Hanging out an the beach with Michael Douglas just became a priority. And not just because it would give me something to write about.

One of my earliest Twitter bios said:
“Yoga teacher by day. Cougar by night. Writer 24/7”
I am no longer a yoga teacher, since I don’t teach public classes. And I have my writing reasonably under control, but this can also be because my love life has been non-existent since the breakup.
It’s not that hard not to write if you don’t have much to tell.

But the one I ve digressed from the most, is cougar. I no longer see myself dating anyone under 40
And I ve known this for years.
If my affair with Mr.Big established one thing, it’s that it converted me from a cougar into someone who will probably never date men younger than her, ever again.

Today, my morning and early afternoon was busy. But for the afternoon I had accepted an invitation to go to the movies and have a drink.
The person who had invited me had been surprised that I had accepted, and I said this may have been because I used to hold off social appointments during office hours.
It conflicted with my idea of “preparing” myself for a daytime job.
“But I hold a different view on that now,” I concluded.
Not to mention that I always work on weekends, so if I was serious about working office hours, I would also have to quit at some point.

But originally I had thought working hard for my own business, eight hours a day net, would be great for my confidence. Knowing that the transition between having been an entrepreneur (I m still an entrepreneur, more on that later) and a payroll job, would be a smooth one, since I had already been keeping office hours.
But it turned out to be the opposite.

A payroll job is a social thing. It will nourish me in a way working from home doesn’t. 
I had this resolution to make good use of my final weeks of freedom and work on my publishing business and my online yoga. But I just can’t make myself…
It all feels so terribly wrong.

But if I can’t make myself work on my business now, with ample time, how will I possibly do that in the future?
Where does my online yoga, my writing under my real name as well as under this name;
Where does it all belong in my new life?
Or is this hesitation a sign that it really does not belong at all?

I think I have been asking myself this question for a long time. About where my writing, biz, and purpose fit. Like a buzz in my head, an annoying background noise.

But after noticing today, how quickly I had been to “sacrifice” what could have been a productive afternoon, I see that I’m just recovering from all the years of writing and solitude. Maybe even from the five years of being with my lover.

That my resistance around setting up my new business, publishing my books, and even doing yoga, doesn’t have anything to do with me not being an entrepreneur.
But with having maxed out on my loneliness quota.
I need to replenish and restore with ample of social context.

I don’t know how long it will take before I pick up consistently running my businesses and publishing my books. But I do see that self-care needs to be an absolute top priority, from now on. And for the first time in my life really.
So for example when I start working, I will not cram my evenings with running my business. When I m off, I m off.

The only thing I will be doing is yoga, men over 40, and write.
Because that is the one thing from that 2010 tagline that didn’t change:
I m still a writer 24/7

~Lauren
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living 

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020

I m now at an intake of over one viewing of Basic Instinct a day. And honestly I have no idea where I get the time.
Especially because I ve also consistently been doing my mindset work/ listening to Katrina Ruth on YouTube/ live streams on Facebook.
So how do I also watch a feature length movie a day?

And it’s so addictive, it took me days to replace it with something else. And now that I have (An Inside Job), I ve spontaneously created a home study program from all paid courses from Katrina Ruth, which I own.
In other words, it’s much more tempting to study marketing and personal development for entrepreneurs, than to watch any other movie than Basic Instinct.

And the strange thing is, it is doing something to me which I cannot explain. I really have no idea. It’s like being in love but not knowing with whom. I mean I m in love with Michael Douglas, who plays Nick Curran, but that doesn’t really explain it. This is something else, I m sure of it.

The last days have been super intense.
On Thursday I felt this high vibe of creating a new channel under my real name, but on Friday I went down the rabbit hole where I had many adventures, some in this world and others just in my head.

And it took a drastic haircut, a stationary haul, hours at the cafe AND creating an entire education out of all Katrina Ruth programs before the voices in my head finally said:
“Okay, we’re done. We’re still clueless where we’re heading but we do know what you will be doing from now on, to get there.”
Which didn’t make sense, but I took their word for it.

And in my mind I heard the lines detective Andrews said to a suspended Michael Douglas/ Nick Curran, when he comes to Andrews to ask what he has found out about Catherine Tramell’s parents: 

NICK:  Did you find out about her parents? 

ANDREWS: You’re on leave, man. You’re on psycho leave. I’m talking to a possible wacko here.

