In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez is joined by Annie Lalla, founder of Heartcoach.com and an expert in relationships, emotional intelligence, and transformational experiences. Annie is renowned for her ability to design events that leave attendees with a profound sense of self-worth, empowerment, and connection. With a unique blend of creativity and deep emotional insight, she has facilitated numerous successful events, including her signature program, The Love Dojo, and high-end masterminds for world-class couples.

Annie shares her expertise on the art of designing transformational event experiences. She reveals how focusing on the feelings attendees leave with—whether joy, empowerment, or inspiration—should guide every aspect of an event's design. By reverse-engineering the emotional outcomes she desires for her attendees, Annie crafts events that resonate on a deeply personal level and create lasting impacts. Her insights will inspire event leaders to move beyond logistics and focus on emotional connections.

Another highlight of the episode is Annie's deep dive into conflict resolution in event collaboration. Drawing from her expertise as a relationship coach, she shares strategies for navigating differences in values and priorities when working with partners or teams. Annie emphasizes that conflicts, when resolved effectively, can lead to stronger collaborations and more dynamic event outcomes. Her practical advice is invaluable for anyone striving to maintain harmony and productivity in high-stakes environments.

Finally, Annie discusses the importance of optimizing for aliveness in events. She explains how creating spaces that allow attendees to feel a full spectrum of emotions—joy, vulnerability, and even discomfort—can lead to profound transformation. By fostering an atmosphere where participants feel seen, heard, and appreciated, event leaders can ensure their events are not only memorable but also deeply meaningful.

This episode is a must-listen for event leaders looking to elevate their events from ordinary to extraordinary. Join Rudy and Annie as they unpack the secrets to crafting events that inspire, transform, and delight. Tune in now to gain actionable insights that will revolutionize your approach to event planning.

Want to connect with Annie?

The Art of Fighting Program: 

www.annielalla.com/courses/art-of-fighting 

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Website: https://www.annielalla.com/

Website: HeartCoach.com

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Facebook Coaching Page: https://www.facebook.com/annielallacoaching/

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/annielalla

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-lalla-a3a9a011

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to today's show. We have a special guest with us, Ms. Annie Lalla. Welcome, Annie.

Hello, we're excited to be here.

Excited to have you. In the green room we were chatting and you shared with me that your number one value is fun and having a good time. I'm committed that we have some fun on our interview today with our podcast and I know you're gonna bring it.

Let's do it.

For our guests who are maybe tuning in to Annie for the first time, I wanna share just a little brief bio on her. She's a cutting-edge relationship coach who matches the complexities of romance and upgrades emotional skills, specializing in love, sex, and conflict resolution. Annie's created a suite of practical tools that resolve unconscious relationship patterns, attachment wounds, and recurring conflict. She helps clients create and cultivate relational esteem and develop collaboration skills that go beyond power struggles, shame, or blame. Annie is a fierce stand for creating intimate relationships and that last lifetime. She believes in true love. She believes that true love is possible.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Annie, thank you for being with us. A little background just between you and I for our audience is, I believe we met several years ago, I think three or four years ago. Oh, I remember now. It was in Los Angeles at the virtual coach event just before the doors closed down. I remember you and Eben were hosting your event. Then I got to afterwards meet you in like a side event that you were hosting on relationship stuff. It was really cool to get to see your genius and your brilliance in relationship stuff completely separate from Eben. I was like, wow, you're your own complete genius.

And it was - Definitely, my own genius.

Yes.

I'm smarter than him. He will even say it.

I've also been part of your mastermind group as well for a couple of years. So we've gotten to know each other there and also got to hang at Burning Man last year, which is super fun.

Yes! So let's take it away. I'm open to any question you have to ask. I have to say that I probably relate to events in a different way being a woman, being someone who's got a very specific visual aesthetic. So I'm willing to bring all my feminine intuitive insights to how events can be made even more extraordinary.

Absolutely. So again, for our audience here, Annie has co-hosted or facilitated many, many events in the relationship and personal development space. She has facilitated her own events called The Love Dojo along with Eben Pagan. Then she has her own high-end masterminds that she runs for world-class couples. In fact, I think Annie, you mentioned that you rented like The Gatsby Mansion in Austin, Texas. How cool is that? So yeah, I'm very curious to jump into this. Let's start off with a kind of a big picture question. You and I were talking in the green room, what's the most important thing when it comes to an event? You share with me that it's the feeling that you leave people with. Let's start, I feel like that's a big point that you're brilliant at.

