Holly Mandel
AlchemE Mentor
- Listing ID: 61252
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Profile:
If you know you’re meant to live BEYOND the rules you have been handed but didn’t ask for, if you’re a disruptor of norms and limitations, if you know you are here for so much more than the current culture tells you you’re allowed or that’s possible, then the key is learning how to get BEYOND the cultural field of “shoulds”.
I know this because of my own experience. I was someone who thought if I checked all the boxes, colored within the lines, and performed the roles I was supposed to play, all would be great! I’d be happy, loved, and life would be incredibly fulfilling.
However, fulfillment lessened instead of increased and what took its place was a growing frustration, a core confusion where the math wasn’t adding up and the person I had spent most of my life constructing seemed farther and farther from who I authentically was. Although I was well-liked, it seemed that no one - not even my closest friends, intimate partners, and even family REALLY knew who I was. And that was because I didn’t either. The fact is, there was no room for her and I didn’t have the tools at that time to let her out and turn her loose!
Thanks to the many years I have spent on my journey that includes such disparate-seeming roads as learning, performing & teaching improv, a rigorous spiritual path that was on par with Buddhist monk-hood, studying Cultural Evolutionary philosophies such as Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, and most recently the work of Donny Epstein, I’ve learned and experienced quite a lot! I now know that culture ITSELF provides us with rules and roles to maintain the status quo. Culture ITSELF is designed to give everyone within it a map and a “how to fit in” manual.
What drew me to Donny and his work was the truth that if I didn’t claim the EXTRAORDINARY for myself and the impact I am here to make, than ORDINARY will claim me and my life. I would be on a default setting as the good girl - ever-pleasing, obedient, and selfless, far from the person I longed to be and knew I HAD to be for my life to have any authentic meaning and purpose.
My passion for being a Mentor brings together my 12-year experience working with thousands of women all over the world in business, leadership, and creative expression. It also builds upon the 20 years I’ve worked with people in the corporate and artistic arenas as an improv instructor, consultant, and performer.
My life is an ongoing, expanding expression now of the very thing that I am excited to bring to all seekers as part of this first group of Mentors to graduate from the AlchemE program - the magical experiences and tools needed to be both a disruptor of the illusion of limitation, and an awakened architect of a new self, a new life, and a new future.