfortable with catching lies and telling the truth, to themselves and others, there is a burden that is lifted, and they live their lives with much more energy, joy and self-expression. It creates a total brain shift that makes people truly happier.

Those who know me well can vouch for the fact that I take this one to heart. I say what I mean and I say it all. It can get me into trouble sometimes, because feelings will get hurt and there will be clean up, but I always find that it is much better to risk hurting feelings than to keep silent. That is the only way to make a big difference on the planet and to have deep relationships.

Now that I’ve mapped out a few different ways that people lie on a daily basis, look at your own life. See how often you lie. Make a list. Really, take a day and write them all down, or at least keep a tally. Listen to what you say to people and what you say to yourself. You’ll be amazed by how many lies come out of your mouth every day.

I wish I could give you a total fix in this one blog post, but it takes persistent, hard work to really make a dent in this thing. Becoming aware of all the areas in which you lie is a great start. The next step? Tell people you lied! That’s where the fun starts…

Love,
Lauren

P.S.- Let us show you EXACTLY HOW to start telling the truth in your life. Come to one of our Life Coaching Crash Courses this winter.

Here are some things I used to hate:
- Carrots
- Exercise that required sweating
- My brother
- Listening to my parents
- Getting dressed up
- Stopping working at a set time
- Salad
- Taking risks
- Being scared
- Celery
- Honest conversations
- Failing

Here is how I now feel about some of those things:
Vegetables are delicious and they make me feel so good and good about myself. I had just never tasted them really or trained myself to think correctly about food, health and taste. Thank goodness I forced myself to TRY to like veggies; now I do not know what I’d do without them.

As for my family, sure it was a fun cliché to resent and blame them for my issues, but I am much happier taking 100% responsibility for my own life and getting to know them as adult people, equals. Turns out, I really like my brother and my parents. Thank goodness I dropped the distaste I had for being with them and cleaned up my messes and started to listen. It feels undeniably good to be connected to my family of origin. The more I like them, the more I like me and vice versa. Fancy that!

Dressing up is still something I have to GET myself to do, but I force myself to gravitate towards it, because you know what? Looking my best feels really good. (Thank you stylist George for the support here.) I wouldn’t have thought blow drying my hair, having my toes done, putting an outfit together or wearing shoes would make a difference, but it does. Self-respect and self-care resonate with me and others in the world.

Risks- oh boy. I still have to force myself to take risks, have hard conversations and work through failures, but I do it. Turns out, it’s an EXCELLENT high and it makes for great stories, too. Folks, you want some stories to tell your kids to inspire them (or at least amuse at the next party you go to). I’d even venture to say you are on this earth to make great stories to leave behind. All your little soul really wants to do is evolve, learn and grow and it won’t do that without risks and challenges. It’s literally what your life is for.

So, what’s your list of what you hate? This year gravitate towards what you hate at least some of the time. Sure, follow your bliss too, rock on! But make sure you give serious thought to facing your deep, dark demons and your daily demons, too. We can really help you. You can start anywhere: issues with food, family, love, self-esteem, your career, communication, or just plain risk-taking. If you tackle one, the rest will fall much easier. Let us show you how. If you haven’t been to the Life Coaching Crash Course, you are missing the best bang for your buck, ever. We will make it incredibly fun and inspiring to face your demons. Hope to have you.

Love,
Laurie

The biggest moment of her life was about to arrive, and Katie Torpey didn’t even care. It was a Saturday night in Los Angeles, and Katie and her husband had dinner plans with friends. Katie, an award-winning screenwriter, was about to have her splash on the big screens when her movie, The Perfect Man, starring Hillary Duff and Chris Noth, debuted in movie theaters across the United States. Katie had worked for this moment for decades, bartending her way through film school, selling scripts that went nowhere but trash cans.

It was going to be her moment. She couldn’t even think about it.

The fight with her husband had started in the afternoon. It was a silly fight, something about a magazine headline, but it erupted into a screaming match and ended with Katie landing on the living room floor amid shards of broken glass.
A few days later, she told her husband she was going to the post office, and she left—permanently. “That was the beginning of my journey,” she says.

