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"  Your body is a template on which you can learn to manage your mind,&amp;quot; says my new life coach, Laurie Gerber, as we enter a fitness class to which she occasionally takes clients. Called IntenSati (the word intensity combined with sati, an ancient Indian word for &amp;quot;awareness&amp;quot;), the class is like boot camp\u2014if it were led by Mr. Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale. In the back row, I struggle to follow along with the 50 other participants as IntenSati&amp;#039;s leader and founder, Patricia Moreno, takes us through a complex sequence: Knee pump, fist jab, knee pump, lunge. &amp;quot;Confusion?&amp;quot; the class demands in unison. &amp;quot;So what!&amp;quot; Fist jab, lunge, leg lift, jump. &amp;quot;Fear? Bring it on!&amp;quot; Squat, straighten, jump, clap. &amp;quot;Failure? Try again!&amp;quot; Next to me, Gerber, a slim, attractive 37-year-old with light blue eyes and a wide, flat mouth, is smiling beatifically and repeating, &amp;quot;I am done complaining! I set myself free!&amp;quot; In front of me, a heavyset man in bike shorts squeezes his elbows together. &amp;quot;I am the change I want to be.&amp;quot; This must be how cults indoctrinate new members, I think, as I sweat, pant, and fumble the steps. First you break people down physically, then you make them repeat insipid slogans over and over. Lately, everyone I know is either seeing a life coach, thinking of seeing one, or thinking of becoming one, but when my friend Rebecca told me about Gerber, who is the president of the executive and life-coaching firm The Handel Group, my ears perked up. A documentary filmmaker whom I consider a connoisseur of so-called self-care, Rebecca always knows the best masseuse, acupuncturist, yoga instructor in town. Over coffee one morning, she confided that a few months of working with Gerber, whom she met through her yoga instructor (of course), had improved her relationships with her mother and husband more than years of therapy with her highly sought-after shrink. Thanks to her coach, Rebecca said, she&amp;#039;d finally begun to see how she contributed to keeping her loved ones stuck in patterns that she supposedly abhorred. &amp;quot;Their unofficial motto is `Maybe it&amp;#039;s you,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Rebecca said. Founded eight years ago, Handel employs a cadre of coaches who guide clients to identify dreams, recognize what&amp;#039;s blocking their fulfillment, and then come up with specific steps to make them reality. An action-oriented plan like this appealed to me. I&amp;#039;d been in therapy on and off for the better part of two decades, sorting through the psychic fallout of growing up with a mother who drank too much in order to dull the pain of some horrible tragedies she&amp;#039;d experienced as a young woman and a father who was evasive, philandering, and hypercritical (a professional book critic, in fact). Self-understanding had helped me accept myself, flaws included, but now I wondered if I&amp;#039;d set my sights too low, if my limitations were preventing me from getting more satisfaction\u2014not to mention joy\u2014out of life. Not that I was miserable: I got to spend my days doing work that I cared about; I had a partner (I call him my husband) who made me laugh and never bored me and, as a professor, was around and available more than most husbands; and I had two kids who made me feel as if I&amp;#039;d won the genetic lottery. Our professional lives gave us the freedom to spend summers at my mom&amp;#039;s house on Martha&amp;#039;s Vineyard; live for a semester in Paris, then Buenos Aires; and volunteer at our kids&amp;#039; schools. Still, I often felt overwhelmed and tired, nagged by a vague discontent\u2014is this it? After the exercise class, Gerber and I headed to a caf\u00E9 for breakfast. &amp;quot;How was that for you?&amp;quot; she asked. &amp;quot;I felt a little like I was being brainwashed.&amp;quot; She nodded. &amp;quot;Yeah, I&amp;#039;d say you&amp;#039;re an eight.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;An eight what?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;On the skepticism scale.&amp;quot; Over an egg-white omelette, hold the toast, Gerber divulged the first of her many promises designed to keep her own happiness in line: no bread or pasta, and dessert twice a week, provided she&amp;#039;s in her ideal weight range. She explained that the key to the Handel Method is making promises to oneself that had to be kept, otherwise there&amp;#039;d be consequences. &amp;quot;What kind?&amp;quot; I asked, harkening back to my decades of abandoned New Year&amp;#039;s resolutions. &amp;quot;You have to give up something you like,&amp;quot; Gerber declared cheerfully. She started looking over my initial homework assignment, &amp;quot;The 18 Areas of Life,&amp;quot; which had taken five hours and 12 single-spaced pages to complete. I had to describe my dream vision for everything from my body to my career to relationships and bad habits. After ranking myself in each area on a scale of one to 10, my task was to describe what might be preventing me from living my fantasy. My highest rating (9\u201310) went to my home, which my husband and I&amp;#039;d recently renovated and was now truly beautiful. On the lower end of the scale were body, health, sex life, and time, which made me feel like a depressing clich\u00E9 of a working mother. According to Gerber, my reasons for why I wasn&amp;#039;t living, dare I say, my best life were full of &amp;quot;weather reporting.