Colinda Latour, a devoted self-love coach and author, shares her transformative journey from a challenging upbringing to becoming a beacon of empowerment. Raised in northern Canada as the youngest of six children, Colinda faced a childhood marked by a lack of unconditional love, with her father's abandonment and a tumultuous family environment leaving enduring scars. However, her resilience led her to create her life-altering "31-Day Full-on Love Challenge," chronicled in her book, "Living in Love," propelling her from a love-less existence to a love-filled life and motivating her to become a certified self-love coach.
Specializing in empowering high-achieving women, Colinda's coaching addresses perpetual self-pressure and the quest for external validation, as reflected in her signature program, "The High Achiever’s Path to Unshakeable Self-Love." This program aims to break the cycle of internal pressure, fostering an understanding that love originates from within. Utilizing methodologies like meditation, breath work, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT tapping), and “Love Actions” from her book, Colinda guides her clients to embrace self-love as a foundational element of their success.
Looking forward, Colinda envisions a global movement centred around love, embodied in her upcoming initiative, the "Global Love Generators" subscription service. This initiative seeks to unite like-minded individuals, providing tools and coaching services to spread love and inspire positive change worldwide. Colinda firmly believes that by nurturing love within ourselves, we can create a ripple effect of positivity, transforming not only individual lives but the entire world. Presently, she resides happily on the south coast of England with her partner and dog.
Colinda Latour, Self-Love Coach – Author
Can you tell us about your journey to becoming a self-love coach?
My journey started as the youngest of six children, raised by a single mother in a small town in northern Canada. It wasn't an easy childhood, and unconditional love was notably absent. My father left two months after I was born and I carried the weight of thinking he left because of me well into my adulthood. Later in life, I retold that story, but before then it had formed into a limiting belief and had a huge impact on me feeling worthy of love. My father’s abandonment and the resulting bitterness my mother carried towards him and her circumstance created a volatile childhood that seethed with anger. One where we as children never seemed to do anything right.
On the other hand, my mother was also very affectionate and vocal with her love. It was a dichotomous environment that left my heart reeling and confused. In addition, both my brothers disappeared from my childhood—one to a boarding school when I was nine, and the eldest suddenly died when I was thirteen.
Trying to process everything, my young brain came up with; all men leave and I don’t deserve love and even if I did, it comes at a cost.
Now, I am grateful for my childhood because it helped create who I am today. But for many years, I lived in its shadow of fear, unworthiness, and resentment towards myself. Those feelings bubbled into my romantic life and I struggled to find love. After years of searching for it in all the wrong places, I decided to shift gears.
Instead of looking for love, I set out to understand and embody it.
I wanted to be love.
Drawing from this thirst to become love and my own experiences and insights, I crafted the "31-Day Full-on Love Challenge," a transformative journey that birthed my book, "Living in Love: How to Create a Lifestyle of Love, Faith, Bliss, and Crazy-Ass Manifesting (All in Thirty-One Days)."
This challenge changed my life and after the book's publication, I felt a deep calling to go beyond its pages and actively contribute to the well-being of others. This led me to enroll in a self-love coaching certification course, where I immersed myself in understanding how I could help others become the loving beings I believe we are all meant to be.
The journey continues as I weave the lessons from my book, life, and education into my signature coaching programme: The High Achiever’s Path to Unshakeable Self-Love, were I work with high achieving women empowering them to break free from the cycle of internal pressure and external validation and guide them on a profound discovery of self-love and fulfilment.
You mention that your 31-Day Full-On Love Challenge changed your life, can you tell us about it and how you changed?
Basically, I went from love-less to love-full by putting love into action. I wanted to act, think, and react from a place of love and I realised to become that person, perhaps I had to do love. So I created the Full-On Love Challenge where I did ten acts of love per day for thirty-one days. The “Love Actions” as I call them, were directed towards myself, to others, or done to simply generate feelings of love. For example, one of the Love Actions I performed towards others was to send messages of love to five people each day. This was often a text or voice message and was always returned with greater love. It is still one of my favourite Love Actions to do.
An act I did towards myself was to hug myself multiple times per day, which during the time of Covid lockdowns, brought me great comfort and love. I still do it because it feels so nice. One act I did simply to raise my loving vibration was what I call Love in the Mundane. For this, I chose three mundane activities per day and sent love into the activity while performing it so love could seep into all facets of my life and become ingrained. One of my favourites for this was to wash my hands with love. For example, every time I picked up the soap, I would appreciate the warm, clean water and the fragrance or softness of the bubbles as I lathered the bar between my palms.
Doing ten acts of love per day was magical. It created a love bubble around my life and impacted everything in a positive way. When there is so much love in your life there is no room for fear or doubt and that is when people and things begin to flow into your life with very little effort. Manifesting transpires easily and quickly from a place of love and sustained periods of bliss become the norm.
