A few days ago, I was sitting across from a dear friend in a quiet corner of our favorite art museum. That afternoon, she was reflecting on how far she had come, after recently celebrating two years in business. She admitted she was doing better than she ever thought she would. Then, unexpectedly, she stood up, walked around the table, and hugged me.
“How are you always so uplifting?” she demanded, smiling at me. “I realized recently that every time we get together, I go home feeling bright and happy.”
I laughed and hugged her back. I told her how much I cherished our friendship. What I didn’t say out loud was this:
I wasn’t surprised.
There was a time in my life when my mother worried about me because I could barely speak to strangers long enough to order pizza.
I was introverted to the point of social paralysis. Social interactions felt overwhelming. My voice felt small.
The idea that I would one day speak confidently on stages—or be featured on ABC, Fox, or NY Weekly for my work as a women’s rights advocate—would have made 20-year-old Sarah laugh.
The shift didn’t happen because I read a few confidence books or forced myself to “fake it until I made it.” It happened because I committed to a structured system of personal development that addressed something deeper than skill.
It started with the book Dianetics, where I learned the root cause underneath all my shyness and inability to think positively about life. It addressed the ways the past can quietly sit in the background of our minds, influencing our emotions, how we react under pressure, and our relationships, without us even realizing it.
For many high-performing women, success is not the issue. Capability is not the issue. Strategy is not the issue. The real question is subtler: how much of your attention is anchored in old experiences? How often are you reacting—even slightly—from something unresolved? And what would change if that mental baggage simply wasn’t there anymore?
The book Dianetics answered all those questions for me.
In fact, for many years, simply understanding the preventative mental wellness techniques from that book felt sufficient. Learning how the mind stores and replays painful experiences gave me language for things I had felt but couldn’t previously articulate. It gave me tools to reduce my mental garbage.
But after my divorce, I realized I needed to dig deeper into myself.
I wanted to come out of my shell. Build deep friendships. Understand why sometimes clients didn’t respond to my sales pitch the way I thought they would. Why certain interactions left me energized and others left me analyzing every word I had said.
I realized all those things boiled down to failures of communication… and that’s when I did my first professional Scientology communication course.
It changed everything.
What surprised me most was that it wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t lectures about “confidence” or abstract frameworks about influence. The course was approximately 80 percent drilling. Repetition. Practice. Correction. Refinement of every aspect of my communication, until what I thought I was expressing was truly being received and accepted at the other end.
We drilled presence under pressure: learning to sit comfortably across from another person without fidgeting, performing, or mentally rehearsing what to say next.
We drilled listening without internal noise: not waiting for your turn to speak, not silently judging, not planning a rebuttal, but actually hearing.
We drilled responding intentionally instead of reactively: choosing words with clarity rather than letting tone or emotion leak out unconsciously.
(That one was HUGE for me after coming out of a divorce that left me devastated)
People from my past started to comment that they hardly recognized me. I hadn’t changed my appearance. I hadn’t rebranded. I hadn’t reinvented myself. I had simply learned how to make steady eye contact without awkwardness. How to read body language. How to build rapport even when someone expressed an opinion I didn’t fully agree with.
At the end of the course, I was asked to sign an attestation stating that I felt capable of handling any social situation through communication alone. And for the first time, that didn’t feel like bravado. It felt calm. Easy.
I was amazed to realize it felt completely true.
And yet, even with this new stability in how I communicated, something deeper was still unresolved.
Externally, I was more confident. More composed. More capable in rooms that once intimidated me. I built a $6-figure business. Expanded my circle of friendship. Founded a charitable organization and began to accomplish my mission of protecting women’s rights around the world at ever greater levels. I was showing up differently in the world.
But internally, I still had moments I couldn’t seem to stay fully present.
There were stretches of depression that didn’t make logical sense. Flickers of anxiety that would rise without invitation. Old arguments that replayed long after they were over. And beneath all of it, grief—my divorce, the loss of my little sister to cancer a decade earlier—that still had the power to pull my attention backward without warning.
I began to see the distinction clearly: communication training had strengthened my ability to interact with the world around me. But I still needed to address what was happening within me.
That realization led me back to the teachings of Dianetics: this time not just as a reader, but as someone ready to apply it fully.
I made the decision to pursue the State of Clear.
I wasn’t falling apart. My life was infinitely better than it had been before I began to apply Scientology to my life. But I was tired of carrying mental and emotional residue that no longer served me.
The premise was simple, but profound: if the reactive mind (the part that stores painful experiences and triggers emotional responses) could be reduced, then clarity, stability, and presence would naturally increase.
I wasn’t looking to become someone new.
I was looking to remove what was interfering with who I already was.
I walked into my local Church and told my spiritual counselor, David, that I was ready. Together, using a series of standardized questions outlined in in the Scientology scriptures, we revisited moments that still held emotional charge for me—not to relive them, but to reduce their grip. Each session stripped away a little more of the automatic reactivity that had quietly shaped my responses for years.
The goal wasn’t to suppress my emotions. It was to experience them fully, understand their source, and finally no longer be controlled by those experiences.
Gradually, something shifted.
The depression that I once felt powerless to control began to lift. The anxiety that would spike without clear cause quieted. Memories that used to pull my attention backward lost their force. I could think about my sister with love and without shedding a single tear. Only happiness and gratitude at the impact she’s had on my life remained.
I could finally reflect on my divorce without feeling defined by it.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed since achieving the State of Clear is that I am no longer forcing myself to be positive.
I’m no longer fighting ghosts of who I used to be.
As attention freed up from the past, it naturally settled in the present. And from there, I could move toward the future.
That is ultimately what the State of Clear represented for me: not perfection, not constant happiness, but the absence of compulsive reactivity. The ability to choose how I respond to life instead of reflexively reacting to it.
So this week, when my friend—a woman who owns her own law firm, manages four associates, wins cases in court, hosts retreats, and was recently invited to speak on stage in Dubai—hugged me and asked how I am always so uplifting, the answer felt simple.
I am a Scientologist.
And by definition, that means I have invested time and discipline into examining my own mind. I have done the structured work required to reduce the emotional residue of my past. I have trained myself to communicate clearly. I have taken responsibility for my reactions rather than blaming circumstances or other people.
The result is a presence that didn’t happen by accident.
It is the ability to sit across from another human being without bringing yesterday’s pain into today’s conversation.
If someone leaves a meeting with me feeling brighter, it isn’t because I was born naturally optimistic. It’s because I am there. Fully there. Not split between old memories or quietly bracing for something that already happened.
And that is why her question didn’t surprise me at all.
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