BONUS: IS THIS A CULT AND OTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CLUTCH

Really, if you are listening, you’re still here, you’re still showing up and you are on the fence about joining The Clutch I really want to know why. I want to know what’s holding you back from joining us and I want to answer whatever your concerns are.

And my goal always is for you to make a decision that you feel good about, right? You might think my goal is to get you to join The Clutch, and it’s not. I mean, obviously, I think The Clutch is amazing, that’s why I created it. And I know how much it is changing women’s lives inside the group, but I want you to make the decision, right?

All of my work is about teaching women that they are their own authority and that they can trust themselves to make good decisions, right? And the reason that we sometimes need coaching on a decision is that we don’t trust ourselves and that we don’t understand how the human brain works. And we think that what we think is that the rightness of a decision is what will make us feel certain, right?

That’s how we’re kind of taught it works. Like if you know it’s the right decision, then you’ll feel sure about it. And if you’re worried about it or you’re not sure, then that might mean that it would be the wrong decision. And to that, I just want to say like, have you met a human brain? Because that’s not how human brains operate.

My brain can be very sure that I are the wrong thing for lunch, a decision that doesn’t matter, can’t be evaluated by anyone else, right? And it’s completely really irrelevant to my overall life, journey and satisfaction. My brain can be not sure I’m doing things right about literally anything. And some of the best decisions in my life that I’ve ever made, I’ve had lots of doubts about.

Like I had doubts about my business all the time, still a really good decision. But think about this, right, do you all think that when I was like, “You know, I’m this close to a job as a law professor, I’m running a think tank at Columbia Law School, I’ve gone to Harvard Law School, I’ve clerked on federal courts. I’ve been a litigator, I’ve been an academic, I have put 15 years into this career. I think I should quit and become a life coach and go get certified by this woman I heard on the internet.”

My brain was not like, “Cool, cool, no doubts, no concerns, no notes, just go for it.” I had so many doubts, but it was still an amazing decision for me, right? So the presence of doubt or the lack of certainty, does not tell you anything about whether it’s the right decision for you. That’s not how we want to decide.

The way you want to make any decision is what are my goals and what are my values? And does this decision move me towards those things, right? If I get what I want out of this, will that move me towards it? That’s the way you want to think about it.

Okay, so got some questions to answer. And then we’ve already got a couple of people who have already joined who put in their story, so I want to read those, like I said. Jennifer said, “I’ve been thinking about joining for a while, and wait, do I really need this? Is this just an indulgence?” This was in the Facebook group. “And I will admit, it feels like an indulgence, but it shouldn’t.”

So that is like also, right, the idea that it’s an indulgence to take care of ourselves is something that women are socialized to think. We don’t think it’s an indulgence to remove our body hair, or try to lose weight to conform to society’s standards, or you dye our hair so that we can pretend we’re never growing older. And I’m not blaming anyone who does those things, like I shaved my legs.

But the idea that we are socialized to believe that all the time and money and effort we put into trying to look a certain way so other people will want to have sex with us, right? Or trying to make everybody around us happy, that that is like important time and money to be spending. But that investing in our own happiness and our own empowerment is an indulgence is like a total brain fuck.

Now, as a tourist, I personally love indulgence. So hell yes, I think we should all indulge. But it is just so important to see that we are socialized to think that this is an indulgence somehow. Anyway, Jennifer managed to get over that thought, which is amazing. So she has joined The Clutch. She says, “It looks like a community with a clear statement of respect and support that this chicken needs right now.” So excited for her.

All right, so somebody says, “I’m curious how your program differs from other life coaches who also teach the model.” Such a good question. So for those of you who don’t know what the model is, there is a coaching model that was created by a life coach named Brooke Castillo, who’s the person that I trained with. And it’s a way of organizing a process that a lot of kind of different coaches and thinkers and spiritual leaders and, you know, spiritual teachers have talked about different parts of.

And it basically helps you see how your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions produce results in your lives. So the thought, feeling, action cycle is from cognitive behavioral psychology. And then there’s sort of some more spiritual development writers, I would say, who talk about the results you create. Anyway, the models a way, it’s a brilliant way of putting all that into like a process that you go through.

