Laura Berman Fortgang - Living Your Best Life: Ten Strategies for Getting From Where You Are to Where Youre Meant to Be

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Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR

LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE

Laura Berman Fortgang will help you reach the success and fulfillment you are destined for.

KEN BLANCHARD

Fortgang generously offers glorious, refreshing guidance to help us each find our unique path in life. I scribbled notes on almost every page. I know I will refer to her book over and over again.

JENNIFER LOUDEN Author of The Womans Comfort Book and The Comfort Queens Guide to Life

Fortgangs Wisdom Access Questions have the makings of brilliancesimple, easy to use, hugely effective, and humblingly obvious. If only we had thought of them first!!

JUDY GEORGE
Founder & CEO of Domain
Author of The Domain Book of Intuitive Home Design
and The Intuitive Businesswoman

A brilliantly written, indispensable guide that touches and expands the very best of our hearts, minds, and spirits. With fresh insights and practical, powerful exercises, Fortgang shows how to restore and revitalize the precious balance between work and home, life and career, and fulfill our highest destiny.

HAROLD BLOOMFIELD, M.D. Author of Making Peace with Your Past and How to Survive the Loss of a Love

Bewarethis thought-provoking book will put you on a one-way path to a more creative and fulfilling life. Youll read it cover to cover.

KYLE MACLACHLAN actor

I read Living Your Best Life on a movie set, and everyone kept stealing it from me, reading it while I was shooting, and then raving about it. Finally I got to finish the book and found it amazingly helpful. Laura helps you organize information you already have inside so you can move your life forward in positive ways. I cant recommend this enough!

JULIA SWEENEY actress

AUTHORS NOTE

Many names and identifying details of the client examples described in this book have been changed to preserve the confidentiality of the coaching relationship.

This book is dedicated

to Mark, the wisest man I know, whose love is my rock,

and

to Skyler, a chip off his dads block, who makes my heart sing

INTRODUCTION: EXCAVATING YOUR LIFE BLUEPRINT

BECOMING A COACH

The woman in the white jacket looked over my questionnaire. Wed like to admit you, she said. I was twenty-nine years old and on the verge of becoming a resident patient at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, to receive treatment for severe depression and suicidal tendencies. No, that wont be necessary, I replied through nervous laughter as I got up to leave.

They let me go. They didnt even try to stop me. Maybe it was the certainty with which I responded or maybe it was because they had planned to scare me straight. Whichever, it did not matter. All that did matter is that in that moment something shifted in me forever. I decided to turn my life around. I decided to find a way out from behind what I had taken to calling the black curtain. I decided that I could change, that I did not have to be a very sick girl, as my family and doctors said I was.

At that moment, something stronger than I was took over and directed me down a path I had no idea whether I could follow. Over the preceding six years I had weathered depression, pain, and a life that did not work, but now I did not know if I could cope with healing, forgiveness, and happiness.

My previous years of on-and-off-again therapy had not made a big impact, although I had been the most entertaining patient a shrink could find. Mine should have been paying me for my weekly stand-up comedy routine, which included an occasional Sarah Bernhardt impersonation. After D day at the hospital, I tried a little more therapy. I even tried antidepressants. At the time, nothing seemed more enticing to me than a little magic pill to lighten the leadlike heaviness I felt running through my veins and brain. But five days after starting the pills, I was on the StairMaster and suddenly could not breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack. When my pulse came down, I was fine, but I took this incident as a sign that drugs were not going to free me of my problems. I quit Zoloft. I knew I had to figure this thing out on my own.

Predating all this was a long struggle with anorexia and exercise bulimia. My every day had been centered around what I would eat, when I would eat it, and when I could work out to burn off the calories I had consumed.

Ninety-five pounds and zero percent body fat looked great to me. My eyes were like marbles because there were no cheeks to surround them. My knees were knobby like hammers and my hip bones darted out like the fins on a 1950s Cadillac. Like all anorexics, I was proud, not worried about my health at all, and sure that those looks people darted at me were jealousy over my perfect form. Yet, one day, I found myself wishing for a stranger to come and take me off the StairMaster so I could rest. Realizing that somewhere, down deep, I was crying for help, I had a flash of understanding that something was really wrong.

The frenzy that I had worked myself into had to do with a personal characteristic that has always been both my greatest strength and my most dangerous weakness: my drive to succeed. Right after college, I had decided that no matter what it took, I would become an actress. I wanted to be sure I would not, one day, regret not having gone for my dream. But being a poor, struggling artist was not an option. So I earned half of my income from acting and the rest from waitressing, aerobics instructing, shoe modeling, and anything else you could do with your clothes on. Id wait on line for auditions as early as five A.M., then pound the pavements pursuing acting jobs until three P.M., when Id take a power nap before waitressing from four to midnight. I was miserable, and yet I thought this lifestyle was leading me somewhere. I was sure I had all the answers to life and that I was somehow superior to others because I was taking actionlots and lots of actioninstead of just passively letting life happen.

The only place I did not seek perfection was in romantic relationships. I wanted desperately to be loved, and I had hardly any criteria as to whom Id allow to do so. When I think back on the many near misses and stupid capers that I put myself through, I realize that I am lucky to be alive. I really cant bring myself to reveal what my mistakes were, but I will say that I hope my kids grow up to have more self-esteem than I did at the time. I hope they know how to say no and mean it. Most of these stunts you could write off as the stupid stuff you do when youre in your twenties. But when I got involved with a married, gun-peddling drug dealer, I realized I had crossed the line from stupid to self-destructive.

It is ironic that, a few years later, the event that finally cracked me open like an egg was a marriage proposal from my beloved boyfriend, Mark. Mark was a penniless actor with no prospects, and because he did not match the a man will take care of you myth that I had grown up with, my brain went haywire. Something did not compute. I knew no one had ever loved me like Mark did and yet the perfectionist in me could not settle for someone less than perfect. Shortly afterward, I ended up at the door of Fair Oaks.

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