NICK: Well you know I’m wacko, Sam, what’d you find? 

They were right. It’s not about being wacko. 
It’s about what you find out.

~Lauren
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020

This morning I woke up feeling so hesitant about what I would share here today..
The last 24 hours have been like a roller coaster with regard to my creative work under my real name, much of which I still have not shared there, but the upcoming years are going to be so exciting.
And also, I will be having a daytime job, limiting the number of hours I will be working on my own business. This is all deliberate. I have been working independently as a yoga teacher for almost 17 years.
I crave having colleagues.
Even when I make more money than I can spend as a writer, I would still want to have a normal job. After so much time alone, it’s like a form of self-care to be among people and to leave the house every morning being expected somewhere.
Regardless of how high I value showing up online, and I definitely do, having a place locally and during daytime hours, is a priority from now on.
Which is great.
But not if you are so creative you’ve been needing two accounts, two names and two languages, meaning basically four different businesses, to channel all that…
Then you might be a bit like me, wondering: “How the f am I going to do all that?”
How am I going to show up for four accounts, with all those new plans I ve got going, AND work a job?
No idea.
But, I can say that it excited me very much.
Not despite the stress, or uncertainty, or despite having five balls up in the air;
But because of it.
But with LS Harteveld being my writer account, and currently the emphasis being on moving forward under my real name, and becoming more visible every day –
What was I going to share here?
If any?
Was it realistic that I would stay online here, or was it better to just put all my LS Harteveld accounts on lock-down during the week?
That’s why this morning, I woke up excited over all my new plans for my other account, but found myself in doubt about my future as pen name author.

So initially I went about my day, and knew what I would be doing and sharing and creating under my real name. When suddenly my favorite person on the internet Katrina Ruth, sent us an email pointing out her latest Facebook livestream where she had discussed, among other things, the sources of having a dry vagina.
I vividly remembered that from an earlier livestream – you can find the essential clip HERE! – it’s because you’re not on purpose, not living the life of your dreams, not hustling your ass off, and not having all the fun, all the men, and all the cookies you want.
That’s what causes a dry vagina.
But just watch her livestream or the clip from years back to hear her say it.
I ve also included the clip at the bottom of this post.

This live stream was the moment when I realized that I was STILL not anywhere near sharing my true message under my real name. I was still holding back. Somehow my old profession, or maybe a better word is my old stigma, of being a yoga teacher still had its clean, proper, manicured claws in me, and I was giving that People Pleasing Demon a place in my life.
WHY WAS I DOING THAT?
Why was I preparing a video for my series over there discussing why you should not be using too much social media, if you want to move up, raise your energy and focus on the things that matter-
When I was NOT talking about The Thing of Things?
Sex.
Why?

In my defense: I do think there were more reasons for this than just the residue of two decades of yoga. 
And I know what it is, and before I explain, let me first affirm that this WAS the moment I saw that I desperately needed to keep writing for this account.
That now more than ever, with a life of so much external pressure and social expectations awaiting me under my real name, I needed this pen name and writing here to stay in integrity. To stay real, I need LS Harteveld because at the end of each day, I still want to be able to look myself in the eye and say:
“Would LS Harteveld have endorsed this message? Is this who we really are?”
I need to write here, especially at the end of my weekdays when the chaos and the pressure has come at me from every different angle online and in real life, and say:
“I have stayed true to myself.”

So yes, I ll be staying!

But back to the carefully crafted message for my work under my real name: Why had I been holding myself back? Without noticing even. Why did it take a live stream from Katrina Ruth to shake me up out of my docile worker bee mentality? 
Because of a man.
I was entirely OFF and not myself in the field of men.
In the most literal sense, I was already heading to Dry Vagina Land.

So what happened?
In December my secret lover ended our affair, and for the first six weeks I held up fine. Later on I realized this was also because I just didn’t want to break down in front of people who had silently or more overtly disapproved of me being a secret lover.
I was going to be fine with a vengeance.
Normal people with normal relationships were the ones that crashed and burned when they were dumped after five years by someone they were still madly in love with and had the best sex ever with.
But I was not.
I was going to show that not only had our affair existed outside of every day life, that I was still there, and not here. I refused to come down from the level I had been living at for five years, in order to feel the misery of it all on an earthly plane.