It's not just an event, but any experience design that I'm creating for another human being, whether it's a coaching call or a VIP day or a four-day event, I start by thinking, what do I want that person to feel in their body about themselves, about their life when they leave the event? I make, I conjure that in my mind. I go, what would be my dream emotional experience that they're leaving with? Then I make that the fixed point and then I reverse engineer, what would have to transpire and take place at the entire event to lead up to that? So that becomes the North Star that I'm working towards and just getting clarity on that starts governing and influencing all of the steps and all the curriculum and all the narrative arc that we're taking the people at the event through as a journey. So the destination for a lot of people is insights or achievements or accomplishments or epiphanies. For me, it's a feeling and as a woman, I actually think that all of reality is run by feelings. Not everyone agrees with me, but when someone buys a house, they don't buy it because of the specifications because it has this swimming pool or this many bedrooms. They come into the house and they get a feeling and they're like, hmm, this is my house. I could live in this house. Then their brain makes up reasons for why this is a great house. It backdates the reasons in their psyche so that they think that the feeling is a result of the reasons. But actually the feeling comes first and the reasons come after. But your consciousness backdates it.

So we always think that the reasons are why we're feeling something, but I don't fall for that at all. So I already know that all of human reality is run by feelings. So I am trying to take people on a choreographed emotional journey to places where they haven't mapped before and out through the other end. My job in any interaction with a client, a student, or someone in my seminar is that they leave having fallen more in love with themself, more in love with their life. That's what I'm always trying to do when I interact with someone. So that's a kind of overarching guiding principle.

All human reality is actually led by feelings and we rationalize after the fact.

I mean, Descartes said Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am. If he had been married to a bad-a** B****, she would have said, I feel therefore I am. They'd have both been right because full consciousness is an open mind and an open heart and unless you have both open at the same time, you're only getting half a consciousness. So I really am standing for doing affirmative action for the underrepresented aspect of feeling-driven experiences in our culture. I love accomplishments and I love achievements, but why are we doing them? We're doing them so we have a feeling. So if you go directly for the feeling, you can let go of how you achieve the accomplishments. Because sometimes there's various ways to arrive at the sense of fulfillment. But if you're going for an accomplishment, you could have gotten that feeling in an easier way. So I'm orienting to the actual end game, which is a particular feeling that all humans are chasing, which is usually some kind of enoughness, fulfillment, contribution, like your life mattered.

Being enough, being a contribution, like you actually matter. It's interesting you say that because typically event leaders or people in the industry, they think about, okay, how do I get people to, what I do an event about, how do I get people to my event? How do I keep people engaged in the event? How do I get people to continue their journey with me beyond the event? Those are like the top of mind things for most people, but underlying all of it is feeling. What's the feeling that I'm leaving them with? All the way through the journey.

And not just the feeling, but the feeling that they have about themselves. It's not just the feeling. So I teach singles who are trying to find their soulmate. One of the things I'm always saying is, people don't fall in love with another person. They fall in love with who they feel like around you. They fall in love with who they get to be around you. So around you and your events, how do the people attending feel about themselves? You don't want them to think you're interesting. You want them to think they're interesting.That's an intuitive, counterintuitive aspect of whether you're dating someone, or you're calling someone into your event experience. You want them to leave the experience going, I love who I am after that because that's priceless. It's great if they love you. But say you go to a Tony Robbins event. If you go to a Tony Robbins event, at the end you're just like, oh my God, I'm in devotion to Tony Robbins versus, oh, I'm in devotion to my dreams, my new reinvented sense of self, my values, my designer values. Great leaders help people fall in love with themselves and their life. so that's what we're trying to do at the event.

Help people fall in love with themselves and their lives. Beautiful. Maybe if we talk about one of your events that you've done fairly recently, and maybe share with us a little bit about that event and what that end feeling was and how you engineered that. I feel like that would be really interesting to hear.

