Soap Alum Sonia Satra Previews Her New Book (EXCLUSIVE)
Soap fans remember Sonia Satra from her roles as Lucy Cooper Spaulding on GUIDING LIGHT or Barbara Graham on ONE LIFE TO LIVE. But the actress is also a life coach and is about to release her very first book, What if It Were Easy: Using Movement & Mindset to Create Success in Life, Love, and Business!
“It definitely did happen over time,” Satra admitted to Soaps In Depth of her journey from actress to life coach. “When I first got out to Hollywood to become a star as every actress dreams, I went out there with a pretty positive attitude. But then I realized, you get rejected a lot in that industry. And I also seemed to notice that it wasn’t always the very best actor but it was the person who had the strongest mindset that could keep picking themselves up off the floor and keep going that seemed to be the ones that were working.”
So she began studying various methods of self-help and was even working with Tony Robbins’ head coach, Joseph McLendon III, shortly before she landed her role on GL. Then, many years later, Satra found herself considering a career change. “I thought, I’ve become the person that people come to when they need help just because I’ve studied this stuff so much for myself. Maybe I should take this time and get certified and actually learn how to do this. I really loved being able to help people. So I decided to step away a little bit from the acting and really focus on the coaching and speaking. And now I’ve kind of circled back. I do a little of both. But that is my primary focus.”
The inspiration for her book came after her husband lost his job and she found herself trying to coach him through his frustration. “I’m trying to ask him all these positive questions and reframing and none of it was really working,” Satra confessed. “He sort of had this obsession, too, that if he earned a million dollars, that we’d be okay. And he’s like, ‘It’s impossible. I don’t know how to do it.’ It was just like, sort of out of desperation at that point, I go, ‘Well, what if it were easy?’
“At first, he was just frustrated, like, ‘You know it’s not easy. You’ve been in this industry,’” she continued. “I’m like, ‘But yeah, what if it were? What would you do?’ And all of a sudden, he just started laughing and he was like, “I don’t know. I guess if it were easy, I would start my own company.’ And that was a different idea than any of the ones that we’d been throwing around from this place of freakout. And so he did! The first company was Idea Factory, and by the end of the year, he’d made one million dollars. So it really works!”
Having already created the revolutionary Moticise process that combines cardio exercise with mindset tools like visualization, goal-setting, and affirmation, Satra realized this was another way to open up the mind and help achieve positive results. “I think what it does is it really starts to open up your heart and opens up the floodgates to what would you do?” she mused. “What is possible for you? What is it that’s inside that’s yearning to come out?”
And when a friend suggested that Satra use some of her old soap opera clips in her social media to help promote her work as a speaker and coach, she was surprised to discover that it all sort of came together. “I started to go back and look at some of them and it was amazing!” she marveled with a laugh. “I was like, oh my God, Lucy really was a little life coach! I had no idea!”
What if It Were Easy will release on Tuesday, Oct. 17, but you can preorder the book right now at Barnes & Noble.
