Member since April 2026
La Shell Wooten is a Bronx-born Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW, New York | CMSW, North Carolina), keynote speaker, and founder of Abandon Ordinary Wellness — a transformative coaching and leadership practice that has reached more than 200,000 people across the globe. Known as the Emotional Fitness Trainer, she specializes in authentic leadership, leadership recalibration, and clarity under pressure — the kind of live, responsive facilitation that makes every engagement unrepeatable. Whether she is on stage, behind the mic, or on the page, her work returns to the same essential question: Who are you when you stop performing the version of yourself you think the world wants? Her corporate clients include LaserAway, Global Kids, and organizations across the healthcare, education, and corporate sectors. Most recently seen on NBC and Peacock's Deal or No Deal Island, she is a Lecturer at Columbia University Graduate School of Social Work, the author of GPS Your Life: Get Where You're Meant To Be, the creator of the Abandon Ordinary Self-Discovery Deck & Journal, and host of the Abandon Ordinary podcast — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and abandonordinary.life.
The consensus among those who have seen her work is simple: catch her where you can, as often as you can.
Joy is my strategy and I'm not shy about using it. I genuinely believe that the most radical thing a person can do in a world that is constantly asking them to perform, produce, and push through is to feel good on purpose. So that's what I do; on stage, in a workshop, on a Tuesday night attempting salsa like nobody's watching. I show up to feel good and help other people remember they're allowed to also. It turns out that joy is contagious. I've been spreading it professionally for 25 years and I have no plans to stop.
I want to tell you about my grandmother Julie. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. Impeccably dressed. Hair always done. Home curated like a museum — every mirror placed with intention, every surface polished until it gleamed. She sewed her own curtains. She stuccoed her own walls. She cut into the wall under the stairs with her own two hands to install audio equipment exactly where she wanted it.
My grandmother understood something that I think a lot of us understand without ever saying out loud: how you are perceived is currency. It is protection. It is legacy. Especially as a Black woman navigating the world she was born into.
And she was masterful at it.
What I didn't fully see until much later was the cost. Behind all of that poise and beauty and intention was a woman who was known for her impression — and not always for herself.
When Alzheimer's came, it took her mind. But her body — the body she had disciplined and perfected for decades — refused to follow. She stayed here for thirteen years after her mind stopped cooperating. Strong. Enduring. Trapped.
I watched her spend the last years of her life unable to access a single thing she had spent a lifetime perfecting. And I have never stopped asking the question that moment planted in me:
What is the cost of being seen — if you are never truly known?
That question lives in every room I walk into. Because I have never met a leader who wasn't paying that cost in some way.
Abandon Ordinary Wellness didn't start with a business plan. It started with two things happening at the same time.
The job I had — work I genuinely enjoyed — stopped fitting me. I could feel it. Not dramatically, not with a crisis or a breakdown, just a quiet but persistent knowing that I had grown past the container I was in.
At the same time, clients whose time with the agency had ended started reaching out. Intensely. Not to say thank you and move on — but to ask how they could continue working with me. Specifically me. Outside of the agency. Outside of the structure. Just me.
I couldn't ignore both of those things happening simultaneously.
So I made a decision that changed everything. I gave myself permission to see my life as I actually wanted it to look — while I was still in the life I already had. I didn't wait until I left. I didn't wait until it was safe or certain or fully formed. I just let myself see it.
And that shift in how I was seeing things shifted everything around me. Opportunities I could never have thought up on my own started appearing. Doors I didn't knock on opened. People showed up exactly when they needed to.
That's actually what I teach. And it's also how I got here.
GPS Your Life: Get Where You're Meant to Be is a pocket-sized powerhouse for overthinkers who need a break, dreamers who refuse to be lost, and go-getters who just need to chill and trust the process. Warm, witty, and grounded, it helps you stop wait
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Abandon Ordinary is an honest chat about what's got to go and how much joy we think we can handle in our pursuit of extraordinary living.
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The Abandon Ordinary Self Discovery Deck & Journal is your 365-day daily guide to manifesting health, wealth, abundance, and all that you truly desire. This experience helps you figure who really are right now, while putting yourself first.
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STUCK to WHAT is the 30-day gift of disconnecting from all the experiences, thoughts, and habits that stand between where you are and where you want to be in your life, career and relationships.
Get StartedI want to tell you about my grandmother Julie. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. Impeccably dressed. Hair always done. Home curated like a museum — every mirror placed with intention, every surface polished until it gleamed. She sewed her own curtains. She stuccoed her own walls. She cut into the wall under the stairs with her own two hands to install audio equipment exactly where she wanted it.
My grandmother understood something that I think a lot of us understand without ever saying out loud: how you are perceived is currency. It is protection. It is legacy. Especially as a Black woman navigating the world she was born into.
And she was masterful at it.
What I didn't fully see until much later was the cost. Behind all of that poise and beauty and intention was a woman who was known for her impression — and not always for herself.
When Alzheimer's came, it took her mind. But her body — the body she had disciplined and perfected for decades — refused to follow. She stayed here for thirteen years after her mind stopped cooperating. Strong. Enduring. Trapped.
I watched her spend the last years of her life unable to access a single thing she had spent a lifetime perfecting. And I have never stopped asking the question that moment planted in me:
What is the cost of being seen — if you are never truly known?
That question lives in every room I walk into. Because I have never met a leader who wasn't paying that cost in some way.
Abandon Ordinary Wellness didn't start with a business plan. It started with two things happening at the same time.
The job I had — work I genuinely enjoyed — stopped fitting me. I could feel it. Not dramatically, not with a crisis or a breakdown, just a quiet but persistent knowing that I had grown past the container I was in.
At the same time, clients whose time with the agency had ended started reaching out. Intensely. Not to say thank you and move on — but to ask how they could continue working with me. Specifically me. Outside of the agency. Outside of the structure. Just me.
I couldn't ignore both of those things happening simultaneously.
So I made a decision that changed everything. I gave myself permission to see my life as I actually wanted it to look — while I was still in the life I already had. I didn't wait until I left. I didn't wait until it was safe or certain or fully formed. I just let myself see it.
And that shift in how I was seeing things shifted everything around me. Opportunities I could never have thought up on my own started appearing. Doors I didn't knock on opened. People showed up exactly when they needed to.
That's actually what I teach. And it's also how I got here.