I’m Leonard Shostak
aka hardy brooklyn
Life & Business Coach
Helping people live authentic lives in an inauthentic world.
Life Coaching
I help creative artists, entrepreneurs and inventors, and others like you to get past the obstacles that prevent you from reaching your goals and to empower you to live authentically and achieve your ideal quality of life.
Business Coaching
Starting and running a business can be challenging. I get it, because I’ve done it—several times. As a coach, I bring decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur and business consultant to guide your success, whatever that looks like for you.
Setting Goals
I can help you structure goals that are attainable, realistic, measurable, and moving towards what you want instead of away from what you don’t want.
Authentic Communication
A seasoned public speaker, performer, and Toastmaster, I can help you improve your public speaking and interpersonal communication skills to ensure your audiences clearly understand your message.
Managing Stress
My coaching helps clients achieve goals, live authentically, and pursue their missions by reducing and coping with stress using techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, exercises, and managing expectations.
Your Career As an Artist
What Is Life Coaching?
Life coaching helps you: find the path between where you are now and where you want to be; setting and achieving goals across health and well-being, careers, relationships, and work-life balance; and finding what will make you happier. It’s centered around the belief that everyone can achieve their goals through acknowledging and using their own resources versus being told what to do.
Who Can Benefit from Working with a Life Coach?
Life coaching can be the catalyst for a transformative journey, helping you shed limiting beliefs, surmount obstacles, and discover your true strengths. It can guide you towards your goals and, most importantly, towards living a life that is true to yourself. The joy and fulfillment that come from being confident in who you are can open the doors to beautiful relationships with others and yourself—and to a truly extraordinary life!
What Is The Process Like?
Think of this process as a synergistic partnership where the coach and client create a customized program to help you unleash your full potential, personally and professionally.
Pursuing happiness and the quest for meaning are central to our human experience. My mission is to help people live authentically by overcoming inner and outer obstacles. Professionally trained in several coaching techniques, I am empowered to help people define and achieve goals related to relationships, health, achieving big dreams, starting or growing a business, or managing everyday struggles.
While guiding you to become your most authentic self, I provide structure, accountability, feedback, and encouragement so you can:
- Shift your perspective and find clarity.
- Create a compelling vision for the future.
- Identify meaningful goals.
- Generate momentum.
- Carry out a consistent action plan.
1. I use motivational interviewing techniques.
One technique I use is motivational interviewing, in which I ask open-ended questions intended to help elicit your own reasons for change. Instead of the doctor saying, “You need to lose weight,” I might ask, “How might your life be different if you lost the weight that you’ve been trying to lose?” The concept, which has been proven effective in many research studies, is that people who are changing for their own reasons, on their own terms, are far more likely to succeed when compared with someone telling them what to do—which is less motivating and is more likely to instill resistance to change.
2. You get to call the shots!
I don’t tell you what to do. I’m here to help guide you along the way. I am your life coach, so you get to call the shots! And so, you get to decide how you’d like to use your coach. Want help with short-term goals, long-term goals, or a specific area of your life that you want to focus on? You get to choose. Share with me what you want to accomplish, and I’ll help you develop a plan to make it happen.
3. Help with commitment and goals.
I help you stay on track by working with you to create a clear plan with milestones and timelines. Through regular communication, I support, encourage and hold you accountable when resistance causes you to veer off the path.
4. What actually is a belief? And why is it so hard to change?
What actually is a belief? And why is it so hard to change?
5. What does authentic self mean?
The concept is still debated today, but in 2000 two psychologists Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman, developed an Authenticity Inventory that comprises four key factors:
- Self-awareness: Knowledge of and trust in one’s own motives, emotions, preferences, and abilities.
- Unbiased processing: Clarity in evaluating your strengths and your weaknesses without denial or blame.
- Behavior: Acting in ways congruent with your own values and needs, even at the risk of criticism or rejection.
- Relational orientation: Close relationships, which inherently require openness and honesty.
