Spotlight Interview: Julie Lamonica on Living the Farsighted Life

Julie Lamonica, The Farsighted Life, Business Heroine Magazine

{photo by Scott R. Kline}

Julie Lamonica, owner of The Farsighted Life, is a longtime educator and life coach trained by best-selling author and Oprah-featured pioneer Dr. Martha Beck. Julie’s private clients are people who care deeply about the quality, meaning, and depth of their lives; they want to live powerfully and on purpose. Julie specializes in three areas: showing men and women how to create bliss in their committed love partnerships – without couples therapy – because it truly only takes one person to transform a relationship; supporting men and women who have experienced loss and want to move through their grief courageously and gracefully; and, teaching men and women how to live more powerfully by managing transitions, dissolving obstacles, and creating their very best lives. Enjoy her exclusive Business Heroine interview…

BH: Tell us your story – how did you decide to become a life coach?

Julie: One day in 2007 I found myself browsing in a bookshop, and a beautiful blue book jumped out at me from the top shelf: Finding Your Own North Star by Dr. Martha Beck. After reading one page and audibly snorting with laughter in that very quiet shop, I bought it and read it immediately, completing all the many exercises in a separate notebook (because I knew already that I’d re-read it). I read that book at least twice a year for about six years, doing all the exercises…and every time I read it, I knew with bone-deep clarity that I wanted to do the massively transformative work that Dr. Martha Beck was doing.

During those years I worked as an instructional coach for high school teachers. Pieces of that job delighted me – reflective conversations with individual teachers, helping adults learn the skills to manage their relationships with students, building meaningful relationships over time, etc. – but it took me several years to admit to myself how inexplicably miserable I felt in that respectable, outwardly successful career. While I was incrementally facing my inconvenient truth, I was also gradually becoming more open to the possibility of being a life coach. And, once I found that Martha Beck offered Life Coach Training, I registered and committed myself to becoming an entrepreneur.

{photo by Jillian West}

BH: How is your coaching work influenced by your previous career?

Julie: There are a squillion flavors of life coaching out there, and my thirteen years in education have deeply influenced my coaching style. As a classroom teacher, I learned how to make space for people to grow; this involved seeing each individual student clearly, holding a clear vision for where she needed to go, and helping her to move forward bit by bit. Later, as an instructional coach, I learned how to observe carefully, to offer honest feedback, to ask tough questions in a respectful, gentle way, and to listen really, really hard. Perhaps most important, I learned immediately how to be with people in a compassionate, curious, zero-judgment way.

All of these skills show up daily in my life coaching practice.

I’m literally a pro at telling people what to do – in fact, teaching teachers how to give directions so students would follow them is one of my areas of expertise. I’m also a pro at giving homework! I love thinking about what specific actions would be both realistic and challenging enough to help someone make demonstrable progress. But, I don’t do these things anymore – on purpose. As a life coach, I am very careful about these aspects of the work: I never tell my clients what to do, and I don’t assign work between sessions. What I will do is make a suggestion for moving forward (if the client wants a suggestion), but I’m very clear that their choice to do that work (or not) is 100% theirs, not mine. I borrow Martha Beck’s brilliant phrase and tell my clients that I lovingly do not care what they do…which is a significant and intentional departure from the stance taken in the schools where I worked.

{photo by Jillian West}

BH: For all the Business Heroines out there who are considering starting their own coaching practice – or similar service-oriented practice – what advice can you offer from a business perspective?

From a business perspective, the most important thing I’d offer is to cultivate a growth mindset. Educators use the term “growth mindset” to refer to the belief that we can develop ability and get smarter by learning from failure. For most of my life, I unconsciously operated from an “achievement” mindset in which ability / intelligence were innate, fixed qualities, and this understandably led me to avoid risks. I was literally terrified of failure. To avoid looking dumb as an undergraduate at UC Davis, for example, I stuck with majoring in English (which was easy for me) even after falling in love with Neurobiology (which was so challenging and so delicious).

As an entrepreneur, I think any success depends on my willingness to fail. I’ve learned that failure is about performance, not my worthiness as a human being. And, I can always improve my performance. (I know I’ll need help along the way, and that’s fine – obviously I believe in the transformative power of excellent teaching and coaching!) I’ve become a sort of scientist where I look at my business-related actions as experiments: what happens if I tell an unflattering truth in a blog post? how will people respond to a video of me talking? what will it mean if only three people come to my workshop? I get to observe the data and adjust without self-flagellation, which frees me to make my own rules, tune in to what I really want, and create it.

{photo by Jillian West}

BH: What does it mean to live The Farsighted Life?

Julie: The Farsighted Life is shorthand for living in a conscious, fully alive, and powerful way in which we take the long view about what really matters. Social science researchers have shown that one of the strongest predictors of well-being over time is the quality of our relationships (not the amount of money in our IRAs, not the eccentricity of our bucket lists, nor the equity in our homes). However, our love relationships tend to deeply challenge us in every way, sometimes every day, and bliss can seem out of reach. The excellent news is that it takes skills to create our high-quality, dream relationships. Living The Farsighted Life means taking on the challenge of intentionally creating joy, respect, and bliss in our love relationships because we know what matters in the long run.

BH: Who are your favorite clients?

Julie: My favorite clients are simultaneously tough-minded and tender-hearted. They relish a challenge, appreciate tough questions, and enjoy the opportunity to reflect purposefully. They’ve got warm, caring hearts and value the soul-nourishing things in life, like joy, peace, authenticity, and love. In general, my clients tend to be do-ers who effectively set and accomplish their own goals, and I enjoy working with people on the brink of major life change (like marriage, divorce, retirement, childbirth, etc.) when the goal-accomplishing behaviors often become counter-productive.

Whether female or male, 22 years old or 64 years young, my most favorite clients are the ones who (consciously or unconsciously) have a growth mindset – they know that growth is possible and that they can “get smarter” with their love relationships. These clients are the ones who flat-out commit to doing the work, the ones who take full advantage of their engagement with me, the ones who invest themselves in learning deeply. By the end of our collaboration, they literally transform their relationships.

They’re brilliant!

{photo by Jillian West}

BH: If you could impart just one strategy to every human on the planet that would help them access their truth so they could live an intentional powerful life, what would it be?

Julie: Easy question! The tool I’d share is what I call Your Radiant Truth Index: a body awareness exercise that is simple but not necessarily easy. The purpose of this tool is to help you uncover exactly how your unique body says NO and how it says YES. I learned this tool six years ago from Martha Beck’s book Finding Your Own North Star, and I discovered (with great surprise) that my body produced tangible, observable data in response to my decisions, obligations, loved ones, activities, etc.: nausea, hunched shoulders, and shortness of breath communicated NO, whereas dropped shoulders, a relaxed jaw, and a sense of flying through air indicated a clear YES. This is still true, and I use this guidance every day. The larger purpose of this tool is to help you access your own body’s implicit wisdom so you can use it powerfully to create your own uniquely right life.

BH: How can the Business Heroines get a taste of the Farsighted Life?

Julie: Your Radiant Truth Index is available for FREE on my website, and you are 100% invited to get it there. This gift is literally a full-on coaching session that includes a 55-minute audio recording as well as an accompanying workbook so you can capture and reflect on all your body’s wisdom. I encourage my clients to re-visit this essential tool as often as they wish, and some of them do this every day! Also, you’re most welcome to check out my YouTube channel where I post episodes of Farsighted TV: short videos with practical strategies and ideas for living a powerful, fully alive life.