Today I want to tell you all a story about getting what you want and then being very mad about it. I think we can all identify with wanting something, craving something, believing that it will solve all our problems, and then finding the actual experience anywhere from disappointing to confronting. You want a partner more than anything else and then you get one, and then you have to deal with all your intimacy shit. You desperately want a kid and then you have one, and then parenting is so much harder than you thought it would be. You’re sure that if you just made a certain amount of money, it would solve all of your worries, and then you do make that amount of money and now you just have new and different worries.

So today I’m going to share my version of this story that I’m going through right now and what I’m learning about how to be vulnerable, be a beginner, and learn to transform myself all over again.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

About six weeks ago, I texted the woman who trained me as a coach and I told her I needed a coaching intervention. Because I felt like for the first maybe eight years of my career, I feel like I was on fire. I was motivated, I was optimistic, I was coaching myself all the time, I was in transformation all the time. I was constantly blowing my own mind. And my results reflected that. But then I had a few big things all at once. I published a book and got it on the bestseller list, but it took up almost a whole year of my life and energy. And the same year I got married and became a stepmother and I hit perimenopause. So 2024 really hit me like a truck. And then in 2025 I had to pivot a lot of things in my business. There was turnover on my team after a long time of the same team. We changed our offerings, etc. And I went into perimenopause without really realizing it at first.

So I spent the first half of this year feeling kind of shell-shocked and just trying to get a hold of what was going on. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t myself, which is something you hear women say a lot. But I felt like I wasn’t the version of myself that I liked best. I wasn’t the version of myself that was confident and bold and blowing my own mind, not internally.

So I texted my mentor, I told her I needed an intervention. She agreed to coach me. Amazing. We got on a call, she got all up in my brain and told me what was going wrong in there and I immediately hated every fucking minute of it. My brain had so many reasons that everything she said was wrong, she didn’t get it. Here’s why all my circumstances were really true limitations on what I could do, definitely not just my thoughts. My brain also had a lot to say about how my mentor was a unicorn and she was totally different. And whatever she was saying didn’t apply to me because I’m not a unicorn like she is. I wanted to fight this coaching tooth and nail. Even though this was the coaching I had wanted. I had been complaining for years that I couldn’t find anyone who could hold the vision and get in my face and coach me with the tough love and the bigger vision I needed. And then I got it and my brain just hated it all.

But I had promised myself I would be coachable, that I would take on board what she told me. I will never abandon my own authority and discernment, but my knee-jerk resistance was not what I wanted to listen to. Because the thing about getting coached is that if you already could see what you don’t see, you wouldn’t need coaching. So it’s normal that when you get coached, your brain wants to disagree with everything being said. Of course, your brain thinks something different, the thought pattern you’re stuck in, but it’s committed to that.

So over the last six weeks, I’ve been exactly where my clients are when they work with me closely, generally my Mission Impossible Mastermind. Someone who knows me well is getting all up in my brain. She is calling me on my bullshit. She is getting page-long thought downloads and responding with one question that cuts through all the noise and makes it all so simple. She is refusing to believe all of my limiting thoughts. She is laughing at my nonsense and calling me into a bigger version of myself, a bigger vision of myself. And it is uncomfortable. But I want it to be uncomfortable. I know that’s a sign of growth. I always want to choose to evolve and surprise myself with who I can become. I want to stay a flowing river. I don’t want to be a stagnant pond.

I always say when I’m done coaching and a client is laughing but also mad at me, I’ve done my job. Because good coaching challenges all your limitations, your fear, your perfectionism, your desire to control and know everything ahead of time. Sometimes it’s about calling you into going after something bigger when you’re playing small. Sometimes it’s about challenging you to make small changes you can build on if you’re used to grandiose fantasies that you never execute. Either way though, you’re being asked to think, feel, and act differently, and if that were easy, everyone would do it.

So after this quick break, I’m going to tell you exactly what I’ve been getting coached on and what I think you can learn from it.

So the main thing I’ve been working on with my coach is my business and my revenue and wealth goals. And for women, this is really deep identity work. There’s so much socialization around money that women internalize without even realizing it. The men running the world and exploiting people and accumulating trillions of dollars they can never spend profit from women all over the world believing that wanting a 20 percent raise or to be able to buy a beach house makes them selfish assholes who are oppressing everyone else. And I thought I’d gotten through all of this. I never thought I’d make as much money as I have as a coach and I’ve got to be in the top one percent of coaches in the world in terms of my revenue, maybe the top 0.1 percent. But a few years ago, after probably six years of my revenue just going straight up, I had a year that was a decline. I had also closed a whole program, but my brain didn’t care about that. And then the business stabilized, but it hasn’t grown again since.