So my last event that I ran totally solo was a group of about 12 women in my mastermind. I teach a relationship school that goes for three months. Then at the end of that, if they want to go deeper and become part of an inner circle sisterhood, where I curate and interview every single person and I limit it to 12. These 12 women now go with me for six months into a deep dive, a container and the curriculum. I don't make up the curriculum. The curriculum is literally every single woman getting to her next level of development personally in her relationship world and professionally. No one escapes, like everyone's going up to the next level as a group. Then we have this live retreat. So I rented this beautiful luxury mansion with a giant swimming pool and huge sprawling spaces. What I wanted is for my women, I wanted them to feel like royalty. I wanted them to feel like queens. Because one of the things I'm working on with my female students is their self-esteem, their inner dignity, their worthiness. So I had these beautiful gift bags for them and I brought, I had catered gluten-free, dairy-free, all the best food I could have catered. I had two people there making sure the food was displayed. I had hundreds of dollars of flowers and bouquets everywhere. Each room had its own little bouquet and notes. I just wanted people at the experience to have the feeling like, oh, someone knows who I am and they care about me and my name's on this letter and things that they needed, special teas or special coffees or whatever, was all interviewed in a survey ahead of time so that they were fully nourished and they could fully relax into the space.

So I did a lot of research upstream to make sure they were maximally comfortable, but not just comfortable. I actually wanted them to be a little uncomfortable in the direction of being treated with more reverence than they've ever been treated before. So I had a photographer come and do a photo shoot for all of the women. We did curriculum, we did a whole bunch of programming where we shared our visions and we did little workshops, but I made sure that we had a sense of fun and play and glamor. So we had the photo shoot lady come and she took each person for 15 minutes and I decked out all my ladies, like I literally brought my entire wardrobe, like boots and kimonos and crowns and fancy earrings. I just brought them all into the giant bathroom and I, let's get dressed together, girls. We had the music playing and we were just dancing up a storm and doing each other's makeup and everybody went out for their photo shoot and we're just like cheering them on. Strut it girl, you go. I wanted them to have these beautiful pictures of them feeling like a queen. So that's one example. I love dress up. I didn't get any Barbies or dolls when I was a kid because my dad, bless his heart, never wanted me to grow up to be a domesticated Indian woman. So I never learned to cook and I never had dolls. So now I like to dress people. At Burning Man, I like to dress people up and I brought all my most sparkly, fancy, glamorous stuff and would dress up these women every evening and then we just have a dance party. They've just never worn, I mean, I literally have a closet full of sparkle kimonos like that.

I just collect s*** that shines and I don't know what to do with them. Like I can only wear them at Burning Man and I only get invited to fancy parties once in a while. So I just like literally brought everything and, honestly, they were so excited. They're like, can I wear these earrings? Can I wear this diamond necklace? I'm like, girl, put it on. I wanted each person to just feel like the most beautiful she's ever felt. Like what would a queen wear? So we not only just did a dance party but I had them make two lines and each woman had to strut, like dance down the line in her most glamorous sashay and we had it all on film so they could see them. But basically it was fun, dance, play, decoration. But what I was all orienting around was this feeling of confidence, inner worthiness, dignity, and I'm a queen. I deserve an extraordinary king as a partner and I deserve to create a business and an enterprise that serves my kingdom. That's what I was trying to build, is their self-esteem. So the whole thing was oriented to that. That's an example.

Wow, that's a great example, thank you for that. The line jumped out, I collect sparkly s*** that shines. Or something like that. I was like, that's perfect.

I just like sparkles.

Secret to your next event, lots of sparkles.

Yes, but you would be so surprised. These are grown women. These are like 60 year old women, 40 year old women and they would wear, if I said this looks great on you they would just put it on. But this is stuff they would never wear normally. So we did a lot of event facilitation and let's do an exercise. But honestly, I think what these women are gonna take away is the feeling of dancing around like a teenager in really cool glamorous clothes and having the time of their life and feeling sexy. That imprint is never gonna leave their mind. They fell in love with their bodies and themselves and their femininity. One of the ladies told me, you know what's interesting is that workshops that are just women, there's always some drama. There's always some catty something. They were like, there was no drama and that's because I curated every single person in that group to be hyper emotionally attuned, sophisticated, only the kind of women I'd wanna be in a sisterhood with. So we had a drama free weekend where everyone was just cheering for each other and supportive of each other. Some of the women led their own workshops for all of us because they had different modalities that they teach and just getting to be in the genius of each other. The genius of everybody was allowed to come out and I think people fall in love with themselves when they get to be seen, heard and acknowledged for their own unique gifts. So if your event can find opportunities for each person to feel seen, heard and loved for their own unique gifts, they're gonna leave that going. That was amazing.

Wow, thank you for sharing that. I wanna come to your event now. I won't dress up and all that.

