Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential

The transformative new book by the authors of the New York Times bestseller The Tools (and the resident shrinks on Goop) reveals how to deepen your emotional and spiritual experience and realize your full potential.

In The Tools, Barry Michels and Phil Stutz revolutionized the world of personal growth and self-actualization by offering doable, dynamic actions that transformed challenges into opportunities for change. Now, in Coming Alive, they provide four vital tools for tapping into the Life Force that resides within each of us—a wellspring of positive energy that is the source of creativity, renewal, confidence, and engagement.

The first step in gaining mastery over one’s life is identifying the enemy within, which Michels and Stutz have named Part X. This formidable adversary is a shape-shifter—it may be the voice in your head that is a torrent of negativity, persuading you of the futility of finding love, starting a business, or pursuing a creative passion; it may sap you of energy, convincing you that your inner resources are limited; it may take the form of outside forces that conspire against you. In whatever guise it appears, Part X aims to derail your progress, keep you small and stuck, and defeat hope.

The tools in Coming Alive help you connect to the Life Force and harness the energy and will to combat Part X. These are tools of ascendance—they activate your aspirational self; they spark creativity and resilience; they help you to transcend the mire of negative thoughts and circumstances and align with a powerful ally that unites us in our common desire to live lives of meaning and engagement.

Drawing insights from their decades of psychotherapeutic practice, their lived experience, and their moving and generous understanding of our interconnectedness, Michels and Stutz have created a paradigm-shifting guide to achieving optimal mental health and spiritual well-being.

Advance praise for Coming Alive

“There is something indescribably beautiful about living life in integrity. The tools Barry and Phil teach in Coming Alive gave me the courage and clarity to align myself with the truth—no matter how hard or painful it seemed at the time.”—Gwyneth Paltrow

“What a gift! A riveting exploration of four (bone-chillingly relatable) modern ailments and their thrillingly practical solutions . . . Singular in its approach and deeply spiritual in its concerns, Coming Alive is a book I’ll be pressing on friends and foes alike.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different

“‘Practical’ and ‘effective’ are words psychology has always been afraid to embrace. But after working with Barry and Phil for years, I can tell you that they deliver spiritual and psychological transformation. The results, at least for me, have been life changing.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning writer, director, and producer

“When I was going through the most difficult years of my life, I was able to use this method to find my strength. We all have the ability to save ourselves, yet we need guidance when we are lost. In Coming Alive you can find the road map to enlightenment.”—Drew Barrymore

“Part X is another way of describing the addict mind, the obsessive mind, the Jungian shadow, or any fear- or anger-based thought or action. It’s been Phil and Barry’s collective life work to deconstruct Part X and explain it to the rest of us mortals so that we can work with it and not be a slave to it.”—Hank Azaria