&amp;quot; This was a Handel no-no, experiencing life passively\u2014as a tornado whipping you around\u2014rather than as something you consciously create. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not anyone&amp;#039;s bitch,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;including your feelings&amp;#039;.&amp;quot;  Next, she read aloud what I&amp;#039;d written about my dream relationship with my body: &amp;quot;I hope not to immediately gauge photos of myself by whether I look fat.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Come on!&amp;quot; Gerber chided. &amp;quot;Is that really a vision that makes your spine tingle?&amp;quot; Risk dreaming larger, she said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not interested in being perfect,&amp;quot; I shot back. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not trying to make you feel bad or make you perfect or turn you into me,&amp;quot; Gerber said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying to help you design your life so you&amp;#039;re living your dreams, as you define them.&amp;quot; Plus, she went on, &amp;quot;Through the power of the collective unconscious, if enough people get themselves right, then we can change the vibration of the world and get the world right too.&amp;quot; Gerber talks fast, and, still exhausted from the exercise class, I was struggling to follow her leap into this new-agey realm. &amp;quot;Collective unconscious? You mean like Jung?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Who?&amp;quot; she asked. I didn&amp;#039;t know much about Jung myself, other than that he was Freud&amp;#039;s disciple and that he believed in the collective unconscious\u2014that everyone shares a common underlying system for organizing experience\u2014but then, she was the one charging $300 an hour, not me. She was right: I was skeptical that she could help me. Or perhaps I was looking for reasons not to have to change. Gerber has a testimonial of sorts. When she herself went to Handel for life coaching six years ago, she had everything she thought she should want: two beautiful daughters, a great husband who was willing to get up with their one- and three-year-olds in the middle of the night, a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. But she felt dissatisfied. (Sound familiar?) Gerber envisioned herself as a yoga woman, strong and lean, in a white room filled with light. In reality, she was 30 pounds overweight and living and working 70 hours a week in a dark, depressing apartment. She particularly wanted help conquering her fear of shooting higher professionally, of taking the tutoring business she then owned to the next level. One day, Gerber returned from skydiving, recommended as a fear-buster by her coach, to greet her husband. While she was gone, he told her, he&amp;#039;d daydreamed about her parachute failing\u2014and the thought didn&amp;#039;t devastate him. Gerber hadn&amp;#039;t pegged her marriage as a problem area, but the disturbing confession made her realize she&amp;#039;d better start. She made a host of promises: to go off-line every night at six o&amp;#039;clock and devote two hours to her husband and kids, to institute a 20-minute nightly ritual in which everyone takes turns picking a group activity (anything from pedicures to soccer to taste tests, in which Gerber blindfolds her family and makes them guess what they&amp;#039;re eating). Before bed, she and her husband would spend a half hour together (an hour if they&amp;#039;re having sex, which they must do twice a week), during which they&amp;#039;d share what they love about each other, any successes from the day, and own up to bad behavior, such as when Gerber plays the victim. (She insists these talks are better than sex for her; she wants them every night.) Her office now looks out on the garden of her dream home, which she and her husband managed to buy once they stopped working at cross-purposes. Gerber is undoubtedly a saleswoman for the Handel Method, but she sounded genuinely fulfilled, her voice full of energy and optimism. As I embarked on the exercises to help me devise an action plan, however, I had an image of myself sitting with my hands folded in my lap in my immaculate kitchen, my fridge stocked with healthy foods, my three-mile run and three hours of focused writing behind me, the kids washed and in bed on time, my husband resting contentedly nearby. Everything was just so...perfect, but I pictured myself squeezing my hands together, digging my nails into my skin, trying not to scream. My next homework assignment required reexamining the &amp;quot;bullshit reasons&amp;quot; I couldn&amp;#039;t realize my dreams. I discovered I was alternately a chicken (&amp;quot;Anxiety over starting a new creative project makes me procrastinate&amp;quot;); or relying on, in