I'm Effie, a life coach who profoundly gives a fuck about
you feeling better for good. I teach people how to cut the
crap and live according to their own rules.
It's a crime we don't learn this stuff in school, but it's
simpler than you think to break the pattern and start living the
life you want. Listen on to find out how.
Hey, welcome to the last episode of Feel Better For Good for All
of 2025. I'm so excited about this
episode. I've really been looking forward
to it. We are talking about magic
today, how to make it, how to keep it, and how to use it to
turn the corner anytime you need to in this upcoming year and
frankly, in your life. This episode is coming out on
New Year's Eve, December 31st, the last day of the year, and I
just love this time, the the time between like Boxing Day,
the day after Christmas, all through Kwanzaa and into January
1st, 2nd. It really is like my favorite
time of the entire year. This de Noir meant where we're
asked to, if we choose to accept the mission to look back on the
year, what worked, what didn't work, what do we want to do
differently in the new year. And it's just a full reflection.
I love it. I love it.
It's a time to slow down and really, you know, take stock.
So how have your holidays been so far?
Good, bad, ugly. I hope you've had a little bit
of time to decompress. I wanted to start today's
episode just by sharing, well, one message that I got from a
client, one of my amazing women. The day after Christmas, she
sent me a message that said this.
I felt safe in the company of my family yesterday, a first in
over 25 years. Thank you, Effie.
I welled up when I got this message just because I feel so
lucky to get to do the work that I do.
And there's no time more rewarding than the holidays to
really appreciate the magic that my women are making in their own
lives. So I wanna share a couple more.
Here's just some of what I've heard from them this past week.
I have an enormous amount of gratitude for the work we've
been doing together. This was the most enjoyable
Christmas Day I can think of. Normally, I would have a bunch
of triggers around the way things went, other people's
behavior, etcetera. And guess what?
The people were the same. But this time, things didn't
faze me. There was so much relief that I
didn't have to feel so resentful.
I let my family members be who they are.
I was able to do what I wanted and be as I was.
It was just fun. Like who am I?
And the one says I'm so grateful to have gotten here.
When we started working together, my negative emotions
were so fierce. I didn't see a way out.
But it's working. Just having you there every week
made all the difference. Every week we showed up and did
the work together. You make it so simple.
It's like after we talk about it, I have permission to do
things differently and you teach me so much.
I know it is possible to get back up no matter how hard I
fall. I have these tools now that I
feel good about and I know there's a way through anything
because I trust our process. Y'all.
I'm so proud of them. I am just cavalling over here
and getting all of this feedback from my amazing clients really
made me want to offer something special that I actually did on
December 20th. So I don't think I announced it
on the podcast, but I am going to be teaching again back by
popular demand. On January 5th.
I will be teaching my groundbreaking master class How
to Not Repeat 2025. So if you're good and damn ready
to stage your comeback already, you can RSVP at Effie lavoie.com
right now. Hopefully you're hearing this in
time and we can get you in for that free master class that
promises to change the trajectory of your year, to help
you do that and to change the course of your life.
Cannot wait to see you there. OK, so I wanted to share about
my Christmas 'cause it was quite special as well, but in a
slightly different way. I didn't have my kids this year,
they were with their dad. We alternate Christmases and I
had a lot of offers for time with friends or actually I had a
few like date offers and I decided to turn them all down
because I really wanted to spend the day with myself.
That was what I most wanted to do.
It's very special to be able to get a day all to myself.
And the highlight for me was getting to go up to my daily
trail, but I didn't get to. I chose to.
And it was an act of choice because it had been raining in
LA, quite heavily actually for a day or two.
And that day, Christmas Day, was raining on and off and I
thought, you know what, I'm going to take my chances.
So I packed Piggy my puppy up into the car and I decided that
we're going to go for it. On the way to the trail.
It's like 5 minutes from my house, 5 minute drive.
On the way to the trail, it starts like dumping rain and I
almost turned back. I'm like, oh, you know, this,
this could get kind of rough. But I didn't.
I decided no, I'm going to go forward.
I don't mind a little sloppiness.
It was a little bit muddy. I don't mind running in the
rain, and I feel like Piggy, I mean, hello, her namesake.
I think she'll be fine with it too.
So we continued on. We got to the trailhead and
started going up the hill. It was slippery, but for the
most part it didn't dump on us like it had in the car on the
way there. And we were so handsomely
rewarded on the way back. Y'all, I'm coming down the hill.
And keep in mind that this view, it's it's like you go up in the
Hollywood Hills or the northernmost part of it, and
from the top, from the Vista of this trail, you can see the
entire San Fernando Valley. It's incredible.