So that is something we teach in The Clutch. That’s something that I learned and I’m certified to coach and teach people in, and it is a part of what we do. But what is different about my work is that my work is the only work that brings this entire lens of socialization of how women are taught to think about themselves and intersectional coaching.

So intersectional coaching means we look at all the different identities, and communities, and backgrounds that people have, and the way that society teaches us to think about ourselves based on those. And then we have to look at how that’s impacting the way that we think and feel and how we show up in the world.

So when I went through coaching myself and getting certified there was a lot of discussion of evolutionary biology, which you hear in my work too. That’s part of what influences our brain. And then kind of modern psychotherapy spends a lot of time and attention on the family, right? And you see that come up in my work too, like how the family influences your development and your belief systems.

But there was not really a lot of conversation happening in the coaching space when I started out about how socialization impacts your brain, right? How certain thought patterns are taught to certain kinds of people based on what society believes they are and who society believes they are and that that socialization has such a profound impact on our thoughts and our feelings.

And there was also no attention being paid to the way that structural systems, meaning the existence of sexism and patriarchy, or racism and white supremacy, or sizeism and fat phobia, or ableism, or discrimination against LGBTQ people, or, or, or, right? All the different forms of bias in the world. There was not attention being paid to the fact that those things are real and they impact how people think and feel and the actions that they take and what they’re able to create for themselves in their own lives.

And so my body of work really is the innovation of bringing those perspectives to these coaching tools. So taking what is empowering and life changing about personal development work, but marrying it with an analysis and awareness of social systems and of the way that socialization impacts our brains. I just sold myself. I was like, “God damn, that is important and amazing.”

Okay, do you sign up for The Clutch for a full year or can you try it for a shorter period? It’s monthly. It is a monthly feminist coaching program. So you sign up for the first month, your membership automatically renews every month unless you cancel it or unless you graduate yourself, as I like to call it when you’re ready. So you can stay for as long as you like.

We have people who come for a few months, check it out. I always say you should plan, the minimum I would plan on is like three months. You can come for just a month, but you’re not setting yourself up for success if you do that because you’re just going to learn a little bit, your brain might get overwhelmed, and then you’re not going to actually have the support that you need and the coaching you need to really integrate what you’re learning.

But I would say that if you really want to up-level all of your life, and the people I see who have the amazing results, where like every area of their life has changed, they’re usually in it for a year, sometimes they stay for longer. Three months is like the minimum I would recommend.

I don’t recommend joining just for a month, I just don’t think it does, it’s like not doing yourself justice. And you won’t get the results that you want. You’ll feel better in a month, but you won’t really learn what you need and be able to apply it on your own.

How much time do I need to spend in The Clutch each day and week? How much time will I need to devote to this? So that is completely up to you. And here’s what I recommend, whatever you decide, decide on purpose ahead of time what is actually feasible for you. And then decide to believe that that is the right amount.

When we start something new, we have these perfectionist fantasies about how we have to do it exactly right and there’s like an answer out there about how much time we should spend. And then if we don’t do it exactly right, then we stop doing it, right?

So I gave this example on a post in the Facebook group, but if you decided that you were going to do 20 minutes once a week and you kept that up for a whole year, you would have done over 1,000 minutes of thought work by the end of the year. That’s so much time working on your brain.

If you decide instead that even though you know your schedule doesn’t really allow it, you’re going to do it, you’re going to tell yourself that you should do it 20 minutes a day. And then you stop after a week because you can’t keep that up, you will have done 100 minutes of thought work.

You might get some benefit, but that is the power of deciding ahead of time what’s feasible for you is the good, right amount for you. That lets you go for a year, get 1,000 minutes of thought work, right? These are just, obviously, comparisons, you can pick whatever numbers you want. But I really recommend that you decide on purpose based on what’s feasible for me.

You can spend five minutes a day, five minutes a week, you can spend an hour, it’s up to you. It depends on how much you want to do. The courses are the same length for everybody, of course. But then if you want to spend more time you can be submitting questions to ask the coaches, you can be reading all of the incredible written coaching that’s already been done in there, you can be watching call replays, you can be hanging out in the Facebook group.

It is really customizable and so really, the point is you need to decide ahead of time what is feasible for you. This is actually a tool called minimum baseline that I teach in the module on movement and like our thoughts around movement and exercise and eating. Because most of us set these perfections goals that we then never achieve and then we give up.