And first, I blamed everything around me, the economy, the coaching field, politics, whatever. And then suddenly I started to blame myself. But I didn’t realize I was doing that because I wasn’t talking shit about myself or being really mean to myself. I wasn’t telling myself that I’d done something wrong or I was stupid or I was bad or anything like that. So it didn’t register as self-blame. But I started to believe that what I have now is all I’m capable of creating. I started telling myself that my business had a set point like my body and this was just the size it had to be and I could not change it. A few days ago my coach texted me and said, I feel like you really need to sit with what a motherfucking badass you are. It’s like you’ve forgotten that. And you’re moping around letting your circumstances control you and believing you aren’t extraordinary. This was fucking deja vu. Because if you’ve been around me for a while, you’ve heard me tell the story about how this same woman changed my life a decade ago over dinner by challenging me not to just think I was fine, but to actually believe that I was awesome, amazing, or wonderful.

And here I was again. I wasn’t back to where I had started, but I was at a new level of the same pattern. Most people who meet me would think I’m maybe the most confident person they’ve ever met. And yet, I still needed someone who has an even bigger vision than me to remind me that I’m capable of even more. And it was such a powerful reminder for me of what I think are the two core beliefs I have about coaching and the work that I do.

First, women under-believe in their own awesomeness and possibility, and it makes them settle for mediocrity or just good enough in who they can be, what they can experience, and the lives they can have. Often it all already looks amazing on the outside to other people, but they know it’s not all they’re capable of. And two, that’s why you need someone who holds a bigger vision of you to really help you reach your potential and uplevel your life. It’s not because that person has the answers and knows what you should do. I don’t know who you should marry or what your startup strategy should be or what the best pitch is to get you on the track to becoming the dean. What I do know is how to spot the thoughts you have about yourself that are holding you back and making you play small, even if no one else would think you’re playing small at all.

And I think that’s what really sets me and my work and my clients apart. I’ve done the mainstream success. I graduated with honors from the Ivy League schools. I ran the think tank. I held academic fellowships. And I stepped away from it all to do something brand new and then I became world-class at that. So I’ve been in the top 5 percent of my field in two radically different jobs. I stayed single until I found my perfectly imperfect human and perfect for me husband. I’ve created the exact career I wanted when everyone thought I was being insane. So I’m not intimidated by you. I know what it’s like to look like you’re a huge success and still know deep down you want something more or something different or something new. And I know what it’s like to have your life totally together in one area and be in a shambles in another. I get that disconnect. I know how to bridge it.

So there are two things I want you to take away from this episode. The first is that if there’s something you want, something you aren’t going after, an area in your life that you’re not growing or evolving where you wish you were. I am telling you right now that the barrier is your thoughts about yourself and what is possible. It is not the economy. It is not your boss, it is not your partner, it is not your kids, it is not your responsibilities, it is not your cost of living, it’s not your time management, it’s not any of that. There is always a way. What is blocking you is your belief about what is possible for you. It keeps you from seeing that way.

And the second thing is that if you want to actually change that area of your life, if you want to go after that big goal and you’re willing to invest the time, the energy, the attention, and the money to do that, you should go to UnFuckYourBrain.com/mim. We’re filling our January start group for my Mission Impossible Mastermind right now. This is a small intimate group. It’s the most personal intensive coaching I do. We have a two-day retreat where we set each person’s impossible goal. And then we have coaching calls, we have a midway half-day intensive online, and a concluding ceremony online. We usually have like two to three spots open for each cohort because we have a very high renewal rate. So depending on what’s happened since I recorded this, you may see the information and application or you may just see a wait list.

But either way, if you want to spend six months working with me closely to blow your own mind with what you can create, then go check it out or get on the wait list so that you are at the top of the list next time we have spots. UnFuckYourBrain.com/mim. We only open twice a year and the wait list gets priority after our current members renew. So even if you can’t apply now, get on the wait list. You’ll get first dibs for the July 2027 group or whenever the next group is that you’re listening to this. In the meantime, really think about what you want to create that you are not admitting to yourself or others and what your life would be like if you went after it.