But then I did something for which I blame for my current lack of balls, when it comes to speaking my truth and I don’t recommend this to anyone:
I paused.
For a week or two I wallowed in the feeling of being dumped.
Partly because I assumed I had been running away from my true feelings long enough: It was time to face them.
And partially because to me the ultimate victory would be to feel deeply saddened, and to still not crash and burn. To still be the badass I had been throughout our affair, even when I could, and did, feel it deeply sucked that he dumped me.
Even then.

However, this entire process was not as conscious as I would have liked it to be. It happened gradually, and before I knew it I found myself seriously bogged down by the feeling of not being in each other’s lives anymore.
I found myself wondering what I could have done differently.
And pessimistic about the sustainability of the relationships I chose.
Meanwhile in the first six weeks I had felt relieved that I was no longer a secret mistress, and partially because of this sudden burst in energy, I had told a lot of people that it was all over and that I would never become a secret mistress again.
This was great social glue.
I almost got standing ovations when I said I would never be a secret mistress again.

It was disgusting.

So when I created all these plans for my real name, including the neatly packaged message for today to not use social media too much, in order to preserve your energy;
Was I still in my crowd-pleasing, not-ruffle-the-feathers, never-do-it-again, mode?
Damn right I was.
Did I need Katrina Ruth to remind me that this is how we girls get dry vaginas?
Absolutely.

I can hardly imagine a day when I needed to hear this message more than I did today, on the morning I was mentally preparing for a message that was downplaying the entire essence of me. The moment when I was desperately wanting to fit in and maybe even to be punished perhaps, for being a secret mistress for so long, by never speaking my truth again.

I was in my kitchen having breakfast.
I watched the entire livestream, 45 minutes.
And afterwards I looked up, as if I was Cinderella who had been sleeping for way too long. There was an immense clarity that the first six weeks of simply going in denial over the breakup, had been a far better choice than the final ones, where I had been feeling the emptiness of his departure.
And that everything in my life, from the messy way my house looked to the just-not-soul-aligned self-deceiving projects I was churning out, was reflecting this poor mental state I had allowed myself to get into.
And that there was only one way to get out of all of this, once and for all.

To ALWAYS speak my truth.

I ditched all plans to keep coloring between the lines, and instead of covering the song Social Disease (about social media) I was going to cover the title from the album it was on.
Slippery When Wet .

And when tonight, I am standing in front of the mirror, and look LS Harteveld in the eye, I ll make sure she’s proud.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020

It took me a not unpleasant second viewing of the French movie La Belle Epoque (2019/2020) to find out why I liked the movie so much.
I usually remember some compelling dialogue, a sound byte, which offers both the essence of why it pleased me, as well as something catchy to open or close my blog post with.
But with the movie being French and the Dutch subtitles not giving me anything I remembered, although that doesn’t mean nothing memorable was said, it was not the dialogue which made me like it so much.

Before we get into the message of this lighthearted, beautifully shot French movie, about a disillusioned cartoonist who signs up for a theatrical production to take him back to the era or day of his choosing, and he chooses to meet his wife again from whom he is estranged,
i want to get one thing clear about myself.
Make that two, I need to say two things.

First of all, that I am an actor’s fan and a fan of male or female heroins.
I visit movies not because of a director nor because of a topic. I don’t visit them because they offer a profound, or subtle or new perspective to something important.
But if I like the actor? I am surprisingly flexible to what the movie is about.
Within limits.
There are movies with Brad Pitt I have not seen. There are plenty of movies with Angelina Jolie I have not seen. And there are very few with Charlize Theron movies that I have seen, although she seems to be making a comeback to mainstream these last couple of years.
But especially male actors stretch my taste, and I have ended up with some movies out of my comfort zone because of them. 

The second thing I need to tell you is that my lover broke up with me in December, and I used to be a secret mistress for five years and now it is over.
After the initial boost in energy this gave me, to no longer be “the bad woman”, I m gradually coming back from that place where I really believed I too, was better off without our affair.
Don’t get me wrong, I m still not a wreck.
And I m definitely happy that I waited for the world to turn their eyes off of me, whether out of concern or hopes I would crash and be punished by God for my sins or become super relatable or approachable because of my pain, before I turned inside to discover how I really feel.
Getting over a breakup like this is a far more delicate matter than just deciding you re never going to be a secret mistress again.
Even though I did say that in those first weeks, something I seriously regret now.
But maybe because I refused to bend, break or even to give in an millimeter to grief, everything is still very raw.
I did nothing in terms of getting over this, which may explain that all I see in movies is him, me, or us. Exactly the way I have done for five years, except it is all past tense now.
This movie is no exception.

