You may have noticed that the podcast art looked a little different today. Today marks the biggest change I’ve ever made in my business and in my work. It includes snakes. It includes pomegranates. It includes owls. But I promise that I’m not becoming woo or starting to host retreats in the woods. I’m going to tell you all about what is changing and what’s coming next in this episode.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain, Feminist Self-Help for Everyone brought to you by The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Harvard lawyer turned life coach extraordinaire. And I’m here to help you get society’s damaging messages out of your brain so you can be confident, feel powerful and live a life you won’t regret when you die.

If you want to jumpstart that process, you need to grab my totally free guide feeling less anxious and more empowered by rewiring your brain. Just text your email to +347 997 1784 and use the code word ‘brain’ or to go unfuckyourbrain.com/brain. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.

Welcome, welcome, my friends. I am so, so excited to share this news with you today. I have been just dying to tell you all for so, so long, and it has just been killing me to not share it. As you all know, I share every thought I have pretty much on this podcast. I am entirely un-black mailable and I have really wanted to share this new evolution and direction of my work and your opportunities to work with me. But before I can tell you all about it, I have to do a little story time because some of you have been around since truly the beginning of this podcast when it was The Lawyer Stress Solution, if you remember that.

And then some of you weren’t doing my work. You might have found the podcast last week. So I want to make sure we’re all caught up, we’re on the same page. So once upon a time in 2015, I had just gotten certified as a life coach and I was gearing up to quit my last legal job. I was running a think tank at Columbia Law School and I was supposed to become a law professor. And I was about to go on the market for that kind of job. And then as one does, I decided to jump off the path of my extremely time and money intensive, prestigious mainstream career and become a life coach.

So when I did that I was originally focusing on lawyers both because for a real, genuine, deeply felt reason that I still believe in. Which is that as I’ve started to learn about the brain and do my own self-coaching, I was like, “Oh, shit, is law school doing a number on your brain?” There are very specific ways of thinking that lawyers are taught to think and somebody needs to draw attention to this and help people. So that was very deeply held and deeply felt.

And also I was still kind of invested in the trappings of a mainstream career. And I sort of thought that coaching lawyers would make it sound a little bit less of a right turn out of nowhere. So in any case, I became a coach for lawyers and I was just doing one-to-one coaching. And my vision was, I thought okay, maybe way down the line I’ll be able maybe to teach this in law schools or just kind of spread it through the profession. But my vision of how my business would work was really primarily that I would have a one-to-one practice like the therapist I knew.

I would just see, I don’t know, 20/30 clients. And my big goal then was to replace my highest academic salary, which had actually been quite high for academia because the think tank I was running operated on a grant. But it was £125,000 or $150,000, which is a substantial amount of money, no matter what. Back then to me, that was the most I could possibly imagine ever making in my life. So my big goal was that I wanted to replace that in three years.

So in the third year of my business, I hoped to bring in $150,000 of revenue in my one-to-one coaching practice, working with lawyers. That’s what I thought I was doing. And then what happened instead was that by year three, I was no longer just coaching lawyers. And the business created 1.2 million in revenue in that third year.

Now, if you know a business, if you’ve owned a business, I mean, you know you don’t bring home nearly or even most of your revenue because you have expenses and taxes and all that. But my income was more than what I had set as my big, big goal. So how and why did that happen? Why did my work blow up in this way and go viral in this way that I hadn’t expected? It really happened because I’d gone through what I think of now as the first expansion of this work.

As I was coaching lawyers, and I filled my one-to-one coaching practice, I noticed that there were for sure very specific lawyer brain traits. But a lot of non-lawyers were coming to me too because even though I was framing what I was teaching in this kind of legal brain sense. It really resonated with a much bigger range of people. And I noticed that I also wanted to speak to more than just lawyer brains. I kept doing other things on the side, trying to host a body image retreat or I did one-off dating coaching groups.

I just wanted to work with women across a wider range of thought problems and life problems and solutions. So right around the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, I changed the name of the podcast to UnF*ck Your Brain and I expanded my clientele to women of any profession. So The Lawyer Stress Solution had really only been around for about six months, but it had really taken off. It had done well, it had done nicely.

But once I rebranded to UnF*ck Your Brain and I expanded my work to really talk about the different ways that women think and the ways that society teaches women to think. It became one of the top podcasts in the world very quickly. And then the next year, I launched The Clutch, which has been my coaching membership program and the rest of that is history.

So I really just brought in my vision from how does legal education impact lawyer brains, to how does society and social education impact women’s brains? And some of you listening were around for The Lawyer Stress Solution but just numbers wise most of you found my work during this first expansion, since 2018 to now. And now it’s time for a second expansion. So when I started the UnF*ck Your Brain podcast and the brand, I was in a very different stage in my work and my life.

