The Brain Gap is what I call the differences in how men and women are taught to think about themselves — and the gap that creates inside women’s minds between what we want to believe about ourselves and how we actually think and feel.
I created The School of New Feminist Thought to teach women how to use feminist coaching tools to close that gap. Feminist coaching is the only kind of coaching that can help you actually heal your brain from the impact of living in a male-dominated society.
I FEEL SO STRONGLY ABOUT THIS WORK that I left my job running a think tank at an Ivy League University, a few months before embarking on a career as a law professor, to become…a life coach. On the Internet, no less!
My Jewish parents have just about recovered from the shock. But it was my experience as a smart, driven woman in the world that made me realize just how important and necessary it is to close the Brain Gap in our own lives — a mission that was worth abandoning everything I’d been raised to think, feel, and do.
I still care about those things. After a few years, though, I realized that law wasn’t really the best way for me to be of service because it wasn’t where my true genius and passion lay. Law was about moving the pieces on a board that had already been set up for you based on rules you didn’t create.
I WANTED TO THROW THE WHOLE GAME ON THE FLOOR AND START OVER.
Who am I underneath everything I’ve been taught to believe? What kind of life would I choose if I were really in charge? I turned to meditation, yoga, and therapy to answer these questions, but it wasn’t until I found coaching that I found concrete answers.
After the initial high wore off, though, I started to realize something was still missing. I realized that the coaching tools I had learned were really best suited to helping me achieve socially-sanctioned goals. How to lose weight, how to organize my house, how to have a perfect morning routine.
I didn’t want help making sure I got married soon to feel ok about myself — I wanted help learning how to like myself enough single that I didn’t turn into one of Pavlov’s dogs every time Tinder dinged on my phone.
Feminist coaching was my solution. I realized that the power of coaching tools needed to be harnessed in a way that really helped women become more of themselves — not more of who the patriarchy wanted them to be.
At The School of New Feminist Thought some of our clients would call themselves feminists and some might not. But they all come together to change their brains, so they can change their lives… and change the world.
It’s even been included in a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Medical Association* that showed this kind of coaching reduced burnout and imposter syndrome and increase self-confidence, self-compassion and flourishing (yes, that’s a technical term — but it’s also truly the whole goal of this work).
This is deep, wild, hilarious, and mind-bending work. Feminist self-coaching is practical philosophy. It’s asking the Big Questions, and coming up with your own Big Answers. It’s freeing yourself from the constant anxiety of trying to be the Perfect Woman (TM) so you can be a full person of your own. That’s what men have been allowed to do since time began; and it’s time we gave ourselves the permission to do the same. No one else is coming to set us free. We have to free ourselves.
*My work was part of a national randomized clinical trial published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
This coaching membership program is how you learn to close your very own Brain Gap and cure your own socially-programmed anxiety. Self-help is always how women have changed their own lives, because society ain’t gonna to do it for us. We have to save ourselves, and each other.
Order my NYT Best Selling Book —Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head — and How to Get it Out.
In the 1970s women helped each other look at their cervixes in hand mirrors. Today we have to help each other look at our brains. The coaching field is in desperate need of feminist theory and tools, and you can be part of upleveling this industry for the better. We open registration once a year; sign up to get on the waitlist here.
We’re here to help you figure it out. Get on our email list and we’ll send you some powerful questions to help you figure it out.