And so learning to set a reasonable goal that you actually know you can do and then believe that that’s enough, over time that compounds into so much more progress than setting an unrealistic goal and then failing immediately.

Minimum required or recommended amount of months, I think I kind of answered. What I see is that people who stay for a year have really blown their mind in every major challenge that they were working on. And some people stay a couple of years. I have people who have still been in from the beginning because they get to the point where they’re like, “Why would I leave? This helps me stay calm, empowered, set big goals, and hang out with other people who are up-leveling their lives. This is totally worth it.”

And some people graduate themselves and we celebrate them. I just had somebody just posted earlier today that they were graduating themselves after two years. And some people stay for six months. So it really depends, like if you have just one area of your life, if everything else in your life is amazing and you’ve got like one thing you want to work on, three, four months might be great.

If you are kind of like these thought patterns are in every area of my life. Like when I found coaching and thought work I would say my friendships were pretty strong, everything else in my life felt like a mess. So I needed a little bit more than that work.

Are there small groups of other chickens I can meet with? Yes. So we have something called coops because we keep the chicken theme going. And coops are chicken led. So different members of The Clutch who have different areas of interest and expertise have set up peer coaching groups.

And so there’s no cliquiness, we post it in a Facebook post every week what are the coops that are meeting. They are totally run by the people who host them. So it is peer coaching, it’s not like a trained coach who is like coaching you kind of one directionally, it’s like peer conversation.

And there are a bunch of different groups. I know we have one about feelings. We have one, I think, for like artists and writers. We have, we actually should get a list of those, Anna, if you have a list of them. And you can start your own. So if you get in there and you’re like, “I really want a coop for quilting and all the thought challenges that come up for me around quilting,” you can start one.

Oh, I love this story. Someone had posted in the Facebook group recently, and I think some of you will identify with this, that last night their husband spontaneously came up to them with a hug and said, “This positive thought stuff seems to really be making you feel better.”

And then she said, “The beauty, of course, is that I’m doing it 100% for myself and not for anyone else. Yet, I’m already able to show up so much more fully for the people in my life I really care about. I’m especially grateful for this as loneliness and feeling a lack of connection in my relationships has been leading to a sense of burnout.”

It’s not necessary for other people to notice that you’re changing, but it’s so fun when they do. And this paradox that when we, it doesn’t work to try to be like, “I’ve got to be calmer for someone else’s sake,” because you’re just telling yourself that you’re doing things wrong and bad. But when you actually show up for yourself, it turns into this ripple effect that everybody else can benefit from, which is part of what is so beautiful about it.

I wonder if joining The Clutch will help me decide about whether or not to stay in academia. I fear that Kara’s decision to leave her academic career will give me a bias in my decision making process. So any clarifications on how I can prevent that would help me a lot in deciding to join. For instance, are there other academics in The Clutch that have found it helpful in their careers?

So this is so fascinating, right, as a question because what it shows you is that you don’t trust your own authority and you don’t trust your own kind of ability to decide if staying in academia is right for you. So you worry that just by, like you already know me and that I exist and that I left academia, right? And you already know that many people have left academia and that many people have stayed in academia and had amazing careers.

So the idea that sort of just being in The Clutch and hearing my voice teach things, right, or seeing me on a call would bias you, it’s not really about me. Because I have no bias against academia. Some of my best friends are professors and they love it, right? It just wasn’t the right fit for me personally.

And honestly, if I could have been a professor in this, I probably totally would be. I just didn’t want to be a law professor, it turned out. It wasn’t academia, it was the topic that wasn’t right for me. I just was not as passionate about law as I am about this. That’s just me, right?

But what I see in this and the best reason for you to join The Clutch is that you don’t trust yourself, right? You think that, like you already know about my decision, but you think that just like being somehow in my orbit anymore would bias you. And that just shows that you don’t trust your own decision making capacity and you don’t trust yourself to know what’s right for you or what you want.

And that is something that thought work in The Clutch will help you with, right? That is the best reason to join The Clutch, is so that you feel so strongly in your ability to know what’s right for you that you would never worry about this. It’s not bad or wrong that you’re worried about this, it’s just showing you how your brain is working and how much that socialization and self-doubt is impacting you.