Katie weighed 265 pounds, had bleach-blonde hair, washed out skin, and no confidence. She didn’t walk, but rather lumbered around at 5’6”. She moved to Palo Alto with her sister and tried to regroup. She went on the Atkins Diet and lost about 55 pounds, but she hit a wall and began regaining the weight. She spoke to a friend in New York, who recommended Lauren Zander, a life coach.

After a few email exchanges, Katie and Lauren spoke on the phone. “I want to change my life,” Katie told Lauren. “I want to be happy and thin.”

Lauren told Katie her goals were definitely attainable, and yes, she would help her transform her life.

LAUREN ZANDER IS PIXIE-LIKE with a small frame, almond-shaped eyes, and a narrow nose that turns slightly upward at the end. Her lips are always curled in a delicate smile even though every so often an expletive spills out. “I love my life,” she says in a breathy voice. Then, her coffee-colored eyes narrow and she begins sharing her passion for the “brilliant mystery” of people’s lives, for helping individuals move beyond the repetition of their negative histories, and for leading them to discover and prove to themselves that they can be the author of a new life story.

“Once you take responsibility you become powerful, and you take control of the situation.”
Lauren is the chairman and co-founder of The Handel Group, her private coaching company that drives people to get over past traumas, face the truth, choose to take full responsibility for their choices, and work at turning their lives into something they love. Her company now works with organizations like The New York Times Company, Condé Nast, and Vogue. Zander also teaches a popular class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called “Designing Your Life.” In the last 10 years, she’s trained 16 coaches to use The Handel Method, Lauren’s own personalized brand of coaching. The method challenges and pushes clients to take full responsibility for their lives and for all of the choices they make. Lauren’s memorable catchphrase sums it up: “Maybe it’s you!” Unlike therapists who might offer a sympathetic ear when you say you’ve had a bad day and cheated on your diet, or who may encourage you to think of yourself as a woeful victim, Lauren and her coaches will hold you accountable. If you’ve done something wrong, expect to pay with a consequence your coach and you agree on.

With her no-nonsense approach to life, Lauren and her company have coached more than 2,500 clients.

“I CAN THINK OF ONE of my first clients,” Lauren says, cutting into a bloody Angus steak at Jubilee, a tiny French restaurant on East 54th Street in New York City. “When he was 17 he had a car accident that killed his best friend who was riding with him. He could barely go back to his hometown and never talked to his friend’s parents. He lived in psycho shame. What did that do for his life? He had never had a girlfriend. He was 27. He was a banker, financially very successful, but miserable under it all. I was like, ‘Well, ya think that might be fucking you up?’ He chose then to go back and faced his friend’s parents; [and found out that] they never were angry at him.”

She’s been challenging people’s thinking and helping them fix their lives for as long as she can remember. Her mother’s favorite story to tell is of 7-year-old Lauren explaining to the next-door neighbor that racism is wrong. The neighbor had made a comment about Lauren’s housekeeper, who was black. Lauren remembers looking at the girl and saying, “Don’t you realize your mother could have been black? What makes you think you’re so white?”

IT WAS DURING HER FRESHMAN YEAR of college that Lauren began thinking about what would eventually set her apart from other life coaches. She was studying at the University of Denver and desperately wanted to get into a better school, so she asked her brother to help her get straight A’s. She made promises to herself, and did whatever her brother told her to do. For five nights a week, she had to do two hours of homework. If she didn’t she couldn’t go out with friends.
“It changed my life,” she says. She earned her straight A’s, and transferred to George Washington University.

Lauren says she grew up with the concept of “take away”—a system of promises and consequences. For example, if she didn’t do her homework, her TV would be taken away. “It’s just understanding how humans work,” she says. People tend to find it easier to keep promises to others than to themselves, she notes, and by putting promises and consequences in place for yourself, you hold yourself accountable

After graduating from college Lauren got a job at Landmark Education, a global company that is “committed to the fundamental principle that people have the possibility of success, fulfillment, and greatness,” according to the website. Lauren was in charge of a volunteer program. She naturally began to coach her own volunteers on how to reach their personal goals, like losing weight, balancing a budget, or finding love. She helped to motivate them. “I was quietly doing it, but not realizing I was inventing my own thing,” she says. A few years into the job, she gave a one-year notice because she had so many volunteers—she says she wanted to give her replacement ample time to learn the ropes. When her replacement looked at the work Lauren was doing, she told Landmark the job was more work than what was stated in the description. Lauren had her 100-person volunteer team and had been inventing her own course work on how to help them with their personal lives. When her boss figured this out, Landmark told Lauren she had to stop coaching the volunteers because it was “unorthodox.”