So there's mountains flanking the entire valley, you know, to
the right and the left, and there's just massive expanse of
this valley that I love. So we're coming down the hill
and I turn a corner and I see this massive rainbow that's
literally haloing the entire valley.
The whole thing. In almost 20 years in LA, I've
never seen anything like it. We do not get visited by
rainbows very often here. And to see that whole thing
stretched across the sky, it was the most magical moment.
It felt like a miracle, even more so that I was the only one
on the trail, like we were the only ones there.
And so I'm, I'm seeing this scene, you know, playing out in
front of me and I'm just like repeating to myself, I'm so
lucky. I'm so lucky.
I'm so lucky to get to live where I live.
I'm so lucky to have the life that I have.
I'm so lucky to get to see this right now in this moment.
I'm sure other people saw the rainbow from different vantage
points, but from where I was looking, I mean, I felt like it
was for me, that it was, you know, my Christmas miracle right
there and delivered to me right on that slope.
And the thing that really struck me about this is that if I had
turned back, if in that moment where, you know, it was raining
really hard on the way to the trail, I had thought, no, it's
OK and turned back, I never would have gotten to see.
I never would have gotten that reward.
Such an incredible experience, and I wanted to share that with
you on this podcast as a symbol of the magic that we're talking
about today. And I hope you've been
experiencing some magic of your own this holiday season.
I know this time of year can be really challenging, but I hope
that there were many glimmers for you to be able to hang on
to. And if you felt hurt, if you
felt confused, lonely, or alienated, I want this to be the
last holiday season. You have to feel that way.
So let's write your next chapter together.
Let's talk about how to make magic on purpose in your life in
the new year, when things feel like they're in the crapper,
they're not going your way. Like life is lifing.
I want you to know how to turn it around intentionally to not
just find the magic, but to create it and use it to fuel you
toward the life you want to live.
This is important, just like it was important for me to continue
up that hill, because we don't want our circumstances, the
stimuli of our life, the rain coming down the weather, to be
the dictators of our experience. We don't want to rely on the
things that happened to us to inform us about who we are and
how we get to live. I've already told you a little
bit about why this time of year is my favorite and New Year's
Eve is my favorite holiday because it's that time to take
stock of the year, to be able to look forward to the new and
really do a reset. I am actively doing that right
now in this space and with my clients as well.
And in fact, I'll be offering a special gift to anyone who
registers for the Master class on January 5th.
So that's something to really look forward to.
It is a phenomenal tool for being able to take stock and do
your own reset. But for right now, I would love
to just do a little bit of that resetting, a little bit of
unpacking of my past year. I don't want to open any wounds
here, but maybe this will help to get your mind moving that
direction as well. So I don't know about you, but
2025 was a tough one. It's like really tough.
It felt like at many points there was nothing that I could
do but laugh, really. Which is ironic because my word
for the year was joy. I pick a word for the year at
the beginning of every year, and I settled on joy at the
beginning of 2025, which felt like such a betrayal.
Like almost immediately, because we came back from our holiday
trip directly into the LA fires, that true nightmare of a couple
of weeks where so many people that I know lost their homes.
We gratefully didn't have to evacuate, but we were living in
the fear of what may happen at any moment, for better or for
worse. I thought a puppy would help.
So I went out and got a puppy. Oh boy, OK, that made life a lot
more complicated. Then I had all these challenges
in my business. It was just like 1 after
another. Constant challenges and ones
that I really did not expect. I also processed through a lot
of grief this year, a lot of historical grief, grief from the
year before that I really hadn't processed.
So circumstantially. Things were hard, and not
necessarily harder than they'd been the previous year, but the
difficulty level just felt infinitely higher.
And I think that's because I was different.
Like I was going through an identity shift, this big
transitional energy that I was navigating through for really
the bulk of the year. And looking back, I can see how
aspects of my former self were actually dying in these really
challenging moments and these decisions that I was faced with.
And a lot of it was not very much fun at all.
It was quite painful. So when I say parts of me were
dying off, that's really how it felt.
Very painful, especially for the first half of the year.
Joy was much more elusive than I would have liked.
I had to find ways of creating more of it in my world, in my
life, which felt like it was actually dishonouring some of
the grief. So it was a balance.
When do I process? When do I allow this negative
emotion to move through me? And when is joy the
prescription? I really had to find balance
this year. And grace.
That was really the biggest gift of 2025 for me, and I use the
discernment that I was building to fuel a full on comeback.
Oh, it's been so sweet. And I'm teaching my women how to
do it themselves. Everything that I've been
through this year is benefiting everyone in my world.