And the answer to your question is yes, there are many other academics in The Clutch. I actually think we have way more academics than any other coaching program because academics are smart, and they like to philosophically wrestle with things. And that’s something we do in The Clutch.

So I actually think I have way more academics who are still academics. That’s the thing, like not everybody should quit their job to become a life coach. Obviously that’s not the goal. The goal is to show up in your own career in a way that is empowering and amazing for you.

Someone asked, “I’ve just joined The Clutch and it feels like the more time I spend in The Clutch, the more I want to fix. I originally wanted to work on my thoughts about the business I’m starting, but that is getting pushed to the side by all these other things I’m now noticing you can use thought work on, so of course I’m not doing anything. Any feedback on this stalling out?”

Yeah, so the problem here is that you’re thinking that you need to fix yourself, right? Which implies that you’re broken now and if you just fix these things, then you’ll finally be allowed to feel good about yourself. And so of course you’re in a tizzy, right?

It’s like, “Oh my God, all these things are broken about me and I just want to feel good about myself. But I’m not going to be able to do that till they’re all fixed so I’ve got to do them all at once. And of course what happens is you do nothing because you spin out.

So it is true that when you start this work your awareness grows and you start to see lots of other places in your life sometimes that your thoughts could use a little brush up. But that isn’t a problem unless you are making it mean that you’re broken, there’s something wrong with you, you have to be fixed.

You are perfectly worthy just as you are. You’ve just kind of brain that’s been doing its own thing without supervision for a while. But changing these thought patterns, which is the work I teach, it’s what I do, it’s what I live by, it’s amazing. It doesn’t make you fixed versus broken, right? And it’s not a destination that you arrive at where then you never have a negative thought again.

This is the human experience. This work is not about going from being broken to being fixed and then being done. However, whether you stay in The Clutch a month or for the rest of your life, it’s not about when you’re in The Clutch. I’m talking about like thought work itself, this way of life of being self-reflective, and of managing our minds.

This is not about, “I fix a thing then I’m not broken and then I can feel good about myself.” It’s, “I’m going to work on feeling good about myself right now where I am. And how do I create capacity to experience all that human life has to offer me with more emotional resilience and compassion for myself, and love and more empowerment and more enthusiasm?” It’s like how do I expand my capacity to be a human in the fullest sense of that word? That’s what we’re doing. We’re not fixing you because you’re not broken.

I love this work and would truly love to join, however, I’m a single parent and just don’t feel I can afford it long term. What’s the best way to stay connected and move forward? Okay, so I’m going to give two answers to this, I’m going to answer your question, but then I’m going to coach you a little.

So the best way to stay connected and move forward if you are sure The Clutch is not for you, you just came on this call because, I don’t know, you were bored, you wanted to see what I was wearing. Or you truly need, like you don’t have a spare penny. You need that money to eat, have shelter, et cetera, listen to the podcast.

I have so many podcast episodes. I don’t even know how many, maybe Anna knows, but 300 something? I mean, I’ve been doing a podcast every week for five years now, since 2017, 18, 19, 20. Yes, five years. I’ve been doing a podcast every week for five years. That is a shit ton of podcast episodes.

It’s actually kind of too many. So if that sounds overwhelming to you, don’t worry, that’s why we have The Clutch. That’s why I have curated courses where I’ve just distilled really what you need and packaged it for you so it’s easy to get through. But the podcast is out there and what happens a lot of people, we’re at 241, okay. I got a little over excited. We’re not at 300, we’re at 241. Is that including the pre Unf*ck Your Brain ones, though?

Anyway, there’s a lot of podcasts episodes. So listen to the podcast episodes and take notes, right? Write things down, practice. And then follow me on social media, you can leave comments, right? There’s people leaving comments, that’s kind of a little community right there. So that’s what you can do.

But here’s the other thing I’ll say, the amount of money that you are making is something that you can change if you want to. And the reason that people have a hard time changing the amount of money they’re making is largely, not entirely, but largely because of your thinking about it, right? The thoughts that you have, have a big impact on how much money you’re able to make.

