How to Live and Love Out Loud
Taught by Samara Bay, bestselling author of Permission to Speak and a coach for everyone from business leaders to Hollywood celebrities to high school girls. This course weaves inner wellness with outer communication—focusing on how we show up and speak up on behalf of ourselves and those we love. This kind of speaking (sometimes called “public speaking”) is a spiritual practice; how we do it honors or erodes our spirit.
Whether you speak for a living or not at all, the often-tiny, seemingly insignificant decisions you make to say what’s on your heart or hold your tongue constitute a life. Here, over 5 days of big ideas and gentle practice, we go for a life that feels good, feeds your soul, and is, in the words of Rancho La Puerta’s founder, siempre mejor. Always better.
Day 1: The Big Story
How we talk to ourselves matters. And showing up—for yourself, for your people—is directly connected to your inner dialogue. What stories did you pick up from your family and your culture about your own voice? And about speaking up? Getting loud? Getting emotional? Being polite? Not rocking the boat? Being seen and heard? This is a big ol’ lesson on the history of public spaces and who traditionally gets to talk in them… wrapped up in a motivational session about daring to change the story right where we are. Which requires an orientation to love, not fear. Abundance, not scarcity. Agency, not a whole laundry list of shoulds. And mischief, not politeness. All of which starts with how we speak to ourselves.
Day 2: Dreaming
The ability to love on our emotions rather than fear them, and to read other people’s emotions to better facilitate a moment or a room, are two sides of the same coin: how we listen. Fiercely. With curiosity and care. On day two, we cover the compassion/discernment balance, and the strength/warmth balance, and begin to diagnose where you’ve each become lopsided. Shifting how you show up starts with dreaming with purpose: how do you wish you showed up? How do you wish more people showed up (as leaders, as matriarchs, as friends)? Who do you love listening to and what do you love about it? What moves you?
Day 3: Practice
Gently and lovingly, we experience what it feels like to care out loud—which is the heart of authenticity and trustworthiness. What’s at stake? What are the risks? What are the rewards? And, powerfully, what is the social contract we’re writing by deciding to do it more and more? This session includes a warmup for you, connecting the big ideas from Day 1 and 2 with preparing your body, mind, and spirit to actually show up differently. You’ll leave with new tools but even more importantly, the beginnings of a list of memories that reliably get you feeling your own power and permission no matter where you are.
Day 4: Bravery
Here we explore the role of courage in showing up—what it feels like to work that muscle and where we gather our strength when the nerves kick in. As a society, we don’t talk enough about the opportunities to be a leader-with-a-lower-case-L in our daily lives and how to take them, for the sake of ourselves and all the people who need us to show up. Here, we connect deeply to the responsibility we each have to model. You decide what heroism means to you. And you notice how it shifts your whole life to identify the tiny, heroic things you do all the time, and how you might do more of them. This is a practical session on how to do bravery.
Day 5: Power
Our inner wellness—our sense of peace and alignment with ourselves—is inevitably jostled when the stakes are high: when we want something badly, when we’ve hurt someone or they’ve hurt us, or when all eyes are on us and we sense we’ve got something to prove. This final day is about creating the conditions for power and permission even when the stakes are high. Emboldening you, grounding you, unleashing your confidence and charisma, so you can pitch your wild idea, say what’s true even though you may disappoint or anger others, or hold the floor and tell a story like you own the place. Most of us need a soft spot to figure out what we really want (which is hard to discern under all the socialization). This is that spot, where—with mischief and hands on your back—you get to do the next part too. The part where you strategize how you’re going to go after it to manifest your dreams and become your greatest self. Siempre major.
Samara Bay is the author of PERMISSION TO SPEAK, a love letter to anyone about to open their mouth – available in 15+ countries and 5 languages, and a #1 bestseller in Women & Business and Public Speaking (Penguin Random House 2023). She’s a Los Angeles-based speech coach whose clients range from candidates for US Congress to C-suite executives, changemaking entrepreneurs, movie stars, and high school girls.
Her thought leadership has been featured in TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Glamour, Vanity Fair, CBS Sunday Morning, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Deepak Chopra, and NPR. She’s delivered masterclasses and keynotes across industries including Google, MAC Cosmetics, SXSW, Telemundo, Princeton University, Psychotherapy Symposium, and Emerge America. She’s a professor of practice at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. For more, please visit www.samarabay.com.