All I see is us.

And these two main motivators for me to see and like movies were both present in La Belle Epoque.
The male actor Daniel Auteuil and the character he plays, Victor, possesses a warmth, wit and charm that could make any woman drop her panties without much further ado.
And the female characters are strong and unreasonable, in a way that made me realize we would never see such girlpower in an American drama.
But honestly, I was so taken by Victor, that even if the female leads had been totally boring, I would still have had a great time.
Like I said, I am an actor’s girl.

I think it was the second part of my preference – where do I fit in? Where do we fit in? – that I only understood the second time I saw it.
This was more complex than falling for Victor’s cheeky smile and his creative talents.
First I thought it was a matter of finding out which role my lover had, and which role I had.
The most logical one, my lover in the male protagonist role of betrayed underdog and me in the role of his vengeful wife, did not make sense at all.
From the two of us, he was definitely the dominant, partly because I would never make the mistake of taking the lead with a man I like.
It’s one of the things I consider a mistress quality, and one “real” relationships can learn from.
Number one, always support each other.
But, number two, make it clear who is dominant and who is submissive, and stay in character.
Victor and his wife Marianne did not support each other, nor did they have a clear agreement on who was in charge. And their behavior pointed towards the roles being reversed. Marianne was and always had been dominant, and Victor aimed to please her.

I tried out different ways of looking at it, including putting myself in Victor’s shoes, but the breakthrough came from exploring the concept of what is real, and what is fake.
Which relationships are true, and which are fake because one of you is playing a role?

Victor goes back in time and meets an actress who plays his young wife, as they reenact how they met.
But over the course of the film, their play blends over to reality multiple times. And when the production company tries to end it, with a final scene, it is clear that even though the actress stays true to her scripted lines, and Victor is unaware that she is still in (or back in) character;
Her tears are real.
The lines she delivers to make Victor leave their play, are so intense that you can just see that she has feelings for him too.
It is no longer possible to separate reality from play, not even for the actress herself.

A mirror image of that comes at the end of the movie when his wife takes over the role of her younger self, and appears in the 70s bar where they once met.
She plays she’s the 1974 version of herself, and Victor reenacts his part.
This is the most intimate moment between this estranged couple of Victor and Marianne, as they connect emotionally, through lines which barely touch on their current day reality.
They are in a play.

And it was this moment, the second time I watched the movie, when I understood why I liked the movie. Because it illustrates that when we play a role, we are actually more real, than when we are real.
And that we regard it as normal that at the beginning of a relationship, we play a role, and engage in fun and surprising conversation; 
Yet when we are in a relationship, we find it acceptable that this fades to the back ground. That we have a “real” relationship.
What the closing scene between Marianne and Victor illustrates, is that when we play, we are most connected.

I know why this is.
Because when we play we have our consciousness in it. That is what makes it so attractive. We are fully present in the moment, and with the other person.
It is absolutely magnetic.
It is what I did when I saw my lover, it is what he did when he was with me, it is what every newborn couple has done that was head over heels in love.
Nothing escapes you when you are in love, you are completely absorbed by the other person, by the connection. You re under the spell of it.

I think what I still have to get my head around, is what this means for my approach.
Or for what we could have had, if things had not ended.
Would we have done a better job?

La Belle Epoque shows us, that if you let it slip, you will need to move heaven and earth and book an expensive time travel gig to get your relationship back and to find each other again.
But have my lover and me not proven that if you do stay true to your role and put the care into meeting each other, it still might not be enough?

We never had a “normal” relationship, so it is hard to compare.

But something inside of me, tells me that maybe in order for it to work, I would have needed to accept things to become real. And for us to drop the roles of lovers.
That a real relationship may not go with playing the best version of a fantasy self.

Maybe for me this movie highlighted that a real relationship can only be formed, at the expense of what the lovers once had.

I know what I would pick.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020

I was writing this post about how I lost a day to fear;
That s how intimidated I was by my own dreams, when my new shoes arrived.
They didnt even charge for taking life to an entire new level of rock n roll.