Handelese, a &amp;quot;bad theory&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;My writing process has to be painful to produce good work&amp;quot;); or, most frequently, just a brat (&amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t feel motivated to work out when I&amp;#039;m tired&amp;quot;). Then I had to debunk the false rationales: &amp;quot;Procrastination will quell my anxiety,&amp;quot; for instance. Over the ensuing weeks, during numerous Skype sessions (the Handel coaches dismiss the traditional face-to-face approach of therapy as inefficient), Gerber helped me construct promises for my most pressing problem areas: body, work, time management, relationship with kids and husband, and vices. She quickly homed in on my habit of a nightly cigarette or two, my regular glasses of wine after my son and daughter went to bed, and my occasional use of pot to get my creative juices flowing. Not only does addiction run in my family, but these habits didn&amp;#039;t make it any easier to get my work done or stick to my exercise routine. (Apparently, my life coach wasn&amp;#039;t going to celebrate a weekend of debauchery like my friend John&amp;#039;s coach, who told him\u2014after John shamefacedly described a trip to Vegas involving drugs and multiple hookups\u2014that he was living every man&amp;#039;s dream!) &amp;quot;But don&amp;#039;t you ever feel like not following one of your rules?&amp;quot; I asked. I&amp;#039;d gleefully busted her for breaking her 6 P.M. to 8 P.M. rule when Skype informed me one evening at 7:38, &amp;quot;Laurie Gerber is online&amp;quot;\u2014until she explained that she&amp;#039;s allowed two nights off a week for work. Mostly, she replied, she felt grateful not to have to think about whether her actions were aligned with her dreams. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m happy not to spend my time negotiating with myself about food, my sex life, being with my children.&amp;quot; Here&amp;#039;s where the consequences come in. Each promise has a punishment for not keeping it or a reward for following through. For example, if Gerber were late to dinner, she&amp;#039;d have to throw a $20 bill out her front door. When I asked whether she&amp;#039;d ever actually done this, she demurred, saying she hates wasting money. (Which, I have to say, didn&amp;#039;t exactly dispel my skepticism.) Gerber suggested that if I didn&amp;#039;t run for 30 minutes at least three times a week, I&amp;#039;d lose my nightly cigarettes. I had to invent rituals besides smoking pot to divorce me from my mom routine sufficiently to enter an imagined world: Together we settled upon meditating or dancing in my living room. I promised that I&amp;#039;d focus all my attention on my five-year-old daughter when she was telling me something, that I&amp;#039;d read at least two books to my two-year-old son every day, that I&amp;#039;d dote on my husband (and have sex with him on a regular schedule, even if I didn&amp;#039;t think that was &amp;quot;romantic&amp;quot;), that I&amp;#039;d limit myself to one serving of bread or pasta each day, and that I&amp;#039;d write for a minimum of three hours a day. Our most heated negotiation was over the number of allowable glasses of wine. I argued that I couldn&amp;#039;t monitor how many actual glasses I might have at dinner with friends. Someone was always topping you off; nobody was counting. I refused to commit to anything less than drinking four nights a week with a three-drink maximum. &amp;quot;Look at what you&amp;#039;re negotiating,&amp;quot; Gerber said, frustrated that I wasn&amp;#039;t willing to rein myself in more. (I knew that even two glasses of wine could disrupt my sleep, but I insisted on having the freedom to make this mistake if I wanted to. Brat!) For my part, I kept finding myself on the edge of tears during our conversations. I wasn&amp;#039;t confident that I could &amp;quot;be good&amp;quot; on so many fronts simultaneously, even as I recognized that the changes could pave the way for the life I said I wanted. All the rules made me feel defeated, as if I&amp;#039;d just entered a contest I was sure to lose. I balked at giving up things\u2014not just my wine but my involvement with my kids&amp;#039; schools (which in part offset the isolation of writing), my nightly TiVoed shows, my determination to finally weed the garden. I didn&amp;#039;t want to admit that there wasn&amp;#039;t time to do everything I wanted to do. I also associated this regimentation with what I considered an oppressive American culture of perfection\u2014the imperative to be &amp;quot;on top of things,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;on the ball.&amp;quot; In France, where I&amp;#039;d lived briefly, women didn&amp;#039;t have spreadsheets to regulate their wine intake and sex life. And they were much thinner! On a walk with my friend Rebecca, she laid it out for me. &amp;quot;It gets a lot easier once you understand that no one&amp;#039;s trying to punish you or take away your pleasure\u2014that if you do these things, you&amp;#039;ll feel better.