Even if there are other things going on, your thoughts make a big difference because we know that there are all kinds of people in the world making all kinds of money. So digging into that is something that you can do in The Clutch. We have, first of all, just learning to use the basic thought tools will help you. And then there’s a whole module on work and money mindset.

But to me, I would be being a bad coach and not showing up for you if I didn’t at least mention to you that one of the options is that you change your thinking around money and what kind of money you can create for you and your kid and to let you go and go off, whether you join The Clutch or not, thinking that you have no control over that and you can’t create more money if that’s what you want to do.

I just coached someone on The Clutch call yesterday about money stuff and we started by celebrating that when she first joined The Clutch she had never made more than $50,000 a year, she was making like 40 something.

And now I think she’s two years into doing thought work and she just negotiated a job where she works four days a week and makes $125,000, which is way more than she’d ever made before. Just by changing her thinking around what she’s capable of, what she is qualified for, and what kind of money she is able to negotiate for and ask for and create for herself.

I love this money mindset. So just as an example of a different way to think about this, Andrea said, “A friend of mine, life coach. and fellow chicken, meaning Clutch member, is the person who introduced me to Kara and this work. Through just my history in thought work, six months of the podcast, and one coaching session with her,” I think she means with her friend. Yeah, she got her first ever promotion of her life just last month.

So then when her husband and she were discussing why Andrea would pay money for The Clutch or any program, when she got this promotion after doing just one session with her friend she said, “If I can get $27,000 a year from just doing one session with someone or listening to the podcast for free, imagine what I would get if I invested $97 a month and got all the rest of those tools. It’s already paid for itself.”

She said, “I already understand that the monetary commitment helps make the mental commitment to the work stronger.” And that is so powerful, right? I mean, there’s a version of this that lots of coaches say, which is like when you invest money you show up. That’s sometimes true sometimes not true. We’ve all paid for shit we didn’t use, I’m not going to sugarcoat that.

But there’s a big difference between paying for something that you don’t really want, you already know you’re not going to use and you’re buying out of just kind of scarcity or pressure or something. Then yeah, you probably wouldn’t use it. When your hesitation is like, “Do I deserve to be allowed to care about my own emotional and mental health? Am I allowed to spend money on feeling better, as opposed to looking more fuckable or spending every last cent I have on my children even though they have toys they already don’t even play with? Or it’s okay for my husband, right?”

We had an amazing testimonial from someone, posted from someone whose husband was encouraging them to join and she was saying to her husband like, “Well, you spend more than this on golf every month.” And he was like, “Yeah I agree, you should join.” But she was holding herself back because she was thinking like, well, I don’t know, maybe we should spend the money on the kids, or on my husband, or on the house.

When what’s holding you back is not believing in your own ability to change or your own worthiness, then committing on the monetary level makes a huge difference. Because it’s this act of claiming that you do fucking matter, that your mental and emotional health matters, and that your happiness and the bigness of your life and your ability to be resilient and to change and grow is actually an important fucking thing that’s worth investing in. That sends a completely different message to you, to your brain, and to your commitment to do the work.

Somebody else said, “I have the thought I do not belong in this group of professional women. I’m uneducated and unemployed, never worked because I have a criminal record from 30 years ago. So much regret and unworthiness of a life unlived. I can post questions or models and I decide to delete them because I have the thought that I’m whining, I’ve built walls and burnt bridges all to protect my own thoughts and shitty feelings. As I read this, I think, ‘Fuck, I’m pathetic.”

Everyone belongs in The Clutch. You don’t have to have any kind of specific job, you don’t have any kind of specific relationship. I mean, what is so beautiful about The Clutch is we have people of like every lifestyle, every background. We have people who are members of like conservative religious groups and then we have people living in polyamorous communes.

We have every kind of person, every kind of background in The Clutch and everyone belongs there. All that’s required to belong is that you want to be doing this work and you want to be in a space where that’s what’s happening, and you want to change your life and your brain. That’s all that’s required, right?

And this is such an example of how we beat ourselves up and we hold ourselves back and we shit on ourselves all the time, right? We tell ourselves we’re whining if we are trying to learn how to feel better and how to take care of ourselves in ways that most of us, like let’s face it, we’re not taught as children.