It took a while before I understood why I lost a day.
Probably because the day before had been both hugely productive as well as flooded with social events, more than half of them unexpected ones.
I didn’t even know my social life was big enough, to cause such an avalanche of meaningful conversations and excitement on a Wednesday in January.

So trust me when I say, no one was more surprised than me that my Wednesday had been so action packed it was coming apart at the seams.
Or at least I was, the day after.

And I had been untrained for this!
January has been: J stands for Solitude.
And the delirious effects that has on one’s brain.

So when I, a writer, which is pretty much the modern day equivalent of a monk, was suddenly showered with advice, love, laughter, inspiration, truffle pizzas, and WINE – and I actually drank that for the second time within 5 days when I normally do not drink a drop – I didn’t look into why I had lost the next day because it was totally logical.
I had a splitting head ache from two glasses of white wine.
A mental shutdown because I had been interacting with four different people. My limit is one non-work related social interaction a day. 
And because I had been interacting for 10 hours straight.
So of course I lost Thursday.
Except?
No.

Something way more profound had happened.
Wednesday had been the perfect decoy to sabotage my entire plan of everything I wanted to do, and WOULD DO each and every day for the rest of my life, because I knew exactly what I wanted out of life.
Except for Thursday, when I woke up late, had a headache and felt like somebody had ripped my entire sense of purpose and self out of me and drowned it in Chardonnay.
But letting my Wednesday explode, and my Thursday being sucked down by its slip stream into the abyss, had been a GREAT way to cover up what had been going on beneath the surface:
That I was scared.

Over the past ten days or so, I have not just been consistently building the vision for my writing and book publishing business:
I have also set my first practical steps into curating my English work, under my real name.
Those are two websites that contain all my older English work.
One has – I think 40 posts on them or so;
They’re my first steps, although (of course) I was already writing as LS Harteveld.
And one blog which I started shortly after, which turned out to be a massive body of work.

If I didn’t write anything ever again, not for this account nor under my other name;
And if I would publish my books in orderly format
-not making them too thick or too long, but nicely cutting them to humane sizes,
each telling a good and solid story;
I would already have about 15 books.
All ready. All written. 
It’s ALL there.

I felt like someone who had inherited grandfather’s couch and found it stuffed with bundles of cash, and for a moment just wanted to put her head in the sand.
A few days of not knowing.
A few days of being normal.
And even started considering not using it, not telling anyone. And just let it sit there, or sneak it into your expenses without anybody ever knowing.
Just because I wasn’t ready to deal with the responsibility.

That was the process I was unconsciously going through.
I had already gone through something similar in 2019 when I started to take stock of all my LS Harteveld accounts, and its vaults. It had been so intimidating, that I found excuses to stop doing it.
Some excuses were valid:
2019 was a difficult year and I didn’t know what I wanted with my life/career/income.
I didn’t have the mental clarity and deep concentration curating this source material needed.
But now I do have clarity and the same thing happened, when I looked into the material for my other account:
I dropped out.
Sabotaged myself.

At surface level, it is all understandable and no emotion is attached to dropping out. Because HOW am I going to take care of all this, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life tied to a desk? 

It wasn’t until today, when I woke up fresh and excited to enjoy my new life, and my newly rearranged house (done yesterday, in order to take back control) –
that I suddenly saw, that beneath me being fed up with all the solitude, and wanting to go out into the world to work, there was a real fear.

I was afraid of what I had found.

That my entire future plan, where I had my own business selling books but I also had a normal job where people didn’t know all that or didn’t care:
A job where I was just Lauren, with the stability of having my own successful business:
That future was within reach.
I had more to work with than most authors will create in a lifetime, and I kept writing and kept creating, even when I didn’t want to or thought something else should come first.

One of the movies I m currently looking into again is The Big Short, because Michael J. Burry is often used as an example of how autistic people feel.
How misunderstood, lonely, and our extreme levels of anxiety because we don’t fit in even when we try.
And even if you do make yourself useful, it is still no guarantee you will be accepted. 
From his letter to his investors

“For the past two years, my insides have felt like they’ve been eating themselves.
All the people that I respected won’t talk to me anymore, except through lawyers.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results.
They choose it because it feels authoritative and familiar. And I am not, nor ever have been, “familiar.” So…so I have come to the sullen realization that I must close down the fund.
Sincerely,
Michael J. Burry, M.D.”
from the movie The Big Short

I ve had fear ruling my life until I stood up and faced it because what I wanted was more important than that. But it’s like an onion: Layered and the biggest fear comes first.
Which is the area in your life where you are most out of alignment, where you have made the biggest adjustment in order to work around your fear.
In 2006, I broke through the first layer of the onion. The dry discolored outer layer, that protects what’s inside but is not eatable.
What came from underneath was my own, newly developed love life.
And although there have been different levels of going through that, I feel what I’m going through with my books is about something else.
It’s about business. It’s about money. It’s about being visible and bringing those manuscripts from their digital vaults, into the open where they can be read.

