The Joyful Feminist Challenge
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You may be a feminist.
You may be a coach.
Or you may be a licensed mental health professional.
BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU ARE delivering TRULY INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST COACHING or therapy.
Intersectional feminist coaching is an entirely different method of coaching from traditional life coaching systems.
It’s a lens through which you understand the world and how women move through it, relate to it, are shaped by it, and shape it in turn.
It’s a holistic social, political, historical, and intellectual lens on coaching tools, the coaching industry, personal change, and social progress.
And you can’t truly understand what is happening in women’s brains and how to help them change their lives without it.
(I said what I said.)
In ACFC I was pushed to think harder than ever before. To challenge my assumptions more courageously. To coach myself harder and with more compassion than ever before (and therefore equip myself to do the same for my clients). To investigate again and again what was important to ME, and be better able to articulate to myself WHY. I made myself available for this work over and over again, even when it got hard.
As a result, today, I am creating bodies of work that feel like a more coherent expression of my deepest values than ever before. And as a result, my business has become so much more joyful, and every dollar I earn more soulful.
Thank you Kara! And thank you to Past Me for investing in ME.
Almost every woman in the world grows up in a patriarchal society.
Almost every woman in the world grows up in a white supremacist society, or a society impacted by white supremacism exported by “first world” countries.
Almost every woman in the world grows up exposed to sizeism, ableism, and a host of other intersecting structures of oppression and marginalization.
These powerful cultural narratives shape our brains from infancy on.
So when you try to help a woman with basic life coaching or therapeutic tools?
You’re bringing a butter knife to a sword fight.
YOU CAN’T TRULY HELP YOUR CLIENTS EMPOWER THEMSELVES UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IS MAKING THEM FEEL DISEMPOWERED.
And when it comes to women, it’s not just evolutionary biology or cognitive psychology or their family histories at play.
It’s what they believe they are allowed.
It’s what they believe they can accomplish.
It’s what they believe they are worth.
And if you’re coaching a woman of color, or a fat woman, or a woman living with a disability, or an LGBTQ+ woman, or a woman who lives across more than two marginalized identities?
And you don’t understand the history, theory, and impacts of the social forces that have shaped their experiences, minds and lives?
You’re doing them a disservice. And you’re doing yourself one too.
This advanced certification is intended for certified coaches and licensed mental health professionals of any gender who support clients of any gender, because understanding what society teaches us to think about ourselves based on our identities matters to everyone.
No matter how many intersecting identities you live in or forms of marginalization you’ve experienced, there are others you don’t know about first-hand. This certification will teach you about your blind spots, and will deepen your experience of yourself as a multi-faceted coach and human being as well.
This isn’t a luxury, or a bonus
It's a necessity.
THIS IS ESSENTIAL INFORMATION
WHEN IT COMES TO COACHING WOMEN EFFECTIVELY.
I understand coaching in a way that I was unable to before this program. I can recognize patterns in my clients with their thinking, what they fear and where they’re holding back and now I know why. This deeper understanding of the patriarchy and internalized oppression has made me one thousand times more effective. Prior to ACFC, it felt like I was coaching on the surface and now I can recognize the deeper cause of their issues.
I loved being immersed in a community of diverse women with all the various intersectionalities. Loved it. The open and honest conversations were like medicine for my soul. I witnessed truth, struggle, confusion and many exciting brain exploding moments.
Whether you consider yourself a feminist through and through…
Or the word ‘feminist’ conjures up images of burning bras and hating men…
Actually doesn’t matter.
(I know, not what you expected me to say!)
Because if your clients have absorbed social messaging about women, then their brains have been impacted by it. Full stop.
And that means if you want to coach them effectively, then you have to understand these impacts so you can help undo them.
And strangely, whether you identify as a feminist or not doesn’t have anything to do with having this skill set.
Because even understanding political theory doesn’t mean you know how to apply it to create a consensual, collaborative, and transformative coaching container that helps your clients rewire their brains at the deepest level.
And this is the only place to learn it.
Welcome to the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching.
BECAUSE THE REVOLUTION STARTS WITHIN.
The Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching is the only certification that combines the most powerful cognitive change tools in the coaching business with an intersectional feminist analysis. You simply cannot learn this work at this level anywhere else.
This four month program includes an education in feminist theory and feminist coaching principles, a coaching practicum, and a certification project.*
This advanced certification is intended for coaches and licensed mental health professionals.
The curriculum focuses on the gender-based socialization that women receive, but certification is open for coaches and licensed mental health professionals of any gender who coach clients of any gender.
- Understand the social, historical, and ideological forces that shape the way that women think about themselves and the world.
- Have mastery of feminist coaching tools in areas like body image, sex, eating + exercise, social relationships, family + parenting, romantic relationships + dating, money, work, self-confidence and self-care.
- Feel confident coaching any woman, of any background or identity, on any topic.
- Know how to approach coaching from a collaborative, consent-based perspective that maximizes your clients' agency and empowerment.
- Develop capacity to expand your own body of work in deeper and more feminist-informed directions.
I’m Kara Loewentheil, the creator of the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching.
I’m the host of the internationally top-ranked podcast UnF*ck Your Brain, and the author of the forthcoming book “Take Back Your Brain: How Sexist Thinking Traps You – and How to Break Free” (Penguin 2024). My work has been featured in publications like Glamour and the New York Times, and praised on podcasts as varied as My Favorite Murder and We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle.
Why am I qualified to “write the book” on feminist coaching? Well, I’ve been a professional feminist my whole life. After graduating from Yale University, I worked as a media writer for Planned Parenthood before enrolling in Harvard Law School, where I was the President of the Board of Directors of the national organization Law Students for Reproductive Justice. I clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then litigated at the Center for Reproductive Rights. After that I held academic fellowships at Yale and Columbia, before leaving the law to become…a life coach, of course!
I started my new career with no business experience of any kind. I got certified and then master certified as a coach, and was bringing in seven figures in revenue within three years. Now I run a team of 10 and have created over $20 million in revenue since 2017 using my feminist coaching tools. More than fifteen thousand women have participated in my feminist coaching community, The Clutch, and I’ve created an entirely new framework in the coaching industry that shines a light on the social context that has been missing from this field since its inception. Coaching and therapy were both created mostly by straight white Christian men. It’s time the rest of us had a say.
ACFC CONTENT MODULES
- Compassionate Self-Inquiry
- Feminist Coaching Principles
- Intersectional Feminist Theory
- Intersectional Integration and Self- Reflection
- Work and Professional Life
- Money
- Body Image
- Health, Food, and Movement
- Friendship and Social Relationships
- Dating and Romantic Relationships
- Sex
- Family, Parenting, and Household
- Religion
- Aging
- Relationship with self, Confidence, and Self-Improvement
- Social Justice
Feminism started as a social movement. But movements are created, organized, and executed by human beings with human minds.
WE CAN’T BUILD A NEW WORLD UNTIL WE CAN DREAM IT.
And we can’t dream it until our minds are free.
Your job as a coach or mental health professional is to help your clients free their minds.
And to do that, you have to educate and free your own.
All the rest will follow.
ACFC elevated my work as a coach and increased my ability to make change within my niche. And most importantly (to me) you created the first place since kindergarten that I can recall feeling completely comfortable being myself, being curious, and knowing other people would understand what I was talking about. That is priceless.
The most valuable part of ACFC was learning about why we think the way we think. The effects of living in a world with patriarchal and white supremacist views. I finally have the words and explanations for what I’ve been experiencing and witnessing. It all makes sense now.