I was not taught, most of you were not taught how to soothe yourself, how to regulate yourself, how to come back when something’s hard, how to believe in yourself, right? And then we beat ourselves up for even wanting to know those things. That is some toxic, misogynistic, patriarchal, cultural bullshit in our brains.

Okay, someone asks, “I don’t use Facebook, is The Clutch still a good fit for me?” We’re covering the gamut here. Yes, the Facebook group is totally optional. That is like the community hangout place. If you are not into social media, you are not into hanging out in Facebook groups, you do not need to use it.

All of the learning and coaching in terms of my teaching, all the work that I’ve created, all the tools and practices, that’s in The Clutch membership site. It’s like having a username and password to any other site you might have. We have a membership site where you sign in, that’s where all that stuff is.

All of the coaching in terms of the written coaching from ask the coaches, that calls of the live coaching, right, live coach calls happen on Zoom but the replays are in the membership site. Learning, teaching, coaching, that’s all in the membership site.

The Facebook group is for community, peer coaching, talking about coaching. We’re a very focused Facebook group, the only posts that are allowed are posts about coaching. We also allow memes about coaching. But we’re not blah, blah, blahing about anything else. There’s no whining, there’s no drama, there’s no just venting.

It is like, here’s the stuff I’m working on in my thought work, what do you guys think? Here’s an amazing thought I had, I wanted to share it so you guys can borrow it. I listened to this podcast, this thing blew my mind, I want to talk about it. That’s what’s going on the Facebook group.

And let’s say some people don’t have a Facebook account because they, you know, don’t want Mark Zuckerberg to have all their information which I understand. You can create a Facebook account that’s just for being in The Clutch. It can be anonymous, you can make up a name, whatever. You just hit reply to any, to like your email when you sign up and let us know like what’s the fake Facebook account you’ve made so we can match it up with your actual Clutch registration.

And so some people do participate that way. You can also ask questions anonymously in the Facebook group if you want. And when you get coached also, right, can be anonymous.

Somebody asked, “What if I’m in therapy? Will this work get in the way of or replace the support I already receive?” It will definitely not get in the way of it. Lots of people who are in therapy are also in The Clutch. People sometimes find The Clutch because their therapist referred them or their therapist listens to the podcast and told them to go listen to the podcast.

I have students who they and their therapist both listen to the podcast and they like discuss it together, which is so cool. So it definitely will not get in the way of it at all. And it won’t replace it, most likely. I mean it kind of depends on what you’re doing in therapy. Certainly it does not replace expert, you know, psychiatric or therapeutic support for more serious mental illness or mental health challenges.

Thought work is still helpful, right? This work is always helpful, even if you need other support. You know, if you’re going to therapy and what you do in therapy is you rehash your childhood over and over and you don’t feel like you’re making any progress and nothing ever changes and your thoughts don’t change and you don’t really like your therapist, then it’s possible that The Clutch would then maybe replace that for you.

But it certainly isn’t a conflict with therapy. It’s not a problem to be in therapy and The Clutch. A lot of people are in both and they find that there’s like amazing synergy, you know? What they’ve learned in therapy helps them in their thought work. They can bring like thoughts that they have unearthed in thought work to the therapist and talk about them. I see posts like that all the time.

Can any age join The Clutch? Are you able to help someone older with more entrenched and ingrained brain habits? Yes, and the first coaching I would give you is that if you tell yourself that your brain habits are entrenched, then they will feel that way.

But yes, in fact somebody asked this on one of the other calls. One of The Clutch members who was watching typed in that she was 78 and that you were never too old to join The Clutch. And I hope we have an 85 year old and a 95 year old in there. My grandma is 95, she listens to the podcast sometimes.

So no, any age can join as long as you’re old enough legally to join things, you know, it’s not for children. But all the way up, right, can join. And I don’t believe it’s ever too late. And I actually think like thinking that things are too late is such a problem thought pattern because, and it’s also socialization, right? Because women are socialized to believe that basically once they are, I don’t know, 40 they are all of a sudden completely like pointless. Like their existence is pointless and unnecessary.

If you are not, you know, 25 and having babies then who cares about you. Like that is the kind of social discourse around women and aging. So many women say that they start to feel invisible as they age because being visible for a woman is so tied socialization wise to sexual desirability and youth. And that is some toxic programming that we have to redo for ourselves.