I will dress you. But you know, a lot of people want people to learn things at their events. I definitely am heavy as a teacher. I like didactic models and downloads. But honestly, I don't know if that's what people remember. I don't know if I remember what I learned at all those seminars, but I remember how I felt. I remember they were fun. So I just really think ensuring that the vibe is intentionally crafted to produce those feelings, the lighting, the food, the decorations. As I mentioned earlier, my husband is like no nonsense practical. I'm gonna wear my blue shirt and my black pants and the stage will be clear so that only the speaker can be seen. I'm like, no, I wanna decorate it with flowers. I want lights. I want it to be like a performance. Like Cirque Du Soleil with some smart people saying some cool s***. I just want maximal delight. That's what I want. So I don't know how other people do events, but delight is a very high value of mine. I like to optimize for delight, mine and other people.

A couple of things jumped out to me as you were sharing. I think our audience can really relate to this idea of no drama. I know events can be, they can be inadvertently, drama dramatic, whether it's stress with the team that's hosting the event or with the participants, it can happen. So your point of curating, interviewing, curating things specifically so that there would not be drama, like you optimize for the intention, no drama. I think that that goes a long way because all it takes is one dramatic person to ruin the vibe for an entire room. So that was one of my takeaways as well.

That was conscious. I talked to my team who was working with me and I made sure they felt loved up. I made sure that they knew that what we're doing here guys is we want every woman here to leave feeling like she's royalty. So once everyone's in the same schema and theme, then we're on the same team. So it also doesn't hurt that I'm a conflict resolution specialty. So as soon as I might see anything going, I quickly dance it through. But honestly, I think an event takes on the transmissive quality of the leader of the event, just like companies take on the character of their leader. So the visionary comes from that the person leading the event is being governed by is gonna filter through the event. At an event, we're trying to do two things. We're trying to create a transformational experience that changes their life forever in a lasting way. We're trying to run a business. I personally have a 49/51 rule and this might not be what other people have, but I want 51% to be, I fucking rocked this. They fell in love with themselves. This event was so nourishing and 49% I'm running for the profit. See, it's almost 50/50, but I slightly err on the side of wanting everyone to have an extraordinary experience. I can't tell you why, and probably great marketers might argue with this, but I feel like humans can smell and taste the difference.

They can sense when they come from is more pitch fest or more, I just want you to have a great experience. If you fell in love with yourself and this container, here's an opportunity to go deeper. They can smell the difference and you can't fake it and you can't hide it. So you actually have to come from, even if you buy nothing else again, this is gonna be a life-changing memorable experience. There's an invitation for you to stay or to go to the next level. I'd say 40% of the people joined again for the program because it was nourishing and memorable. I was so optimized for them having fun. People pay a lot of money to have fun.

Like Burning Man, prime example. I love the point you made about the come from, then the 51% and the 49%, 51, slightly erring on the experience that they're asking and 49, running the business. I agree, it's the line I like to say is mission over commission. It's like, what are we here to accomplish? What are the differences we're here to make for others? The money follows the value. The money follows value. Focus on the money, the money runs away, but if you focus on the value, the money follows. I also love that you're like, while you walk that fine line, it's like, hey, I'm not gonna completely ignore the fact that I'm running a business, but I'm gonna keep as much of a balance as I can, but with an air on the side of experience.

Yes, 51 rounds up to 100.

That's right. Beautiful, thank you for sharing that, Annie. You mentioned that you are an expert in conflict resolution. I think that's a good leeway here into maybe talking about another element of your life and business here. You and your husband, Eben, run an event as well called The Love Dojo. They've done that several times. It'd be interesting to hear maybe a little bit from you about that event and what the dynamic is between you and Eben and anything you wanna share about conflict resolution.

And running an event with your partner definitely has its own conflict.

Yes, that's a good point to touch on.

Especially if you're co-running an event with someone and they have just different values than you, which is like you and everybody else, even if it's a female or male partner, colleague, or your romantic partner, s*** gets hectic because they want it a certain way and it makes them feel safe to do it that way. You want it a certain way and you have different values. So learning to collaborate while running an event is fascinating. It took me years. Basically for the first few Love Dojos, Eben and I would be fighting right up until the moment we got on the camera. It's so funny that we're teaching people how to resolve conflict while we're in the conflict, which is perfect. Sometimes we would say it, yeah, we're in some drama right now, but here we are showing up, the show must go on. So I think remembering that when you're collaborating with someone on an event, that the event being a great experience for the people is more important than you're a little squirmish. I think that's what it means, the show must go on. I don't know what it originally came from, but no matter what kind of drama I might've had with my husband, neither of us ever entertained the idea that we're gonna cancel the event or not go on stage. So I love that we're both highly committed to delivering value and not letting our little grumble about whatever we were scrapping about interfere with our commitment to create value for the group. It works much better when the two people leading the group are in a cohesive collaborative dance. It's taken us years to find that and we've now found our ebb and our flow with it now. But I think you learn a lot about what works and what doesn't work in collaboration by doing a project with someone.