What Michael J.Burry’s letter, my fear to develop my love life, and my current resistance to becoming a successful writer all have in common, is that they are all social phobias:
They’re a deeply rooted fear of being cast aside, to no longer be part of society and to really no longer know enough people to see a Wednesday in January hijacked by social interactions, because they’re all gone, and no one talks to you except through lawyers or because they need your money.

I lost one day to fear.
This was not the Wednesday, where I saw too many people.
But the Thursday, because I chose to go so all-in and drink on Wednesday, went to bed too late, so that I needed a day to recover.
And it happened because for ten days or so, I had not been taking notice of those voices of fear in my head, and had brushed them off way too lightly.
Until they needed alcohol to be shut down.

But I choose to see losing that day, as an investment in myself. I needed that day offline, off-life, off-habit tracking to make a conscious choice:
“Am I really ready for this? Am I ready to face the consequences?”

There is a quote, some say it is from Mohammed Ali, some say from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and others say it is anonymous:

 “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough”

I second that.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books 

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020 

video: January 2017, the moment I saw this training I became a Katrina Ruth convert

One thing I loved when I had a yoga studio – in fact I loved it so much I didn’t realized I was more consistent with that than with yoga – was marketing.

I don’t remember when I started studying it, but I do know the first coach I encountered in whom I took a serious interest was Marie Forleo.

Because I have lived at multiple addresses over the years, I am usually correct at dating certain events, and if I am not mistaken I encountered Marie Forleo as early as 2008.
Although I studied her free material, and was excited to have found her, things didn’t really pick up until 2014/2015
With three Australian coaches with whom I was fascinated:
First was Amanda Daley, who focuses on health coaches, which explains why I (as a yoga teacher) encountered her first.
Amanda Daley’s system is traditional, just like Marie Forleo’s system.
They teach you to adjust marketing principles used by big companies, to being a local service provider. 

Through a webinar hosted by someone else – I even thought it was Amanda Daley herself but I can’t seem to find it back – I encountered Denise Duffield Thomas who was a guest.
Denise focuses on manifestation and running your own business but she hardly teaches any marketing, which is probably why around that time all the other coaches I was following, were already starting to take a backseat.

click photo to go to website Denise Duffield Thomas

Once you’ve had a taste of running a business without making the effort to “translate your service into the language of your target audience”, and other tedious (not to say ineffective) marketing techniques, you’re sold.
Which is why late 2016, I spent the holidays decluttering the pile of marketing materials I had been gathering, in particular in 2016 when I had encountered a lot of new coaches, and bought several smaller packages and courses.
And there was one new coach, whom I had just encountered that month.

I remember simply saving her material, instead of sorting it out. Because it was still so little anyway, a few printed blog posts.
But I didn’t know how important she would become.
And that had I known her earlier, my Christmas decluttering session would have been a lot more rigorous.

click for Kat’s daily (!!) blog and all the other goood stuff (+check her Facebook!)

I would probably have thrown out everything but her.
Kat Loterzo.
Or Katrina Ruth, as she changed her name late 2017 it was I believe.
Katrina Ruth would turn into a pretty monomaniac inspiration for me, and I ve actually only recently picked up studying Denise Duffield Thomas again, to spice it up a bit.
And because they’re complementary, they teach different things.

You’ve been Katted

I ve always loved sharing my marketing adventures, if I talked to someone who didn’t yet feel they had it in them to show up on social media, and promote their service.
Especially yoga teachers and therapists, usually do not seek out marketing opportunities, so I was always glad to refer them to Amanda Daley, who I still believe to be the best coach if you still see marketing as something you do for your health business.
Not because it (marketing) excites you. 
And also: Amanda is the best coach if you see your business as something you do for your clients.
Not for you.
The big difference between Amanda and Denise is definitely that for Denise a business is something you do for yourself, whereas Amanda connects it to being of service to your clients.
Denise promotes an online business, minimizing your one-on-one hours and definitely not basing your business model on them and makes it pretty clear that your business is there to serve you.
Denise is more abstract than Amanda as Denise is a mindset mentor.
Not a business coach.
But even Denise is an easy breezy walk in the park compared to Katrina Ruth;
It’s just I didn’t really see that until I started making referrals!