And I see women even in like their 60s, 50s telling themselves like it’s too late for me, it’s too late to change, it’s too late to do what I want with my life. You might be alive for another 30, 40 years. Or 20 years or five years. If I have one year left alive I want to spend that year learning how to manage my mind and make that year as amazing as possible. So it’s never too late and I think even just that thought is like patriarchy programming itself.

So one thing I want to address is this question that we get and that I see here about kind of is thought work in the way that we’re teaching it like just kind of brain only? Like isn’t it kind of like bypassing the body? And that’s a total misunderstanding of the work that we’re doing. And we talk about feelings quite a lot, right? Because the mind and body are so connected.

The first week in The Clutch, when you start the feminist mindset fix, which is the first month program you go through, the first course you go through, that teaches you how to coach yourself we start with emotions. We start with feelings because your emotions are what tell you if a thought that you’re thinking is helpful or not, right? That’s the next thing that happens, you have a thought then you have a feeling. So they’re also related.

And so I love this story from my student, Ashley, who says, “I’ve always been very cerebral, living in my head to the point of near constant disassociation all of my life. And yet the concept of thought work and taking responsibility for my own thoughts never occurred to me. I was over identifying with my thoughts instead of realizing I had the power to control them and work them to my advantage to create peace and coherence in my life.”

So The Clutch is actually a great match for people who are too cerebral and disassociated from themselves because it teaches you how to connect to your brain and body or your, as my student Deb calls it, the mind/body experience, right? It teaches you how to actually connect to those things.

Somebody said, “What can I expect in The Clutch? What resources are there?” So I’ll just give the very kind of basic overview breakdown while we see if anybody, if there are any last brave questions coming in. There are sort of different elements to The Clutch so that people with different learning styles can take advantage.

So the first element is what I would call the courses. And so when you join, everybody goes through the feminist mindset fix first. That is the first course, the first month you learn the self-coaching model, that model I talked about in the beginning of the call, but with my socialization intersectional context and tools. So you learn how to coach yourself, you learn how to become aware of and process your feelings, how to become aware of and change your thinking, that’s month one.

Then every month after that you get a course credit and you can unlock a different course every month. And we have courses on all the topics that really most women and people struggle with, or people socialized as women at least struggle with. Which is food, and exercise, and your body image, and self-confidence, and work and money, and family relationships, and dating, and sex and sexuality, and the nervous system and trauma. And there’s more, but basically any big challenge that you’re working on in your life, we have a course for it. So that’s kind of the courses.

Then we have the coaching element, so that’s where you can bring your coaching. And some people love the courses and some people never do a course and they just want to be in The Clutch because they want to learn how to coach themselves and then they want be able to get coaching at such an affordable rate.

So they use ask the coaches which is where you can submit written questions and get written coaching answers back. And you submit anonymously, so nobody who’s reading it knows who asked the question. But you can see everybody’s questions and the coach’s answers, not who submitted them, like I said, anonymous. But you can read, like people have gotten so much coaching already on the things you’re struggling with so it’s almost like a library of coaching questions and answers.

That’s where you can get kind of written coaching. It’s great for people who think and process better in writing, who want to be able to submit a question like any time. You don’t you don’t need to make a live call to do that. It’s really important to me in The Clutch that everybody can get their question answered.

There are some big coaching programs with sort of similarly high profile coaches to myself where you’re in there and it’s possible if you have a question it’ll never get answered. And that is not how I roll. I want everybody’s question to be able to be answered, everybody to get the coaching that they need.

So there’s no limit, you can submit as much as you want to ask the coaches and you can get written coaching, and you can read everybody else’s coaching, you can search by keyword, by topic, it’s incredible. I mean, it’s just like a huge library of coaching and coaching responses on any issue you’re dealing with.

And then we have live coaching calls. I do a live coaching call once a month in the beginning. And then if you’ve been there six months or more, we have a second live coaching call a month with me. Three or four weeks a month as well we have calls that are run by my Clutch coaches who are hand trained in my method, my work. They are the best of the best. We had 200 applications last time we hired a Clutch coach.

