I’m Kara Loewentheil.

The founder of The School of New Feminist Thought

I’M A FORMER WOMEN’S RIGHTS LAWYER AND ACADEMIC turned Master Feminist Coach & Coach Instructor, and my team and I are on a mission to liberate women from the inside out.

At The School of New Feminist Thought we teach women (and people socialized as women) how to repair the damage sexist social messages inflict on our brains.

I call that damage “socially-programmed anxiety,” and it’s not addressed by the typical solutions  for anxiety offered by therapy or wellness techniques. I teach women cognitive-change strategies they can use to rewire their brains and create new beliefs.

Because all women deserve to live a life we won’t regret when we  die — but we can’t do that when we’re living by the principles a sexist society taught us to use against ourselves.

THE BRAIN GAP

You’ve heard of the wage gap, the confidence gap, the domestic labor gap. But what about the BRAIN GAP?

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.

The Ivy League Lawyer to Life Coach Pipeline

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.

While I’ve changed in many ways since I discovered coaching, one thing has been constant: I’ve always been preoccupied with the Big Questions.

I went into the law because I cared passionately about women’s reproductive and legal rights.

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.

I am a big-picture thinker, and I always wanted to talk about the important questions that we’re taught to ignore.

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.

I learned a lot from coaching — like how to become aware of what I was thinking and feeling, and how to change it.

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.

But they weren’t equipped to help me question those goals in the first place.

I didn’t want help becoming the person society told me I had to be in order to be acceptable to the men who run the world. I wanted help uncovering who I really was and what kind of life I really wanted.

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.

I didn’t want to be a better handmaiden to the patriarchy. I wanted to be free.

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.

Feminist coaching isn’t about agreeing with the modern American feminist movement in every particular.

It’s about bringing a feminist lens to cognitive change.  It’s about acknowledging and working specifically on the ways that society’s messages to women have impacted  your brain.

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.

We teach people socialized as women how to recognize  the impact of social messages on their thoughts and how to deprogram their brains so they can figure out who they really want to be.

Our work has been used by women all over 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.

Want to join us in learning how to close your very own Brain Gap for good?

Here’s how to get started.

Looking to do this work on your  own brain?

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.

Ready to read  more in depth about the Brain Gap?

Order my NYT Best Selling Book —Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head — and How to Get it Out.

Want to become a Certified Feminist Life Coach yourself?

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.

Not sure what you want yet?

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.