I was already a feminist coach, of course, because I’ve been a professional feminist one way or another my whole life. But I was still figuring out and building out and developing my own theory of socialization and cognitive change. I was in my 30s, I was single, I was growing a business from the ground up in a real startup kind of way. I had two employees. I was living that kind of Manhattan girl boss kind of life. And so that brand, that sort of the edge, the sass, the pink, it all really spoke to where I was and the kind of work I was creating.

And now it’s six years later and my work has evolved and changed. My business has evolved and changed. My life has evolved and changed. And I think all of us together in this community of people who listen and try to understand our brains and try to take them back from the impacts of society. And try to become the most empowered and free versions of ourselves and try to create a better world for all of us through this work. I think we’ve all evolved too as a community.

I have my own whole body of work now, my own theory of the mind, my own theory of socialization and how it impacts the mind. I truly believe that all of us together, I mean, I am creating this content. But you are all listening and thinking about it and sharing it with your friends and bringing it into your life and changing the way you think and show up. So we’re all in this together. We’re all part of the same movement, the same mission.

And I truly believe that we are the forefront of the next generation of feminism and that we’re just starting to grapple on a bigger level with the deep impact that socialization has on women’s brains. And so this work now that we’re doing, it’s not just on un-fucking brains in a general way. It’s a very specific body of work and expertise that we have been developing and living together. And I have an actual company now. I have a dozen employees. And we do so much more than just the podcast and even so much more than just my membership community.

We train coaches. I’ve written a book that’s going to come out that I hope is going to really change the world. We’re growing our reach and impact. We’re maturing as a company. I have an actual executive team now. I have a leadership team and as a community. The other thing is that the podcast sort of became the whole name of the brand, which we didn’t do on purpose. So UnF*ck Your Brain is an amazing title for this podcast.

And as you saw on the new podcast art today, we’re not changing that. We have just added actually a subtitle, Feminist Self-Help, for everyone to communicate better what we’re doing here. And we’ve got some new cover art you saw, which is related to the big announcement I’m about to make. But UnF*ck Your Brain was never really meant to be the name of the company. The company didn’t really even have a name. And so I’ll always love UnF*ck Your Brain. And I love that it’s the name of this podcast.

But the business itself and the company needed a new real identity for itself. I’ll always be a little edgy, a little sassy, let’s be real. But that’s not the biggest part of what I do anymore or what this work is anymore. So it’s time to share some really big, exciting news. Today we are introducing The School of New Feminist Thought. The School of New Feminist Thought is going to be the preeminent place for smart, actionable self-coaching and practical philosophy for women all over the world.

It’s where you’ll find my podcasts, my books, my coaching programs that will help you get patriarchy and society out of your head so that you can live your life on your own terms. That’s truly what all of this is about. I want you to feel less anxious. I want you to feel more confident. But I really want you to live a life you won’t regret when you die. I want you to live a life that you know you chose for yourself, no matter how challenging or scary or exciting it was at different times, that you really did it on your own terms, you lived on your own terms. That’s what the school is here to teach women how to do.

And as always, it’s not about being a feminist in the sense of having to agree with every single political move that the modern American feminist movement makes. I certainly do not agree with every single one. And even calling everybody in America who participates in some way in feminist movements, as if they’re just one modern American feminist movement, doesn’t even make sense. But It’s not about a particular political orthodoxy.

It’s about believing in feminism as a philosophy of equal worth and value for everyone, regardless of gender. And healing our brains from a society that does not socialize us the same. So The School of New Feminist Thought is now the home for all of this work. We have a brand new look and visual identity that is absolutely stunning. It is rich. It is delicious. It’s inspired by ancient schools of philosophy, by Greek myths, by symbols of wisdom, by some of the symbols that have been used to marginalize women that we’re now reclaiming.

We have got snakes. We have got pomegranates. We have got me wearing an Athena power dress. It’s truly a stunning work of art, the visual design that my team and our creative director worked tirelessly on for the last six months, and you can see it all. You can just go to unfuckyourbrain.com to see it. It will automatically forward you because as I said, we are keeping the podcast title, UnF*ck Your Brain. That’s still what we’re doing around here.

I will not be using the term ‘chicken’ quite as much going forward, probably which I’ll miss and you may miss. But you may hear me call you my little thought work owl sometimes since owls are a symbol of wisdom and I can’t live without some kind of poultry endearment, apparently. So The School of New Feminist Thought is now open. It is ready and waiting for you to come and learn. And The Clutch, my feminist coaching program and community is becoming The Feminist Self-Help Society.

I am absolutely obsessed with this new name. I, of course, loved The Clutch as a name as well. It was so special to me from the beginning of this work. And if you’re in The Clutch, you’ve gotten some emails about this. I’ve gone live in the Facebook group about it. But if you missed all that, go check it out. We are keeping everything you love. We are adding some amazing new ways to learn. The Feminist Self-help Society, I think, really captures what we’re doing.