Lauren was 28. When she quit, three volunteers immediately became clients. Within six months, she had 40 clients. She was just getting started.

FOR THE NEXT SEVEN YEARS, Lauren coached clients. The first year, she didn’t even have a business card. She had someone do her bookkeeping and manage her invoices, but other than that, she was on her own. When she and her sister started The Handel Group in 2004she says she wasn’t even sure she wanted to start a company. “I still didn’t know what I was,” she says.

“Your life is always starting right now.”
She had taken on three people and taught them how to be an effective life coach and successfully implement Lauren’s methods. Her first trainee was a friend named Mel Robbins, a criminal defense attorney. Now, Robbins is a syndicated talk-radio host and calls herself “America’s Life Coach.” Her first book, Stop Saying You’re Fine, hit bookstores in May.

Zander knew she was on to something. She began to train more people how to be a coach. They set their own hours, worked from home and made money. Lauren asks all of her coaching trainees to read Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead. Lauren is a Rand fan, and loves to point out that they share the same birthday, February 2. Years ago, when she first read the book, she began thinking deeply about how the beliefs and premises that individuals hold affect the outcome of their lives, in everything from business success to personal happiness. She asks all of her new coaches to explain how they may now have (or have had in the past) similarities to the main characters. “I loved that each character had such an extreme version of humanity in them,” she says. “Roark wouldn’t lie for anyone. I think his ideals about what he loves and being true to himself are profound. It is the ultimate achievement of the Handel Method.” (See: Understanding the major characters of The Fountainhead [3])

The company kept growing. Her sister began coaching corporations such as AOL and Citibank. Lauren knew she wanted more. A few years ago, Lauren met David Mindell, an MIT professor of the history of engineering and of aeronautics and astronautics. He knew that a significant number students he taught suffered from depression and unhappiness and he thought it might be because no one had taught the students to deal with the social aspects of life, Lauren says. She asked him, “If I prove to you that my approach works and will make a huge difference to your students, will you let me teach a class here?” She coached a skeptical David.

Within six months of coaching him, she’d convinced him to let her teach. The year was 2006. They listed the course, “Living and Extraordinary Life”, in the catalogue and had about 30 students sign up (one of whom was Samantha Sutton, now a coach for The Handel Group). During the first day of the course, Lauren introduced the students to her no-bullshit tactics. She once told a roomful of MIT students, “I will expect you to do the homework. I’ll boot you out if you don’t.”

She effectively led them to discover, analyze, and talk about their true beliefs and encouraged them to fully become “the author” of their own lives. She explains that the best way to take authorship of your life is to accept responsibility for mistakes and choices. “The theory I recommend you accept is you created your present life,” she tells them. For these students, taking full responsibility for their choices can represent a huge change.

“The structured, rule-based approached actually resonates very well with students at MIT,” David says. “Students are MIT are very practical and they like structure . . . this course is really about that.” He continues: “For MIT to become known as a place where people are educated as full human beings and for the full range of their life, that would be an extraordinary contribution, both to MIT and to the broader world of education . . . other places would follow.”

Now, students from Amherst and Harvard are attending, and it’s evolved from a week-long crash course in the spring to a full-blown summer class called “Designing Your Life.” Lauren has suggested image makeovers (she had one student trash his inch-thick glasses and peruse fashion magazines to find a new fashionable pair), helped students lose weight, and land meaningful jobs.

In August of 2007, Lauren met another woman whose life she was about to help change dramatically. The woman was Katie Torpey.

LAUREN HELPED KATIE keep promises by leading her to create and participate in an accountability system. She had to stick to her diet of proteins, fruit, and vegetables. She couldn’t eat rice or pasta. She had to work out five times a week and do cardio. If she cheated on her diet, she had to wake up at 6 a.m. and walk her dog. “With consequences, it’s always something that’s good,” Katie says. “My dog loved it. Every morning he was licking my face.”

