Where We’re Headed Next

The past year has changed the direction of Conscious Strong in ways I never expected. Here’s where we’re going.

There is a moment I keep returning to from this year. A client – a man who had played with the same posture for twenty plus years and made peace with it – stood in what I now call the Lab, and I asked him to move into a position his body had been avoiding since before I met him. He got halfway there and stopped. Not from pain. From surprise. He looked at me and said, quietly, “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” Then, a few weeks later, he did it. And when he did, something in his face changed that had nothing to do with golf.

That is the year, really. I set out to refine a coaching practice and instead I kept finding those moments – the pause, the surprise, the quiet after. They asked me to build something larger than I had planned. I decided to listen.

Three things changed. None of them arrived as a strategy. Each one began as a small experiment I almost didn’t take seriously, and each one, in its own time, rearranged the whole.

The Mobility Lab

For twenty years I have said that mobility is longevity. I believed it before I could prove it – believed it the way you believe something you have watched be true in body after body, without yet having the room to demonstrate it cleanly. A body that moves well, under load, through range, at any age, keeps its independence and its power. In golf that truth is merciless. The swing is a lie detector. It finds every restriction you have quietly built your life around.

What I lacked, until this year, was a place. Coaching had always traveled with me – a hotel gym here, a client’s home there, my own hands doing the measuring. It worked, and it was never quite enough. So I built the Mobility Lab: a virtual room where movement science, elite golf performance and general mobility finally sit under the same roof. It is where the Axis Assessment stops being a report and becomes something you feel. We measure how you actually move, not how you believe you move, and the gap between those two things is usually where the whole story lives.

I resisted this for longer than I should have. “Can I just stop creating?” I asked myself many times. Centralizing felt like narrowing. It turned out to be the opposite. And, yes I kept creating. The Lab gave the work a spine and gave clients something they rarely get anywhere – the sense of being taken seriously at the level of the person, not the symptom. The client with the twenty plus year posture did not need a swing tip. He needed someone to notice that his ribs had stopped rotating decades ago and to care enough to give them back. That is the difference between correcting a swing and rebuilding how a person moves through their life. That difference is the heart of where Conscious Strong is going.

I did not expect a single room to change the philosophy of a business. It did. It gave the belief a place to stand.

SwingAxis

The second change I can hold in my hands.

SwingAxis began as frustration. I wanted a tool that would hold a client in the positions their body had forgotten – hold them there long enough that the pattern started to take – and I could not find one that met the standard. It was too small. Too complicated. Lack of depth. So we made it. The prototype was messy. The tenth was not. Somewhere in between, it stopped being a piece of equipment and became the entry method into everything we do.

Latest prototype running this week! 

The boards are machined at Hammerhead Design in Winston-Salem, and I will confess the part I am most sentimental about: my son leads the CNC department that makes them. I have stood in that shop and watched the raw stock become the thing that carries my life’s principle into a client’s home, cut by his hands. There is a rightness to that I could not have designed on purpose. A family fingerprint on the object that does the quiet work when I am not in the room.

What surprised me was how completely it reframed the model. SwingAxis turned a service into a system – a foundation a serious amateur, an executive, and a competitive player can all begin from and progress through. For Axis Experience clients, my team and I install the board ourselves; it is part of the standard, not a shipping label. For everyone else, it travels to them. Either way the principle goes home, and the work continues between sessions instead of ending when the session does.

I did not expect a machined board to change the whole philosophy of the business. It did. It made “mobility is longevity” something you can put your body and soul into. 

Travel

The third change is the one I speak about most carefully, because it was never meant to be marketed. It was meant to be lived.

The travel began with a person. In 2016, a client I adored looked at me and, in so many words, said the work deserved a bigger room than any studio could give it — that it belonged somewhere beautiful. She inspired the first retreat, and that first retreat changed my life and my business forever. Ten years later, I am still hosting them.

For most of that decade I did it the way instinct told me to: gather the right people, curate every hour, handle the arrangements myself. Then a colleague in the retreat world said something that stopped me cold. The way I was hosting, she told me, was “illegal.” It was not, as it turned out. But she was pointing at something real. I had been carrying a level of business and personal exposure I hadn’t fully seen. Knock on wood, in ten years nothing has ever gone wrong. That one sentence, though, sent me to do it properly.

So I became an official travel advisor with Gifted Travel Network, a Virtuoso partner. It means I can now book and curate travel almost anywhere in the world, with a level of access and protection I simply could not offer before. My focus stays where it has always been – luxury wellness and golf experiences – but the door is now open much wider.

Italy remains the heart of it. I return every year, and I host my own retreats there twice a year: the pinnacle of what Conscious Strong offers, kept small and quiet on purpose. Beyond Italy, I am beginning to share the rest of what I love – Lauren’s Top Travel Destinations, opening with my seven picks for 2027. Everything I recommend, I can shape to your own needs. And for any travel beyond the list, ask me. If it is a good fit, I will curate it. If it isn’t, I will hand you to someone who is.

Travel taught me that Conscious Strong is not a set of services. It is a way of carrying yourself – through a round, through a decade, through a life – and it holds up anywhere.

Where This Leaves Us

A year ago I would have called Conscious Strong a coaching practice with a strong point of view. I would describe it differently now. It has become one connected thing: a Lab where the work is measured and built, a tool that carries it home, and experiences that prove how far it reaches. The executive, the board my son cuts, the morning on the terrace – they are not three businesses. They are one belief, told three ways.

None of this diluted the standard. If anything, it concentrated on it. The capacity is intentionally small – a handful of clients at the deepest tier, a few more in the method, a single retreat a year. I am not building something large. I am building something that holds, for the right people, at a level I can sustain without ever letting the daily quality of the work slip. Growth here has never meant more. It has meant deeper.

So here is where we are headed. The Mobility Lab becomes the center of gravity, the place the whole philosophy is anchored and tested. SwingAxis keeps evolving as the entry point that makes the principle portable. And travel remains the pinnacle – rare, considered, reserved for those ready to see what their body can do when it is finally given everything it needs.

The through-line has not moved an inch. Mobility is longevity. Everything I built this year was simply a truer way of proving it.

I did not expect the year to take me here. I am grateful it did.