I grew up watching my father abuse my mother. What I learned from that was that love had to be earned and that pain was part of the deal. I carried that belief into one dysfunctional relationship after another until I found myself homeless, on food stamps, with my five-week-old daughter in my arms. That was my line in the sand. I wanted her to grow up seeing a different kind of love, and I knew that had to start with me. My degree is in biology, and I was on the pre-med track. So I approached love the way I knew how to approach a question I couldn’t answer. I started gathering data. I went on 100 first dates in 90 days. I opened my business in 2006, and over the course of this work, I’ve interviewed thousands of men, women, and couples. Today, Bonding Biology draws on 8,000 client profiles across 47 countries. A woman can tell me exactly what she wants in a husband and still feel the strongest chemistry with a man who gives her very little. I want to know why that man feels so compelling to her. We look at six layers, from her conscious beliefs and subconscious programming to the neurochemistry of attraction, epigenetic patterning, identity, and the six predictors I use to assess whether a relationship has the potential to last. By the time a woman comes to me, she can usually name the pattern. What she wants to understand is why she keeps choosing it, even when she can see it happening.

It started on YouTube. I was documenting my dating experiment because I wanted answers for myself and my daughter. I’d tell viewers what I thought would happen over the next 30 days, then come back and show them how it played out. Sometimes the man I’d been dating would come on camera and tell them himself how he felt. People started following along, and then women started asking me for advice. At first, I told them I wasn’t there yet. Then a woman who was being abused reached out and asked for help. Her story hit home because of what I’d grown up watching. I started helping her, and that’s how I got into coaching. Later, I left my job and went all in. My TikTok videos started going viral, and that brought a whole new audience to the work. Today, women find us through social media, the lives I do every week, the webinars I teach, and the ads we run. I give a lot away because I want a woman to get something she can use the first time she hears me. If she can watch a video and catch herself on her very next date doing something she’s been doing for ten years, I’ve already helped her. That’s how a lot of women come to trust me enough to work with us.

Building HerPocketCoach™ changed the direction of the business. My private clients invest a great deal to work closely with me, and I kept running into the same wall. There’s only one of me. I kept thinking about the moments between sessions, when a woman is staring at a text or trying to make sense of a date and could use some guidance right then. I built the app around the same methodology I use with my private clients so more women could get that support when they needed it. That decision made me a tech founder. The mistake that taught me the most was undercharging. I gave away a lot of my time and charged very little because I thought it would make it easier for people to say yes. Then a well-known public figure told me, to my face, that I was extremely talented and that she wouldn’t hire me because my prices were too low. I laughed so hard. Here I was trying to make it easier for her to say yes, and my price had talked her out of it. I raised my prices. I still say, “People who pay, pay attention.” In my work, what matters is what a woman does with that attention. The change happens when she takes what we talked about and makes a different choice in her actual life.

The women I work with are tired of swiping, and they’re tired of advice that could have been written for anybody. My clients are executives, physicians, attorneys, and founders. They make decisions with incomplete information all day. Then a woman goes on three dates with a man she really likes, he starts getting inconsistent, and she’s asking herself, Am I being discerning, or am I doing that thing I always do? That’s the question she wants help with. With HerPocketCoach™, she can video chat with Shay AI about what actually happened and use a dating scorecard to look at his behavior. Did he make a plan? Did he follow through? A man can plan a beautiful date and still leave you guessing for the next two weeks. Both are data. Sometimes the answer is “Yes, ma’am, pay attention to that.” Sometimes it’s “No, ma’am, give it more time.” Either way, I want her to understand why. I created the Being H.E.R.™ Circle because there’s something a woman gets from doing this work alongside other women. She can come to a live training, try what she learned that week, and come back and talk about what happened. A lot of the women I work with are used to being the person everybody calls when they need an answer. In the Circle, she gets to be the one with the question. She can say, “I know how to show up for everybody else. I’m still learning how to let somebody show up for me,” and hear another woman say, “Girl, me too.”

Get trained in the methods you plan to use, and document your work from day one. Write down what a client came in wanting to change, what you worked on together, and what she could actually see changing in her life. When somebody asks whether your work helps, you should be able to give her a specific answer. And charge for the time and care it takes to do the work well. I spent enough years apologizing with my prices. I’d ignore the pressure to be the cheapest and the pressure to repeat whatever dating advice is going viral that week. Everybody can tell a woman to raise her standards. Can you help her catch the exact moment she starts talking herself out of a standard she set when she was thinking clearly? That’s where the work is.