Live life through a poetic lens.

Carla Russo is a journalist and life and success coach who focuses on emotional resiliency, leadership development, shadow work and storytelling.

She runs coaching programs designed to push you to explore every aspect of yourself, discover new edges, reframe past adversity, and experience more success + pleasure in this life.

Carla is currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. She is focusing her research on how people use personal storytelling to transform past adversity into fuel for authentic connection and resiliency.

She completed a year-long training program to master the following coaching modalities:

• Clinical Hypnotherapy

• TIME Techniques

• Neurolinguistic Programming (working on the conscious + subconscious levels)

• Emotional Freedom Technique

• Transformational Life + Success Coach

Carla has also spent a decade as a journalist, telling stories in the ever-changing world of identity politics + modern culture.

Memoir is Carla’s favorite style of writing and, for some reason, she continues to share, in embarrassing detail, traumas, dramas and transformational moments of her life.

Like how a quarantine-era virtual sex party forced her to address her childhood trauma and how a nuclear missile headed for her home state of Hawai’i forced her into a fierce fight with her fiancé over a tractor.

She’s written stories about nearly every angle of humanity + lifestyle — from running taste tests of the best mai tais in Hawaii, tracking the popularity of tiny bikini bottoms to covering natural disasters, major cultural movements (ex. Me Too, Black Lives Matter) and U.S. presidential elections (2016, 2020).

She’s also interviewed survivors of sexual assault, talked to world-renowned singer Jack Johnson about donating his tour money to charity for five whole years and followed the ongoing fight for Native Hawaiian sovereignty.

Carla graduated from the University of California Irvine’s Literary Journalism program, which focuses on long-form nonfiction reporting and writing.

She also independently studied Human Design since 2018, focusing on texts written by Alan Robert Krakower (aka “Ra Uru Hu,” the original author of the first Human Design texts) and Karen Parker Curry, and trainings by Jenna Zoe.