&amp;quot; Rebecca had created a character for the voice in her head that told her she couldn&amp;#039;t reach her goals\u2014an old biddy aunt who was always complaining. In my head, I kept hearing Gerber&amp;#039;s twangy outer-borough accent telling me that I was &amp;quot;nobody&amp;#039;s bitch, especially not your feelings&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; But guess what? It actually began to click, for a few weeks, at least. I made time for running, even dragging myself out of bed at 6:30 A.M. for a jog. I set the Freedom software program to disable my Internet for 180 minutes at a time so I could focus on work. I gave my husband back massages; we had more sex than we&amp;#039;d had in a long time; my son started to recognize the right way to hold his board books; my daughter seemed to be whining less. The cloud of happiness and self-confidence gathering under my feet, Gerber said, was the result of living in &amp;quot;personal integrity.&amp;quot; It always feels better to push to finish a project on time, to make yourself go running at the end of an exhausting day, than it does to slough off and carry the burden of guilt and remorse. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so simple,&amp;quot; I enthused to friends one evening with the wide eyes of a convert. &amp;quot;You just have to figure out what you need to do to make yourself happy, then come up with some assurances so you actually do what it takes, and voil\u00E0! You&amp;#039;ll be happier.&amp;quot; Just as I hit cruising altitude, a bomb dropped in my life. A project I&amp;#039;d been working on for a long time and fully expected to be favorably received was rejected. I was given a few months to &amp;quot;turn the ship around,&amp;quot; but it felt as if I&amp;#039;d found myself in the cockpit of a 747 and had just been told that I was going to have to land the thing myself. All I wanted was a calm, steady voice on the line, telling me what to do. Enter Laurie Gerber. She listened sympathetically to me crying and told me to take a week to wallow in my feelings of anger, sadness, and self-doubt. Then, come Monday, we were back on Skype, concocting an action plan. But I kept falling short on my time commitment to work; I couldn&amp;#039;t get any traction for restarting my project. The truth was, I was paralyzed in the face of the hard work, of the chance that I wouldn&amp;#039;t succeed. During our sessions, Gerber encouraged me to pretend I was playing basketball with myself, to recognize my feints and patterns and to outmaneuver them. She tried to call forth my competitive spirit, but turning the frightened part of myself into an opponent only made me feel worse, as if I were kicking myself when I was down. It was much simpler to imagine ways to outwit Gerber and her crackling whip. I confessed to Gerber that I felt like crap about myself. &amp;quot;Feeling bad is a diversion,&amp;quot; she retorted, citing another coaching principle: &amp;quot;You say you are going to do X, which represents your ideal. But instead you do Y, plus feel bad; therefore\u2014because you feel guilty\u2014you&amp;#039;re still a good person. If you did not feel badly about yourself, that equation would equal that you&amp;#039;re an asshole.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; I said dubiously, and continued to do Y. I was in the middle of explaining to Gerber why I hadn&amp;#039;t met my writing quota yet again\u2014I spent an hour cleaning up the house in the morning and then another half hour online ordering the month&amp;#039;s supply of diapers, paper towels, etc.\u2014when she interrupted. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t need a life coach to be a better housewife.&amp;quot; If I didn&amp;#039;t start following the method, she told me, she was going to have to fire me. &amp;quot;How dare you pick up house instead of writing!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But I need a clean house for my sanity.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s never going to be better for your sanity to clean your house than to get your writing done.&amp;quot; I was suddenly petrified that my life coach was going to lose faith in me too. &amp;quot;Okay, okay. Please don&amp;#039;t give up on me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Promise that you&amp;#039;ll sit down for three hours,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;If all you write is `I&amp;#039;m scared,&amp;#039; that&amp;#039;s okay.&amp;quot; Gerber had me start tracking my time in half-hour increments. After I got over the fact that I had to put aside time to track my time, I was shocked to see how much of my day was squandered on domestic duties. I noticed the long span of relatively uncluttered time between when my youngest woke up and when I had to get the oldest off to school\u2014an opportunity to knock off some chores! This I could turn into a game. Get the beds made, the laundry put away, and the dishes done before heading out, with my husband splitting the tasks with me. Place the grocery order while I was breaking for lunch. I started to feel that cloud of confidence gathering again and even scheduled some romantic downtime with my husband, who, as a skeptical academic, was initially derisive of the &amp;quot;method&amp;quot; but nevertheless found that &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re on my list of things to do&amp;quot; had a sexy ring to it. It was an immense relief to re\u00ADdirect my focus from evaluating my talent (largely out of my control) to evaluating the quality of my effort (measurable, day by day). Once I again had control of my &amp;quot;personal integrity,&amp;quot; we turned to some emotional work to trace the sources of my &amp;quot;bullshit&amp;quot; rationalizations and &amp;quot;bad theories,&amp;quot; to which Gerber told me that people will dedicate their lives to proving. When she started coaching, her dream marriage included having meaningful conversations with her husband; she blamed their superficial exchanges on the fact that he was a jock. But when she asked her husband what he thought the problem was, he said she never listened. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t let him get to the end of a thought, and what I interrupted to say was usually critical or nitpicking, so he stopped trying.&amp;quot; Gerber identified two bad theories at work: She&amp;#039;d made her husband into a macho caricature, and she believed she could interrupt at will because she was the one who had important things to say. To put her big mouth to good use, she made a promise to give him a blowjob when she interrupted\u2014and they&amp;#039;ve been having lots of deep conversations ever since! Sounds like a punch line, but Gerber is sincere: &amp;quot;The more I listened, the more interesting I found him, and the more I wanted to listen.&amp;quot; An exercise she gave me called &amp;quot;Haunting Incidents&amp;quot; helped dislodge one of my bad theories, that I wasn&amp;#039;t bright or talented enough. It required re-creating a distinct memory, the idea being that it would contain clues to negative beliefs I had about myself. I recalled a time in high school when I asked my father for help on an English paper. He kept sending me back to rewrite it until, around 11 at night, he finally grabbed the paper from me and wrote it himself. I can still feel my frustration, sitting at my desk, trying to snatch the words that flitted around me like flies and pin them down into some logical progression on my page, and my shame, walking down the hallway, knowing that I&amp;#039;d failed his expectations once again. Since my dad is dead, I couldn&amp;#039;t ask him about his side, but for the first time, I connected this memory with a story a friend of his had shared about a writing retreat they spent together and how every morning my father would present the same few paragraphs with a comma changed here, a new word there, immobilized by his own perfectionism. While I couldn&amp;#039;t rewrite this history, I realized I didn&amp;#039;t have to keep reliving it. Will I always stick to my promises of running three times a week or no nightly cigarette, working three hours each day or no TV, limiting my wine intake or else? Truthfully, I probably won&amp;#039;t without Gerber kicking my butt on the phone. But I&amp;#039;m so grateful to have a blueprint for redirecting my energies in a productive direction, to know that following it calms and comforts me. Especially when you&amp;#039;re in a crisis, when everything seems dire and impossible, the promises are like a path to safety. The action-oriented approach has also taken root in ways that seem irrevocable. Here&amp;#039;s one small example: Instead of constantly complaining about how much I hate my tiny closet without a light, instead of getting pissed off at myself and the world because I have to search in the dark among a jumble of clothes for my favorite black cardigan, I spent a morning cleaning it out and installed a $12 battery-operated light. It wasn&amp;#039;t hard, and I felt a million times better. As for that long-term project that was rejected? Well, the powers that be didn&amp;#039;t like the second attempt much better. The news didn&amp;#039;t come as a complete surprise, since business imperatives had stacked the deck against me, but I was surprisingly fine. At least I had the satisfaction of feeling proud of my effort, and I even started to get excited about finding the work a more welcoming home. (&amp;quot;Failure? Try again!&amp;quot;) On a Sunday evening this past fall, just as the sun was starting to set, I made myself go running after a long day to meet my exercise promise for the week. My normal route involved running to my local park and up and down a long series of stairs there that, cornily, I admit, brought to mind the movie Rocky. Usually I did six sets. But on this night, I invoked Gerber&amp;#039;s playful, hectoring twang: &amp;quot;Come on. Is that the best you can do?&amp;quot; And then I heard another voice, my own defiant one, talking back to her: &amp;quot;This one is for you, Laurie.&amp;quot; On the eighth and ninth sets, I told myself, &amp;quot;These are for me.&amp;quot; I rested at the top afterward, trying to catch my breath, and surveyed the sun as it cast its final rays of orange and pink across the tops of the buildings in downtown Brooklyn. And I had a glimmer of the feeling: &amp;quot;I am the change I want to be.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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