We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Harper Huntington a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

When I was 25 I made a series of mistakes that were both costly and caused me o feel a lot of shame. My mom flew out from the East Coast to California where I was living at the time to help me pick up the pieces and figure out my next move. At one point I looked at her and said, “Aren’t you disappointed in me?” but she took my face between her hands and said, “The people who love you don’t care that you made a mistake. They just want you to be happy”. And although I had grown up knowing I didn’t have to earn her love, it was the first time I felt the heavy weight of other people’s opinions lift. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that the people around me would still love and care for me after the mess I had made. It was one of those life lessons that fundamentally changed my world view and opened the door for more self-compassion.

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Sarah Harper Huntington and I help women fast-track their personal growth through self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-direction.

The women I work with are powerful, resourceful, and capable. But they have encountered questions or limitations that then created stagnation, confusion, or isolation. I guide them in assessing current habits and behaviors, uncovering what truly matters, and designing a new way of being that aligns with who they are TODAY.

I became intrigued by human behavior from, of all things, watching Oprah Winfrey after middle school, I had one experience in particular that had a huge impact on me and I talk about it frequently. I was 13 and my brother 10, and we were watching the Oprah Winfrey Show after school. Well, I was watching. He was attempting to wrestle with me. We were latch-key kids, and we lived on a quiet street, so I was the only playmate for this brute of a boy.

As she often did, Oprah had a psychologist on the program who was talking about the differences between men and women and how boys are programmed by society not to talk about their emotional needs, which left physicality as their primary means of expression. At that very moment, the doctor on Oprah said “If a boy is rough-housing he usually just needs to be close to someone but doesn’t know how to express it. Try rubbing his arm and watch the behavior subside”. So that’s exactly what I did…I started stroking my brother’s arm gently and he instantly stopped trying to pin me to the floor.

To me, it was like I’d just learned a secret power! This cause and effect relationship between two people ignited in me a lifelong interest in human psychology. But deeper still, I realized that knowing something about a person’s needs would help me relate. How many other similar secrets of the mind were there to be unlocked? I began to really pay attention to the impact words, actions and deeds had on others around me.

Flash forward 40 years and I still enjoy figuring out why we do, think, and feel the way we do. I work with women because that’s my lived experience and I have walked through fire myself. I am on my own self-investment journey with them.

What makes my practice stand out from other mentors, consultants, or coaches is that I focus on understanding the relationship between certain forces– the heart and mind, our thoughts and feelings, intention and attraction, self-acceptance and judgment. I do this work because I believe our primary function on this earth is to truly love and accept ourselves, and in doing so, heal the world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This is a great question for me because I spent 18 years in corporate marketing. As a small business owner, I no longer had an SEO team, a creative design team, or an operations and analytics team. I was back to square one. My corporate marketing conditioning actually held me back for the first year. I was so focused on perfection and building my mar tech stack in the right order that I often missed opportunities. I had to unlearn some of those rules to be agile and grass roots.

How did you build your audience on social media?

In my line of work, people are buying essentially two things– they’re buying the transformation that will come through coaching and they are buy me. Which meant that when I launched I knew I had to be OUT there. Not just posting images, but speaking directly to my audience. That also meant I had to accept the fact that I’m not going to be a fit for some women, I’m not rigid, preachy, or loud and that comes across on social media. So if a woman is looking for a drill sergeant, I’m not her coach. But because I am calm, confident, and happy I tend to attract an audience of women who feel drawn to my energy. Fortunately, I did not struggle much with filming myself. What I struggled with– and sometimes still do– is being consistent with the frequency. My advice is to try to make content that either educates, entertains, empower or engage your followers. Don’t make your posts about you too much, it should really be about your intended audience and what they care about/need.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sarahharperhuntington.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahharperhuntington/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGnQM1ObAyuhdGVpGB7fagQ
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@successcoachsarah

Image Credits
Tracy Huffman