Some of the other love “side-effects” from putting love into action include unwavering faith in yourself and life, increased trust in your intuition and ability to sense or hear it, and a much greater connection to yourself, your energy body, and the world around you.
You briefly mention your book, Living in Love, can you tell us more about that?
Yes, of course. Living in Love: How to Create a Lifestyle of Love, Faith, Bliss, And Crazy-Ass Manifesting (All in thirty-One Days), is all about how to put love into action and how doing so can create a life you love. It is based on the results from completing my Full-On Love Challenge and my own personal stories of how I overcame feelings of unworthiness and being unlovable to transforming into the loving being I am now.
These tales are weaved in with the practical tools and guidance that provide an easy, uplifting, and thorough manual for generating more love in your life. I also dive into how love is an infinite resource that becomes more abundant when shared and that by creating a lifestyle centred around love, individuals can manifest their dreams, forge deeper connections, and inspire positive change globally.
You mentioned you work with high achieving women; can you tell us why and what is your approach when working with them to achieve their self-love desires?
After an epiphany with my own self-love coach, I knew I was best serving “goal-getting” and high achieving women because I could relate to them. As a child, I never felt I did well enough at home so I constantly put pressure to do better and accomplish more. I thought if I could just do a chore a bit better, or get a higher grade, then maybe I would receive the love and acknowledgement I so desperately craved.
I didn’t realise it, but I was acting out my childhood well into adulthood. When I finally saw that it was me who was causing so much stress and anguish in my life because of the unsurmountable pressure I put on myself—I knew I had to help other women break that cycle of constantly striving to do better just for a moment of worthiness.
My approach is to provide a safe, comfortable, and loving space for my clients to journey down their unique self-love pathway, providing support and accountability along the way. I believe there are certain aspects that we need to address on a self-love journey, such as self-forgiveness and self-acceptance, and we work through these in the sessions. My signature programme, The High Achiever’s Path to Unshakeable Self-Love, is 16-weeks long and allows enough time and flexibility to dive into the different aspects and whatever else the client needs in order to generate more self-love in their life.
I use tools from my Love Toolbox in our sessions, like breath work, Love Actions from my book, oracle cards, EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique), heart-opening yoga, and Reiki. In the first session we will establish what my client truly desires from working with me and which modalities she prefers, or is open to working with, and from here we embark on the most beautiful love-filled journey.
How do you develop trust and rapport with your clients and how important do you feel this is for the coaching relationship?
With almost 20 years of experience as a consultant, I know my listening and client-relationship building skills are transferable to being a trustworthy and friendly coach. I like to set a trusting and comfortable environment immediately and like to have a free consultation call to test the waters of compatibility and gain trust from the onset.
It takes courage to be vulnerable, so when appropriate, I like to share stories about my personal transformation that demonstrate I can relate and that I trust my client enough to be vulnerable with them. Trust is a two-way path, and we can further develop it together by showing up when we say we will and doing the work for our sessions.
For me, I really want my clients to feel that they are receiving the best coaching I can provide. I take the time to understand what works best for them and ensure this is present in our sessions. For instance, if one client doesn’t like writing, I won’t give her journalling exercises, whereas if another thrives from writing exercises, I will create more written-based activities.
Perhaps the easiest way for me to gain trust and build rapport is by ensuring that each session comes from a place of love.
As we wrap up our conversation, can you give us an example of how a client transformed with you as a coach?
There is one woman who comes to mind. She was my first client. We started originally with a few sessions to help her get through a rough break-up and boost her self-love but she quickly realised the power of self-love coaching and we continued to work together for several months. I witnessed her blossom from not even wanting to love herself to being fully engaged in the process and doing what she needed to get to a place where she accepts and loves herself wholly. During a session not too long ago, she mentioned that if it wasn’t for our coaching sessions, she wouldn’t have made it this far.
You published a book all about love in 2023, you are now helping high achieving women find self-love, what is next for you and your love career?
My life’s purpose is to spread love. It started with my book, Living in Love, overflowed into a self-love coaching career, and now I aim to create a worldwide movement centred around love. I passionately believe that simple acts of love have the potential to transform not just individual lives but the entire world.
With this vision of uniting like-minded souls, I plan on creating a self-love membership subscription where we’ll dive into different themes and I provide tools and resources to help work through any blocks, issues, or feelings surrounding that theme each month. Members will receive things such as guided meditations, EFT tapping videos, breathwork exercises, and journal prompts. As well, I will guide them through my Full-On Love Challenge at least once a year. There will also be different coaching services provided based on the level of the subscription you purchase.
I plan on calling it the "Global Love Generators", because as mentioned, I believe simple acts of love will change the world and on my own journey, I discovered that the more I loved myself, the more I loved others and wanted to spread that love as far and wide as possible.
I hope to help create a much more love-filled world.
