A Teacher
Danielle LaPorte
Goals driven by core desired feelings
The transmission
Danielle LaPorte (b. May 25, 1969, Windsor, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian author, speaker, and entrepreneur best known for The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul (Sounds True, 2012; expanded edition 2014).
Without a university degree, she worked as a personal assistant and marketing support to self-help authors before becoming a publicist and then a writer in her own right; earlier she ran the think-tank-style website White Hot Truth and co-wrote a strategy book.
Her own bestsellers — The Fire Starter Sessions (2012), The Desire Map (2012), and White Hot Truth (2017) — sit at the intersection of entrepreneurship, self-development, and spirituality.
She was named to Oprah Winfrey’s “SuperSoul 100,” and The Desire Map grew into a yearly planner system, an app, and an international licensed-facilitator workshop program. LaPorte’s place in the Atlas is as a popularizer of feelings-first goal setting: the inversion of conventional achievement culture so that the desired feeling — not the external goal — becomes the organizing principle of planning and decision-making.
Where classic New Thought and law-of-attraction teachers emphasize feeling the wish fulfilled in order to attract an outcome, LaPorte secularizes and operationalizes the same intuition into a values-clarification and goal-design method: name how you most want to feel, then choose goals and daily actions because they generate those feelings.
She represents the wellness-and-coaching wing of contemporary manifestation — lighter on metaphysics, heavier on emotional honesty, journaling, and practical alignment — and is closely allied with the Marie Forleo / online-entrepreneur self-development milieu.
What they gave
Core Desired Feelings: Named the practice of distilling how you most want to feel across life domains into a short, personal compass of “core desired feelings.”
- Goals with Soul: Reframed goal-setting so the feeling is the target and the goal is the means — choosing to-dos because they generate the desired feelings.
- A feelings-first decision filter: Popularized checking choices against “will this make me feel the way I want to feel?”
- Mainstreaming feeling-led planning: Brought a manifestation-adjacent, feeling-centered method to a broad, largely secular, coaching/wellness audience via books, planners, and workshops.
In their words
Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have.
Awareness is realizing that our life could always be better. Growth is doing what it takes to make it better. When we choose the positive over the negative, liberation over repression, truth over illusion, we become real creators.
You can’t always choose what happens to you, but you can always choose how you feel about it.
Your life is your art. When you make tough choices in favor of your Soul, you’re making a masterpiece out of your existence.
Affirmations are like screaming that you’re okay in order to overcome this whisper that you’re not.
If your goals aren’t synced with the substance of your heart, then achieving them won’t matter much.
Self-doubt is so insidious that it not only renders us stuck in our lives, but it also actually weakens our ability to dream about what living unleashed would look like.
Steadily, we are listening more to the intelligence of our hearts—and acting on that wisdom. And that’s what spirituality is—an expression of Love.
Because here’s the sacred paradox: transformation begins with the radical acceptance of what is.
If I’ve got anything to say, it’s this: you are the authority on you.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: New Thought (feeling as the operative force); positive psychology and values-clarification currents; the broader self-development / coaching culture.
- Influenced: feelings-based goal-setting and “desire-mapping” practice across the online coaching, planner, and wellness worlds.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Fire Starter Sessions2012
- The Desire Map2012
- White Hot Truth2017