Shifting Gears: Wendi Moore

Wendi Moore is the creator of Life’s Little Cheat Sheets, a series of books, writings, and programs that promote personal development. Her services include one-on-one intuition coaching, professional speaking engagements, and business consulting on female-friendly marketing. The author of Open Up and Fly, Shifting Gears, and Everyday Leadership, Moore also runs a blog from her website at www.wendimoore.com.

We meet at a Caribou Coffee near Moore’s Burnsville home. Dressed for the scorching Minnesota summer in a white tank top and shorts, Moore gives off an impression of warmth and approachability. She is petite, friendly, and responsive to the environment around her.

As she settles in for our interview with a bottle of water, I ask her how she had gotten into her line of work in the first place. She says, “this may sound strange, but the work found me. It’s not something I would have even thought of doing when I was in college.”

Developing Intuition
The course of events that triggered her career began in 1994, during Moore’s first pregnancy. “I had never been pregnant before,” she says, “I didn’t know how you’re supposed to feel when you’re pregnant, but I felt a communication with the soul of the child. It would appear sometimes, like if I lay down for a nap. There was a connection.”

“Then I had a miscarriage and I wanted to know what happened to that soul. That’s when I started really thinking that we are more than we appear to be, more than just our bodies. I wanted to know what happens to us when we die.” Coming from a religious background, Moore turned first to traditional religion, but was dissatisfied with the answers given her. “I’m not the type that just takes answers from people.”

Moore didn’t want someone to “hand the universe down” to her. “Don’t get me wrong - I have total respect for people and their belief systems,” she says, “but I needed to find my own answers.”

Since “religion wasn’t doing it” for her, Moore began taking intuition classes. She studied for two years with a teacher who taught her about developing her intuitive senses. Over time, more and more people started seeking Moore out for her insights until finally she was told, “You have to get out there with this.”

Asked to define the term, she says, “Intuition is not a gut feeling. It’s a knowing. It’s when there is no way you can know something, but you still know it’s true.”

As an example, Moore tells me about a reaction she had while driving to Ham Lake last year to visit a friend. “I think I was on 65, somewhere in Blaine – I’m not sure, I’m terrible with directions. There’s this restaurant I love called the Camille Sidewalk Café. The only one I know about is the one in Hopkins, but as I’m driving I start to slow down because I know that there’s a Camille Sidewalk Café over there somewhere. My kids are like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I don’t see anything, so I keep driving. Some time later, I’m going to visit that same woman in Ham Lake and I’m driving by the same place and I get that sense of knowing again. I look over and there’s a sign for the Camille Sidewalk Café.”

“Intuition is something that is developed over time, and you need to practice every day, ” says Moore, who holds her coaching clients to a high standard. After setting their own goals, clients have to follow a rigorous schedule or she will discontinue their sessions. She tells them, “You set your own goals and I will hold you to them.”

Practicing the intuitive process involves cultivating an awareness of one’s environment and matching intuitive predictions against defined outcomes. To start off, Moore says, “I may have clients pick something that they don’t care a lot about. At election time, maybe it’s something like the senate race in Fargo, something a Minnesotan might not be paying any attention to. Who does your intuition tell you will win?”

Moore has also seen coaches give their clients a covered book to hold and, without letting them open the book, have them write down their impressions about the content of that book. “Ninety percent of the time,” says Moore, “they’re right.”

Goals vary according to client and it’s not uncommon for Moore to work with individual clients for a year or more. One client, for example, came to Moore with the objective of being able to have a foot planted in two very different worlds: the earthly world, where the five sense dominate, and the energetic world, where intuition plays a role. Being in that kind of space, says Moore, “alleviates a lot of stress. You can see problems coming and ask yourself, ‘How can I get this to be not such a big deal?’”

An Energetic World
When asked to clarify what she means by energy, Moore drops her voice slightly and nods her head toward the line of people forming at the Caribou register. “Look at that line of people over there. I see them as a blob of energy. Each person has their own energy, and when one of them moves, everyone else in line shifts as well.” As she speaks, a transaction is completed at the register and an elbow-shaped kink in the line, hinged by a mother-daughter pair to one side and a woman in shorts on the other, begins to straighten itself in short bursts of movement.

“If you’re in a room by yourself with your back to the door, you can tell when someone walks into the room, even if you don’t see or hear them,” Moore says, “Just being around other people’s energy can make you feel happy or tense.”