It’s what we’re doing in the podcast, kind of trying on our own, but together in The Feminist Self-help Society, we are helping ourselves in a deep and powerful way. Women have always had to help ourselves and each other because society is not designed to help us. And I love reclaiming self-help as an important and weighty and existential undertaking. When men sit around talking about what is the good life and how do we know what’s real and what’s not, or what to believe or who we should be or how do we become the people we want to be here? What is the purpose of life?

It’s philosophy. It’s deep philosophy. And they get endowed chairs at universities. And when women talk about those questions, oh, it’s self-help, that’s so cute. No, these are the big questions to grapple with. And doing that together is feminist self-help at its finest. So we are keeping everything that our members have always loved about The Clutch. It is still the best place to learn how to coach yourself with a feminist lens but now it’s got a glow up to match the rest of the business as well.

And we also took this opportunity to study our members and their progress, and we’ve reimagined some aspects of the program so that you don’t get lost, you don’t get overwhelmed. And you make real progress on what you want to see change in your life. We’re making a couple of changes that if you are in the Society you have been hearing about, and if you’re not, you can see everything on our information page, which I’ll share in a minute. But my favorite new feature is because we are now a school, we are adding study hall calls.

And study hall calls are a study group, a co-working call in office hours with my Society coaches all rolled into one. I find that even for myself, if I want to do a new coaching program or something like that, the biggest obstacle is just making sure I actually do the work. So we now have these calls where you can come and there’s going to be some co-working time. You’re going to be able to see each other and connect. And you’re also going to be able to ask questions and get help from my Society coaches.

So I’m super excited about those. I think they are going to really help people stay on track. I kind of hate the phrase, staying accountable because it’s kind of punishing, but just stay on track, stay engaged, make sure you do the work and get the support you need. So if you’re not working with me already, I want to encourage you to come be a founding member of The Feminist Self-Help Society. And so here’s what I mean by a founding member.

Of course, we have members who were in The Clutch and are now all in the Society. I started this program back in 2018. I’ve never raised the price since then, but that can’t go on forever. I mean, what the price was in 2018 is now in today’s dollars, 10 or 15% more. So at some point someday, we will need to raise the price. If you were in the Society before today so if you’ve been in The Clutch, your rate is locked in as long as you stay a member of the Society.

So we might be around for 20 years. If you’re in for 20 years, your rate’s going to stay the same. If you join us as a founding member of the society by January 20th, you will lock in that price as well. So you will also get the benefit of keeping that price at $97 a month, where it is, for as long as you stay in the society. That’s what we want to offer. We have our founding members who have already been in and to our new founding members.

It is time to take control of your brain and really to get your brain to work with you. It’s not about punishing your brain. It’s not getting your brain on your side. I know that every woman can feel less anxious and more confident when they learn how to think on purpose. And that is what we teach you in The Feminist Self-Help Society. And, of course we all come to this work because we want to solve our own problems and there is nothing wrong with that.

You’re going to learn thought work, you’re going to learn tools that are going to help you solve your own emotional and mental, practical problems. But we’re also doing something bigger than that. We are co-creating a new way for women to be in the world. That is the goal of The Feminist Self-Help Society. That’s the goal of The School of New Feminist thought. And we need your help to shape it. We need your brain, your wisdom, your humor, your insight.

Some of you may not even believe you have those things, but I know you do and we need you to help us shape that mission and that calling. The Feminist Self-Help Society is your home base to take what you learn on this podcast and take it from informational and interesting and entertaining and turn it into actual interventions in your brain that change your life. Some of you have gotten some of that just from listening. Some of you are more in a kind of just listening way.

But either way, whether you’ve been applying what you’ve been taught, you’ve just been listening, whatever you can create doing it on your own, which might be awesome. It still does not hold a candle to what you can create when you do it in a structured fashion with the concepts, tools, practices dialed in for you and with the support of the coaches and each other. And doing that in the community of other women and people socialized as women who want to bring this work into the world is really just such a special experience.

It’s going to be your favorite place on the internet. It’s been mine since I began it, and this new name, this glow up, doesn’t change that. So come join The Feminist Self-Help Society. Text your email address to +1347 997 1784 that’s +1347 997 1784. The code word is society. Or go to unfuckyourbrain.com/society and remember that you need to join by January 20th in order to lock in that founding member rate at $97 a month and have that rate for as long as you stay in the Society, no matter whether or how much we raise the price in the future.

And of course, if you are already in the Society, if you were a Clutch member as of yesterday, and a Society member as of today, you are of course included in that. Your investment as long as you stay in the Society is also locked in. Alright, my friends, I’m so glad that the cat is finally out of the bag. I’ve finally been able to share this exciting update with you and I can’t wait to see you back here for more feminist thought work next week.