She lost 75 pounds in about 8 ½ months. She stopped drinking. Her ex-husband admitted he was gay and fell in love with a man after she left him. But, after coaching with Lauren, Katie also admitted she’d never loved her husband either. “We went down to the basics,” Katie says. “I started taking responsibility for all the messes in my life. In reality, on my wedding day, I had a meltdown. I didn’t want to walk down the aisle. I put on weight instead of dealing with things. But once you take responsibility, you become powerful, and you take control of the situation.”

Lauren also led Katie to proactively deal with any “haunting memories” or moral failures. Katie called people up she’d lied to, or hurt, over the years. When she was 6 years old, she was sexually abused by a neighborhood boy. She found him, and spoke to him. “Once I dealt with it and let it go, it was like this crazy happiness that came over me,” she says. “I wasn’t lying to anyone, I wasn’t hiding anything. It was so freeing.”

Eventually, Katie reached her ideal weight of 133 pounds. She is half the size she once was. She’s thin—a size 4—and her weight loss revealed sculpted cheekbones and clear green eyes. Her once-bleached hair is now a honey blonde and lies in waves around her face. Her career is better than ever. One of her movies—“a kind of Wall Street meets Goodfellas”—is set to film in late fall. She co-wrote and directed the suspense film Truth About Kerry, released this year. She’s in discussions with a network interested in having her work on an animated series. She wrote a book about her journey with Lauren and is in talks with several publishing agents.

“It’s interesting because I really needed to go on the journey I did to become a better person, a better writer and know what I really want to do with my life,” she says. “Working with Lauren changed everything.”

AFTER SHE SUCCESSFULLY tackled the educational field, Lauren decided to start a radio show and TV show. “I’m a chick with a vision,” she likes to say. Her Biography Channel special Celebrity Life Coach premiered in December 2010 and paired Zander up with fiery actress Sean Young, who starred in Blade Runner and No Way Out. (Viewers watched Young transition from a posture of excuse-making victim to proactive achiever once again.)

Now, Lauren’s role in the company has moved from coaching to launching new divisions in which her method is taught: television, radio, the classroom, online. Her goal is to have her philosophies taught in universities around the world. She also wants to write a book. She is adamant that people need to effectively deal with personal issues that inhibit growth and personal happiness in order to avoid living a bifurcated life. “[People are] dealing with depression, taking medication, never talk to their father, on their third wife, but they run an incredible company.”

Lauren admits she isn’t perfect, either. For years, she wrestled with an addiction to cigarettes. She was overweight and a chronic cheater. But she chose to change. She built promises she knew she could keep, eventually stopped smoking cigarettes, maintained her weight, worked out issues with her father, and found the love of her life. “I am my original student,” she says. “I am the original brat, I am the original chicken.” Now, if she breaks a promise to herself, she’ll have to face the consequences she’s put in place. If she doesn’t have sex with her husband at least twice a week, she doesn’t get to watch TV for a week. Her husband has promises and consequences, too. “We live in it,” she says. “The whole entire method is based on knowing yourself,” she says, and that includes cultivating personal integrity, committing to personal growth, and holding yourself accountable to address and fix your own problems.

As I found out when I participated in a two-day Handel Group workshop in New York City, it takes a lot of courage to do the homework, write your dreams, make promises and keep them. It’s tough. I realized I’d been keeping my family at arm’s length because I felt like they wouldn’t like me if they knew the mistakes I’d made in my teenage years. After the workshop, I decided to write a candid letter to my parents, and now, we’re closer than ever.

Not everyone enjoys Lauren’s in-your-face method—that’s why she has so many different coaches with different styles. But, when one person in a family takes the chance and tries to live an extraordinary life and makes a commitment to do the work, they usually become the voice of change in the family. “Someone’s gotta be in charge to shift,” she says.
“My ultimate goal is for people to change their life,” she says. “I have a deep love of what life is meant to be and I really don’t think people are dealing with what life is meant to be, which is the study of themselves and the creation of themselves . . . you are whatever you want to be.”

Katie has kept her weight off for more than three years. She started a blog about her weight loss journey. In it, she writes about how she tackled her life from every angle, and gives advice to others who want to shed some pounds. “Anyone can change his or her life at any moment,” Katie wrote. “Your life is always starting right now.”