And a highlight for me this year was teaching the Joy Code, also
known as how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy the human
experience. And that master class is on the
podcast. It's episode 75 of Feel Better
for Good. So the biggest one for me in the
context of staging my own comeback and ending the year so
strong, is codifying the process of reinvention into 7 powerful
stages. I have broken down exactly how
to do it for yourself. And you'll find that in episode
88, what reinvention really looks like.
Now, reinvention is a magical sport.
So these ingredients that I'm about to share with you right
now play into and through the seven stages of reinvention.
The seven stages are designed to unlock each of the elements
inside of you, but it can also be really helpful to start with
this energy first. So here you go, the three
essential ingredients to intentional magic making.
How to spin the straw of your life into gold, to
systematically rise from the ashes and create winds from your
losses. The only three principles you
need to know, the only three things you need to practice to
start you ready ingredient #1 is commitment.
You commit to the desire of your heart, to the vision of your
life that feels impossible in this moment, under the current
circumstances, the current regime, and you decide, this is
what I'm doing. This is the direction that I'm
headed in. Right when it was time for me to
go to my trail, I decided this is what I'm doing.
I know the weather doesn't look great, but this is what I've
decided to do and I'm going to move in that direction.
There is magic in commitment, pure magic, and this is a
decision that you make once and that activates the magic, but
you also continue to make this decision over and over again,
which sets the stage for ongoing magic and the possibility of
that, the inevitability of that happening for you.
The second essential ingredient is risk.
And risk requires vulnerability. It requires you to be willing to
feel vulnerable. Magic cannot come through
without cracks in the surface. You have to be willing to put
yourself in harm's way, at least emotionally speaking.
Putting yourself in harm's way to take on risk, to tolerate
risk, knowing there will be slips, there will be difficulty
and heartache, and it will be worth it.
You decide in advance that it will be worth it, and believing
that it is worth it is part of the commitment.
That's an extension of the commitment.
That's why we need to return to the commitment over and over, is
to remind ourselves of why we're doing this.
And we're gonna need to be reminded because this is not the
easiest stuff. It puts us outside of our
comfort zone, but that's where the magic lives.
The third ingredient is presence, and you can think of
presence as simply listening, being available for what happens
next, truly in the moment. And to do this, you've got to
drop what it is you think should happen, what you think is going
to happen, to be able to be with and appreciate what is talked on
the podcast recently about the should life.
And that's what happens when we are always projecting onto the
world and our experience what should be happening.
We are robbed of the magic of what actually is unfolding for
you and in front of you and around you.
You literally become blinded to it.
It's not that the magic isn't there, but you don't have access
to it when you're caught up in the machinations of what you
think should be happening instead of what actually is.
And I hear a lot of people say, well, what is is really ugly or
I don't like the way that things are.
True presence and true listening requires a different kind of
discernment. So instead of judging what's
good or what's bad or what you like or dislike, you start using
your judgment instead to find what's useful to keep and what's
useful to release. And for most of us to on our
list of things we need to release is this sense of
victimization, of being victimized by the world and that
we cannot have the life that we really want because of fill in
the blank. Our trauma, our circumstances,
our difficulties, this person in our life.
You know, truly just fill in the blank with your favorite noun,
the noun that makes you feel the most hopeless, the most
powerless, the most disenfranchised.
To be able to do this, you have to really identify the belief
that keeps you feeling poor and distraught.
And I want you to imagine right now a space you can dwell in
that is happy and secure. Not that everything is perfect,
not that you live in a perfect world, but you feel an inner
peace and a higher purpose and a deep trusted connection to the
source of love. That is what permeates your
field. And in this place there is
supreme confidence and pure awareness.
Pure awareness of where you've been and of the suffering that
still exists. And somehow that suffering and
that history is not incongruent with your peace.
There's a deep appreciation for your own pain, truly, as you
understand, it's what's brought you the humility to be able to
enter the portals into this new world.
And here you know deeply, fully how privileged you are to
understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from
weakness, that the pain is not only the price but the very
touchstone of rebirth. And in this place, knowing its
full worth and purpose, you can no longer fear adversity because
you have found fullness and richness where there was
poverty, where there was fear. Peace and joy and deep
fulfilment have sprung out of the very midst of chaos.
This is the place to be. Let's make some fucking magic in
2026. What do you say?
January 5th is where it starts. Come join me for the master
class. Make sure you go and register
for free right now if you haven't already.
Effie lavora.com cannot wait to see you there.
OK? Thank you so much for riding
this episode with me. I know that we went a lot of
different places. I'm so, so happy that you were
here taking this ride with me. Have a wonderful week and I will
see you next time. I will see you next year.
Yay. If you're ready to do the work
to move forward on what you want and actually get it, I can help
you. I'm offering my podcast
listeners a free consultation with me to talk about what
coaching can do for you this year.
Just visit effielivor.com to get started.