And they lead calls where they go through using that coaching model, they teach it every time in case you haven’t learned it yet, or you just learn better from listening to someone teach. And then they help people understand how to use it and like edit and give feedback on their models. So that’s kind of the live coaching element.

Then there’s the community support element for people who like that. We have that Facebook group, peer coaching, peer discussion. We have those coops, which are the student led groups. For people who want to get on a live Zoom call that’s like peer support and discussion.

And then inside the membership site we also have an archive of almost 100 episodes of question and answer podcasts that I did just for Clutch members. So people would write in with their questions about what’s going on in their lives, what they need help with. And then I would record me coaching them, kind of one sided, right? It’s not back and forth. It’s like they sent in their problem and then I gave them the answer, the way to think about it. We have so many episodes of that, that’s also in our membership site.

We also have a course that’s always unlocked for everyone called when things are hard. Because it’s really important to me that even though you might be in a phase of your life where you’re like working on your money mindset, all of a sudden something happens, right? Someone breaks up with you or someone dies or whatever else and you need some extra support.

So we have this module called when things are hard, that’s always available anytime you need that extra support. You can let me know, Anna, if I missed anything, but I think those are all the elements.

I love this question, “I’m so glad you were brave and answered it. I’m worried about being culty. I left evangelical Christianity where you had to evangelize. Please help explain why this is not a cult.”

Okay, so definitely don’t evangelize. I always tell people never coach someone without permission. And you’ll see people get coached on this all the time. Like, “Oh, you know, my sister complains so much and I just want to tell like that it’s just your thoughts.” And I’m always like, “Don’t tell her that. She didn’t ask to be coached, you don’t have consent to coach her. Don’t coach her.”

So it’s definitely you are not meant to evangelize, don’t coach anyone without permission, it just doesn’t end well. I don’t even coach my partner without permission. People don’t want to be coached without permission, don’t do it.

For real, like here’s why it’s not a cult. First of all, well, this is still part of the joke answer, but like who has the time for that? I don’t want to be in charge of like what you eat, and where you live, and what you can wear, and what you can think. I got another shit to do.

But that really leads to the real answer, which is this, my whole work here is not to make myself the expert. It is to teach you how to be the expert of your own life. That is what I want, and that is why it’s not a cult. I mean, there’s some technical cult definition, I’m sure, that also would tell you why it’s not a cult. But for me that’s the essence of the philosophical reason it’s not a cult.

I am not all knowing. I am not omniscient. I am fucking walking around with a half managed mind and my whole goal in life, my aspiration is to show you how great your life can be even if you’re only half managing your mind. So I have a whole podcast episode called No Gods No Gurus, which is all about how I’m not a guru. Don’t put me on a pedestal. I don’t know everything. I am not the answer. I am not in charge of you, right?

I want you to be the own authority in your own life. I have no idea what you should do. I’m never coaching anyone with an agenda of I know which job you should take or I know if you should break up with your boyfriend or not, or I know what exercise you should do. No, none of that. I have no fucking idea what you should do with your life.

My job, my expertise, my brilliance is in seeing the way that you are thinking mostly about yourself and your own capacity and ability and value is holding you back from fully expressing the you that you are that no one else is. It’s exactly what is individual and idiosyncratic about you and special and rare about you and unique about you that I want to teach you how to express.

And that is the opposite of a cult because a cult is about conformity. And a cult is about everyone being the same and one person being in charge and being all knowing and telling everybody else what to do. And I don’t want to do any of that because, you know, some days I can barely make myself change my clothes. I’m not here to tell you what to do, ever. I love that question. So good.

All right, I think we should end on that. I don’t see any other new questions and that is so perfect. All right, my friends, thank you for hanging out. It has been such a joy and I will see some of you, I know, in The Clutch where we’re going to continue this work. Good night, everybody.

That’s it for today my chicken. But don’t forget, The Clutch is open from today, June 16th through Tuesday, June 21st. We are only open for a few days so if you’ve been thinking about it, this is your chance. Do not hang out on the fence. Fences are uncomfortable and you’re going to have to hang out there for many more months, when you could be changing your fucking life.

Text your email to +1 347 934 8861, and that’s +1 347 934 8861 or go to unfuckyourbrain.com/theclutch, all one word. So unfuckyourbrain.com/theclutch, all one word and come join us.