Because my mind is so active on the subject of food, I need a lot of rules around food. My promises and consequences quiet my mind. Here is a sampling:

- I don’t eat sugar, but I am allowed two desserts per week.
- I don’t eat refined carbohydrates (bread, pasta, etc.).
- I don’t eat cheese, except for feta and goat.
- I don’t eat after 7:30pm.
- I drink two huge glasses of water before anything else in the morning.
- I take probiotics morning and night.
- I only drink water, but am allowed up to two alcoholic beverages per week.
- I can break any of these rules for one meal per week.
- I don’t get to break my rules or eat my desserts unless I hit my favorite weight (which I have clearly defined and shared with my community). This is how I have designed the “consequence” part of the process.

Now, when I go on vacation, I disband all my rules and immediately the food starts talking to me. The main thing that converses with me when I’m away? My favorite chocolates, of course.

When can I get it? Will the family be okay to stop on the way? Will I have to wait ’til everyone is settled in? What if someone else tried to pick the chocolate already? No no, I have to pick it for myself. It’s all for me. I’ll get some to share, too, of course. This is so special and exciting. What if they tease me about this? Okay, I’ll play it cool, I’ll try not to care. But I am just so excited. Uh oh, I remember now I do not feel so good afterwards. My mouth hurts and my stomach hurts and I get all tired and cranky. Then I don’t feel like exercising and I just want to stay in bed. I hate that feeling– like I never really connected with my family because I just wanted to lie around. And my lord, what it does to my skin! Maybe that won’t happen this time. I’ll be moderate, really. Either way though, when I get back home I am going to have to deal with losing all the weight again. That’ll be hard. But it’s worth it, and by then I’ll really be ready. It’s only fair, it’s the holidays, everyone is letting loose, why shouldn’t I? Everyone else is doing it. It’s part of the fun. I hope nobody else in the family is on a diet, that would ruin the fun and make me feel guilty.

This is how the food talk sounds in my head and I could go on and on; this was just a snippet. I am making myself sick just thinking about it! Can you believe this garbage in my head about this garbage in a box? I sound like a teenager or drug addict!

I am hoping by now you can relate, that you too can hear that there is a voice in your head that talks to you ad nauseum (sometimes literally). It’s January and I am back on track with my rules, easily now able to focus on other things, like all the dreams I want to fulfill this year. But I am wondering about those of you who haven’t designed the right promises and consequences to help you live with ease, not anxiety, around food. Do you have to listen to these types of voices as much as I do on vacation? I have time on vacation, but during my “regular life” –NO WAY! I wouldn’t be nearly as productive, or happy! I fear the same is true for you and you don’t even know it.

You don’t know that you could make promises for everything that is important to you: food, exercise, date night, time with your kids, punctuality, TV and internet use. And you don’t know that these simple rules would clear your mind, make you more productive and make you SO MUCH happier. These are not resolutions I am recommending; they are well-designed, custom promises that you make to another human being or community. This is the concept that makes Weight Watchers and AA work. You need way more support than you think; you need people, like your own personal team. Your internal dialogue alone is not going to ensure your success mainly because it feeds you garbage all day long. Remember the garbage in my brain when I’m on vacation?

It’s January and it’s time to start fresh. I offer you a nibble of our community and an intro to designing both a deep context for loving your body and the right rules for you. Try our 4-week group telecourse starting January 16th, Dream Body, and get $50 off if you enter TDL50DBgrp. There are only five spots left.

Let’s make the voice of the food shut up so we can hear the faint whispers of ignored dreams and feast on them instead.

Love,
Laurie

Everyone who knows the Handel Method® knows the power of a good rule to take over the mind. My food rules spare me from thinking about food because they tell me what to eat and not to eat. Without them, my mind becomes a little irresponsible. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, as they say! And frankly, I don’t think we are aware of just how much mental energy (aka thoughts) we do waste thinking about things like our waists. And when our next meal is. And will it taste good. And what about that coffee? Or alcoholic beverage? Even those of us who are very health conscious (sometimes especially those) just spend way too much mental energy having discussions about food and drink.