Coaching Packages
Intensive Discovery Coaching Session
More Details
A powerful one-time discovery session of up to three hours is tailored to your needs, so we can help you: uncover specific challenges and personal or business obstacles; understand a difficult decision you have to make; or achieve clarity through all the constructs and chaos surrounding you.
$800
Getting Your Feet Wet:
6 sessions/3 months
More Details
This renewable coaching package includes two sessions per month for three months. Following an initial one- or two-hour conversation, we have five more private sessions of forty-five minutes each, with email support between live sessions.
$1200
26 Week Coaching Package
More Details
This renewable coaching package includes two sessions per month for six months. Following an initial one- or two-hour conversation, we have eleven more private sessions of forty-five minutes each, with email support between live sessions.
$2100
About Me
I’m Leonard Shostak, AKA Hardy Brooklyn, a fun-loving, successful serial entrepreneur who has bootstrapped several of my own businesses while still finding plenty of time for family, travel, live music, and nightlife.
My guiding principle is the vital importance of human creativity. Whether it’s music, visual art, a performance, an idea, or an invention—or something that doesn’t even exist yet!—I’m passionate about helping people tap into themselves.
As a serial entrepreneur, technology and business consultant, event producer, speaker and performer, soccer ref, Eagle Scout, an artists’ model—the list goes on—I’ve been helping people identify problems, find solutions, and change negative patterns in their lives and businesses my whole adult life.
People kept turning to me for help solving their dilemmas, and I realized that they trusted me to help them clear up emotional baggage and get down to essentials. But I never realized quite how much of an impact I’d had until I started telling friends I was working on getting certified as a life coach—and they surprised me with responses like:
“You’ve really been like a mentor to me.”
“I’ve seen how you help people get clarity regardless of your own personal opinions.“
“Am I going to have to start paying you? You’ve been like a coach to me.”
“You’ve opened my eyes to possibilities that I never knew existed; and been someone I can depend on to talk to without being judged.”
It turns out, all the time I spent being a technology and business consultant and advisor was great preparation for becoming a life coach. I’ve seen so many people and businesses throw money, technology, time, and all sorts of things at problems that could easily be solved instead by opening their eyes to what the actual problem is or finding the root of the behavior that’s causing it. As a life coach, I work with my clients to uncover those root problems and change to a more positive mindset. My coaching training includes Achology Certified Life Coach, Achology Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and Transformation Academy Happiness Life Coach (certificate in progress).
I’m also proficient in a wide range of communication skills, from Dale Carnegie and Sandler Sales Training, to Toastmasters, to improv with UCB East. I’ve presented and led workshops, webinars, trainings, and team-building activities for all kinds of organizations; performed in burlesque, improv, sketch comedy, the Moth, TV shows, and independent films; and produced and emceed at a variety of entertainment events in New York City.
I became a certified life coach because I believe in human creativity and the power of change. I specialize in helping people understand who they truly are, explore who they want to be, develop a strategy for how to get there, set needed boundaries, and begin living their authentic life.
If you want to explore who you are, who you want to become, and how to get there from here, please get in touch!
Testimonials
“The most significant change from working with Hardy happened in my classroom. Working with the queer community, the sex-positive community, and then my classroom community, I think the change with my kids has been the most significant, and seeing them respond to me differently has been fairly validating. So now when my queer babies come to me, and they’re talking about issues, you know, I just kind of channel my inner Hardy and I’m like, ‘So what would you want to see happen? What would you want to come from this?’ Suddenly these ideas are formed, and it’s really great, and the kids enjoy it. So that’s really nice. The kids are being able to open up and share and it’s going to be a big thing, just remembering to take a step back and really listen to them. Let them take up this space.”
—Coaching client T. B., NYC public school teacher
The best thing about coaching with Hardy is that he creates a safe and confidential space to open up. Within the coaching sessions, he accompanied me to identify, face and remove my limiting beliefs to achieve my goals, asking powerful questions and allowing me to discover the solutions. I highly recommend you contact Hardy. You will get the best support to create the life you wish for
– Coaching Client I.N. – Ecuador
“Space Man” (content to come)