A number of clients come to Moore complaining of energy-related problems. “Some of them want me to do something about the negative energy of a spouse or co-worker, but I tell them it’s about learning how to adjust their own energy in order to accommodate so that it won’t affect them in a negative way.”

In some cases, leaving a negative environment might be the wisest choice. Moore tells me that at one point, she had to switch physicians because of the “horrible energy” in the office. For whatever reason, a negative energy had infected the place and, as a consequence, the staff was rude and made mistakes all the time. Many of her clients are making the decision to leave corporate world for those same reasons and come to her asking, “Can you help me work with my energy?”

For those who don’t have the option of leaving, Moore helps them to shift their own energies through a combined process of meditation and visualization. She teaches them how to “expand their energy until it connects with all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor, and how to block other peoples’ energy from coming in.”

“A lot of times, sensitive people will get sick at a place like the Mall of America because of all the bad energy of people around them. I used to come home from there with terrible migraines. Now I teach people how to be around that energy without taking on other peoples’ feelings. For example, if someone is walking too close, you can shoot energy out so that nothing comes in. Or you can contract your energy and shield yourself that way.”

Self-talk is also an important component of Moore’s work. “You get what you tell yourself,” she says, “it’s about believing you can reach that goal.”

Moore’s hopes for the approaching autumn include putting together a class that will integrate self-talk and visualization methods. Her vision is that it will be like “an acting class, where [students] would play their future selves. The more you play your part, the more you become that. It’s a chance to experience that life for a while and see if it’s right for you. Students will figure out exactly what they want and come to a party as the person they want to be. They’ll ask each other questions about how they got there and where they are going from here.”

Shifting Gears
At the core of Moore’s business right now, however, are her professional speaking engagements. She has been booked all over the country for talks addressing various aspects of personal development. Though she has sometimes been called a “motivational speaker,” it is a term she balks at, saying, “You can’t motivate someone to do something. They have to motivate themselves.”

While related, Moore’s talks cover a range tailored to the specific needs of her audience. Shifting Gears is aimed at helping participants to unblock and redirect their own energies when an obstacle gets in the way. Everyday Leadership addresses the need to take responsibility for one’s own life and emphasizes a model of leadership that does not emphasize power, but rather, empowers others. These first two are more popular with her corporate clientele, while Discovering Your Magical Mindspace, is more frequently requested by women’s groups. Concerned with helping people to look more deeply into themselves and their surroundings, the talk encourages participants to look at things from a different perspective.

Moore’s target audience is female, but she is sometimes surprised to find a number of men showing up for her talks as well. “Oddly enough,” she says, “they’re usually either in their twenties or forties. Not so many in their thirties.” Many of her corporate marketing clients come from male-dominated organizations that are interested in diversifying their own client base, but need assistance in attracting women to their services or products.

Overall, Moore attributes the increasing level of male participation at her events as a positive consequence of breaking out of a 50’s conservative religious culture, where men were under pressure to be, well, manly: conflict-oriented, emotionally repressed, and short on sensitivity. “Parents are raising their children – sons and daughters - to be more open to this kind of thing. As we’re evolving, we want our children to see this. We are making the choice of raising them to be intuitive.”

Although Moore is raising her own daughter (10) and son (8) to be in tune with their surroundings, she’s not interested in expanding her practice to include working with children. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says, “I think kids are great, but I’m very careful not to interfere with the belief systems their parents are bringing them up in. Even at home. If my daughter is having a new friend over and they’re planning on goofing around with a Ouija Board, I’ll make sure to ask her parents beforehand if that’s OK with them.”

Moore studied psychology in college back in her home state of Illinois, but says that learning from experience has been priceless. Her work – influenced heavily by Taoism, she says - is for people who are “tired of being handed the answers. It’s about teaching people to look at things from a new perspective.” She tells me, “In some ways, it’s a lot like what you do – just sitting down to talk like this. It’s about listening.”

Before parting ways, we head out to the parking lot where Moore pulls a copy of her book Shifting Gears out of the trunk and hands it to me. As I climb into my own car, I flip open the cover and read the passage on the first page:

All of the fighting and the wars and the problems in this world could easily be resolved if everyone realized that it’s all based on personal belief systems. Once we shift our belief systems, all of the fighting and the wars and the problems associated with those belief systems go away because it’s not important to us anymore. – Wendi Moore

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Photos courtesy of www.wendimoore.com