I want you to spend the next three days listening to you talk to yourself about food, and jot down all those thoughts/feelings about food so you have a record of how distracted you are. In the Handel Method®, we call this thought logging. You’ll have to really be on alert, maybe even get a buddy, because most of us don’t even know what we’re thinking most of the time. Paying attention to your thoughts will revolutionize your life!

So, what will you notice during your thought logging? What will your thought patterns be? There are probably themes like:

- Hoping what you like is served
- Hoping nobody sees what or how you eat
- Deciding on portion size
- Debating how much/what to have now versus later
- Debating how late you should eat
- Wondering if you’ll be hungry
- Wondering what you can and can’t handle as a result of that drink or the absence of it
- Wondering about what other people are eating
- Negotiating eating something now in lieu of something later
- Wondering how something you eat or don’t eat will impact how you feel
- Wondering how something you eat or don’t eat will make you look

And I could go on and on. Ain’t it complicated? And sometimes even sad or painful? I believe that mastering your relationship to food and your body is one of the most complex, spiritual and rewarding endeavors a human being can embark upon, and I want to challenge you to begin, if you haven’t already. After three days of studying your mind on food, I want you to try to silence or talk back to it. The best way to do that is to set up some rules. First, have a rule about not thinking about or talking to yourself about food. (Yup, you can control that, too!) In order to adhere to it, you’ll have to have other physical rules to guide you. Here are some of mine:

- I don’t eat sugar, but I am allowed two desserts per week.
- I don’t eat refined carbohydrates (bread, pasta, etc.).
- I don’t eat cheese, except for feta and goat.
- I don’t eat after 7:30pm.
- I drink two huge glasses of water before anything else in the morning.
- I take probiotics morning and night.
- I only drink water, but am allowed up to two alcoholic beverages per week.
- I can break any of these rules for one meal per week.

Keep a thought log again for three days along with a log of everything you eat (a food log). Write down the food and drink you choose to consume and any thoughts and feelings you have about it during the day. I am asking for less than a week for this experiment! I’ve done this all myself before and for much longer, so I know you can do it, too. What will change when you have your rules? Possibly, you’ll feel a lot of relief. I hope so. I know I am always dying to get back to mine after a vacation. Possibly your internal “brat” or “chicken” voices will start to totally freak out and scream even louder at you than ever before, trying to convince you the old ways weren’t so bad. (You weren’t that consumed or miserable, right?) Possibly, you will realize it’s way easier and more fun to take this on with a coach and a community, so you have support. I hope you will, especially since we have such an affordable group starting next week, and we know it works and we know it’s worth it. Check out our 4-week group telecourse beginning January 16, Dream Body and read a couple testimonials (below) from past Dream Body clients for inspiration.

Much love,
Laurie

“I wanted to take this moment to thank you and your staff (The Handel Group) for the outstanding program I was introduced to earlier this year. I thought weight loss was simply a function of food choices, calories in, calories out, exercise, etc. My life, like others, had become a matter of convenience: fast food, pizza delivery, TV, little or no exercise and late night eating to react to the daily stresses we incur. In starting your program, I was more or less a spectator with interest in the weekly conversations. Slowly, I found myself making changes and adjustments to food choices. It eventually became more obvious the role food had been playing in supplementing or covering up issues, concerns, stresses, habits, etc. Your program has been very effective for me! I have lost 20 pounds since the start of your program. Now food is not always about comfort; it is more often a fuel source for my body and mind. It is good to feel young again, when food did not control my primary thoughts. Thank you and your staff for helping me get to that feeling again!”– Mike Bannister, Business Owner

“I know without any doubt that The Handel Group has improved my life tremendously, more than any single thing I’ve done so far. Obviously working out and losing weight (33 ½ lbs so far & counting) is hugely important, but the thing about HG is that it’s holistic. It covers all aspects of our being. That’s why I say it’s had more impact than any other thing I’ve done to improve my life. I am happier, thinner, healthier, a teeny bit more likable, and I have an eagerness about my life that I didn’t really have before. I loved being alive, but now I’m eager to get busy with the things that are important to me, and I know my work with Handel will make that happen. “There’s no time to waste’ is how I view it! I’ve done enough of that already!”
– Bridget Buckley