Where both Amanda and Denise had always been gladly accepted, when I gave their names or books (Denise) to other yoga teachers or friends, Kat was met with a What the Fuck more than once.
People actually felt compelled to tell me they had not been able to stick with her, and I thought that was extremely odd.
Why would anyone not want to get inspired at that level?

I am talking a cellular transformation that changes you into an entire new breed of entrepreneur, that needs half the hours of sleep you used to, and has ten times as much purpose. 
Someone who steps up their game DAILY, and in any and all areas of their life;
And makes just as much millions as she damn well decides, doing whatever the fuck she wants.
Why would anyone in their right mind NOT want that?!

As sort of a side note, which made the entire thing even more unbelievable, is that Katrina Ruth shares ALL her information daily and for free!
She has many programs, and I own close to ten of them by now, but that’s more because I just like having those courses and because I like paying for them.
That I make a payment, also as a thank you for all her free material.
But her YouTube, her Facebook, and her blog already have all the information right there, for free!

You could start making millions without spending a dime.

Providing you are ready to:
Take the red pill.
Do the damn thing.
Face your fears.
And ruthlessly strip away every layer that no longer serves you.

Out of all the people I referred to Katrina Ruth, only one friend ( I know of) felt the calling and consistently started following her content. 
Needless to say, she is just as much a convert as I am.
Once you’ve been with Kat, your fate is sealed.
There is no getting back.

It’s literally like taking that red pill in The Matrix:
You can’t go back, you can’t unsee.
You’ve been Katted.

Freedom lifestyle

I m sure there are American coaches as well who use this term, but I see it as the common denominator between Amanda, Denise and Kat:
The talk of a freedom lifestyle.
It can be location free because you no longer offer local services but go online. 
It can be freedom from a normal job, because you make enough from your own business.
Freedom to do whatever you want financially.
And ultimately (or if you re following Kat, this is your starting point) the freedom to do whatever you damn well please.
However it also took until this week, that I realized why I had not, as Kat describes it “Press Play” on my life, the way I should have done ages ago.
What had been holding me back.

I don’t want to have an online business.
I don’t want to live location free.
And I don’t need a dream house.
And this week I realized I even want a job. That I don’t want to be a writer/entrepreneur and be “free” the rest of the time.
And that’s when the pieces of the puzzle finally clicked.

I saw that the freedom lifestyle to me meant:
– freedom to do my purpose work (writing)
– free from selling them myself; Offering my books through an online publisher
– freedom to have a normal job, but without being financially dependent on it.
To me, a normal job had always had a bad connotation because it implied being dependent on the company you work for.
Which must have instinctively terrified me.
Not the long hours, not the work stress, but knowing that I could not stop because I needed the money.
Knowing that I wasn’t free,
After all those years studying marketing I suddenly realized that although I didn’t need or even want to live location free as a self-made millionaire;
I had my own very specific reason build a business.
Not necessary because I didn’t want a job;
But because I did.

In 2006 I ended my long term relationship, because I wanted to know what I wanted out of love and develop my sexuality.
What I have come to find, is that I m generous with my love, sexually monogamous and that I need a partner who is adventurous with other women, and who chooses me time and time again.
Not because he needs me; After all he also has other women.
But he chooses me because he wants me.
And he wins me over time after time.

That’s the type of relationship I want with an employer.
A place where I can be generous with my love. A company who has a healthy relationship to its employees. And mutual respect where it is understood that we choose for each other from a place of independence and respect.
And not out of neediness.

Written like that, it’s all so simple. But I can assure you it has taken me until this month, January 2020, before I could pinpoint what my previous resistance towards a contract job had been.
And that self-made millionaires are not just women who want to be free to sit with a laptop on their sun-kissed thighs at the poolside on Bali:
Some do it because they want to have a normal life, between normal people, doing normal things.

Just free.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

RELATED: 
My Year with Kat – How one woman can change your business and your LIFE. For free

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

coming soon: new books 

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020