Lara Coley is a San Franciscan award-winning poet and author of ex traction. Based in Toulouse, France, she is a professor at ISAE-Supaéro, a holistic life coach, and reiki master. She offers coaching in one-to-one sessions and group courses in creative writing and in confidence, connection, and building happier habits. Her work is a creative intersection of writing, healing, and teaching. In this episode of the Joy Studio podcast, Emma and Audrey sat down with Lara, a member of the Joy Studio community, to talk about how all of her facets weave together, what it means to commit before you’re ready, and why giving people the chance to say yes might be the most underrated career move there is. From San Francisco to Normandy, and back to Toulouse Lara’s first move to France in 2005 started from an unlikely place: a French class she enrolled in while going through extreme depression. On the wall was a poster of Mont Saint Michel. She cried, convinced she would never go anywhere that beautiful. A year later, she was there. Her path since then has looped through teaching teachers in Normandy, waiting tables in San Francisco, taking acting classes just to be able to read her own poems out loud (her first open mic, she was told: “You have good poems. No one can hear them.”), completing most of a master’s in marriage and family therapy before realising it wasn’t the right fit, and eventually landing back in Toulouse, this time, she hopes, to stay. The superpower: curiosity from an empathetic place Curiosity. The kind that wants to understand how another person lives something. What they have packed into a single word. How they got to an understanding of an idea. Paired with hypersensitivity (she feels every emotion in the room) and hyperphantasia (her imagination is fully sensory), it makes her a remarkable teacher, a perceptive coach, and a poet who can write darkness with a smile on her face. As a beginning teacher, that same hypersensitivity was almost overwhelming — if one student seemed disengaged, her entire nervous system would mobilise. Now, it’s what makes her classes feel, in her students’ words, like one of the few places in academia where they never feel anxious. The happy class and the engineering students who hugged her Lara teaches what she calls her “happy class” at a Grande École in Toulouse. Officially, it’s positive psychology, because it’s an engineering school and one must be serious. Every cohort, at least five students write in their feedback that it’s the only place in their academic life where they feel no judgment. Where they look forward to coming. Where they go deep with a classmate they’d met just days before and leave still talking. And then there’s the story of the student who sent Lara an email after the course ended, saying her class had given him the skills he believed would lead him to love himself. When she saw him on campus six months later, she hugged him. French people, she notes, are uniformly shocked by this. Her Californian friends see no issue whatsoever. Her last cohort, she says, was especially successful. Two students asked if they could hug her goodbye. “In France. That is very, very special.” Committing before you’re ready — the two courses Lara has two courses she’s been sitting on. Things she’s taught in academic settings for years, wisdom she’s more than ready to share. What she’s launching: → One-time creative writing workshop — May 11th, online. A taster session for people who are curious but not sure they’re “writers.” (Spoiler: Lara loves working with beginners.) → Six-week creative writing course — Starting the first week of June, online. Weekly sessions building into a full workshop experience. → Happy Class — Coming October, in person in Toulouse. No prior writing experience needed. As Lara puts it, what she really teaches — in every class, at every level — is creativity. How to think about how you think. How to look at yourself, your work, your relationships with other humans, with different eyes. The struggle: infrastructure feels like walls For someone with ADHD whose mind is constantly in fluid motion, the moment a plan becomes concrete — a date set, a venue chosen, a price decided — it can feel like walls closing in. Two gifts to take away Lara shares two practical tools she keeps coming back to: 1. Train your brain to look for the positive — by asking questions. The difference between “How on earth am I going to do this?” said in despair and “How on earth am I going to do this?” said with curiosity is everything. Your brain is a machine that looks for answers. Ask it the right question, and it will find them — but only if you let it get to answer number seven without shutting down answers one through six. 2. Give people the opportunity to tell you yes. We are experts at telling ourselves no on other people’s behalf. Oh, they wouldn’t choose me. They wouldn’t want that. It’s not the right moment. But when you actually put yourself in front of people, give them the application, show them the work — frequently, they do choose you. We just never let them. What Lara thinks of Joy Studio We always ask, and Lara’s answer made us cry a little. “I feel like it’s the most holistic support I’ve had in any kind of membership or anything like that. Not just emotionally — but consistent. I see you guys more than I see some of my friends. The brainstorming, the accountability, the in-person meetups... it’s so collaborative. It’s so human. When I have a coffee meetup with these women, I feel like I just went through three months of therapy in the best way. I healed some s**t I didn’t know was broken.” It’s like a garden that grows dreams.” Find Lara 📸 Instagram: @laracoleywrites 🌐 Website: laracoley.com (live from April 20th — with signed copies of her book) 📖 Her poetry book is also available on Amazon and as an e-book at FNAC Joy Studio is a community for women who want to make money doing what they love — without losing themselves. If this conversation resonated with you, come find us. And if you’d love to experience this kind of community in person — our 4-day experience, Bloom, takes place September 17–20 in Aveyron. Early bird pricing is open until April 24th. Only 10 spots. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thejoystudio.substack.com/subscribe