We tend to think, well, how I'm gonna do it is better. But what I've noticed is if you're collaborating with someone you actually respect, maybe even love, I've realized that even though my husband's idea sounds crazy or not as good as mine, if I listen all the way through to his reasons and this come from and the thing he's optimizing for, I usually learn something. I can then take what he's offering and what I'm offering, and we like tessellate it together till we get this third emergent possibility that comes out of the collaboration. That is always, always better than if I had done it on my own, or if he'd done it on his own. So the quality of the event and the output is infinitely more high and value creating than if the person does it alone. I've heard companies that are run with two CEOs that collaborate together always produce better outcomes. I've seen the quality of Eben's seminars upgrade with me joining. I can see when I let him contribute to my events, how he thinks of things that I wouldn't have thought of because he can see in one area of reality that I'm blind in, and I can see in areas of reality that he's blind in. Then together we get binocular 3D vision. So I don't know if you have questions more about collaboration, but it takes something to run an event with someone.

I think that's a great highlight, great point there, because people listen to this oftentimes it's not uncommon for people to do business with their partner or someone, the husband, their wife, someone they love, or just a business partner that they have conflict with at times. So I think that's a really, really great point that you share several points you shared on.

And it produces intimacy, because as a coach in relationships, I'm always looking for how does intimacy get created? I think of intimacy as like, when you go to the gym and you lift the barbell and the muscle rips and it grows back stronger. That's how you build your muscle. The breakdown, little squirmish, when it's resolved is a collaboration. So a conflict is a collaboration trying to happen, but getting undermined. A collaboration is what you get when a conflict gets resolved. So you'd be surprised, but when you work through that little squirmish, whether there should be flowers on the stage or not flowers on the stage, and you find a resolution, you actually have more understanding of each other after that and a deeper relationship.

Yes, like tearing the muscles in the gym, letting it grow back stronger.

Okay.

So Annie, we're kind of coming towards the end of our interview here. I know you have a gift to share with our audience on the subject of conflict resolution. Can you tell us a little bit about the course that you're offering to our audience?

Yes, I thought I would just gift your audience an online audio training called The Art Of Fighting. I actually think fighting is an art and a science, and it's something you can learn to do better. There is no relationship that has no conflict. I've never met one that lasted. So the trick is to learn how to dance through conflict. I think of a true love relationship as a gymnasium in which we work and build our emotional muscles. So I created this program, The Art Of Fighting, to provide people with a resource to navigate situations that trigger us so that you can turn them into opportunities that allow you to grow and strengthen your own emotional resilience and your connection to your partner. Fighting is the way you build intimacy if you know how to spin it. It can either undermine the connection or reinforce it. I really believe any conflict you're having with someone there exists a conversation that you could have that would get you both closer and have you glad that the conflict happened. That's what I'm always looking for. How do I spin this into, well, I'm glad we had that squirmish because look where we are now and just having the faith to believe in that also is a really big part. So this is the program. It's eight sessions. It's an audio course. It's got all my best fighting resolution tools. I'd love to offer it to your tribe.

Thank you, Annie. It's very generous of you. We'll be sure to include a link to that along with the promo code to get access to that here in the show notes for today's episode. Annie, as we start to conclude here, any final comments or final words that you have for our audience?

Just that we're all alive on this planet for a short period of time. The opposite of dead is not happy. It's alive. So what you wanna do in your events, whether it's a giant stadium full of people or a group of four people on Zoom, what you wanna be optimizing for is the aliveness in the space. Aliveness is the full spectrum. So it's joy and happy and fun and laughter and confusion and tears and sadness and overwhelm and fear. You wanna allow all those feelings to exist in the space in your event because when people go through a transformational experience that allows them to dignify all of the feelings that come up when they're going through a transformational dilemma, which is what you want your program to do, when someone's going through a transformational dilemma, they're gonna go through terror and despair and fear and overwhelm and sadness and joy and possibility. You just have to create a safe space so that all of those feelings are welcome. So optimize for aliveness in your relationships, in your interactions with people and in your events.

Optimize for aliveness. I love that. Thank you, Annie. I appreciate it. It's been wonderful. Thank you for being a guest with us today.