A Tucson corporate consultant tries to apply efficient business strategies to her love life

Corey Seemiller, Ph.D., travels the world speaking at conferences and events. She’s a Tucson-based life coach and corporate consultant, specializing in leadership.

Companies often hire her for her research-driven insights on how to run their businesses more effectively. But several years ago, she found herself confronting the reality that she wasn’t running her personal life as effectively as she wanted.

Seemiller was just a few weeks removed from a breakup with her long-term partner. One day, she was cleaning her house with her daughter, when friends started messaging her. Her ex had posted a photo on social media, announcing she was in a new relationship.

Seemiller was crushed. She remembers her 12-year-old daughter taking her by the arm and telling her that everything would be OK.

But Seemiller wasn’t so sure. She was in her 40s, and felt like time was running out to find her soulmate. So, she decided to do what she advises her clients to do: make a plan and execute it.

She tells the story of what happened next in her new memoir “The Soulmate Strategy: My Imperfect Plan to Conquer Heartbreak and Find True Love."

Full conversation

SEEMILLER: In my professional life — well, in my personal life too — but I'm very type A. So every problem has a solution. I move quickly, I'm efficient. And this works great in the professional world. And I thought, hmm, what if I use this in my kind of romantic world, right? Could I move quickly through this if I was just much more strategic rather than sitting around and crying about it?

DINGMAN: So tell us a little bit about what these, some of these things were that people were sending you or that you were finding. Were there any of them that you were trepidatious about where you thought like, "I'm not the kind of person who does that."

SEEMILLER: [LAUGHS] Well, I had someone sending me information about the law of attraction and manifesting. I was a little nervous about it, but I decided to lean in, and I joined a manifesting group. And we met on Monday nights, and we would share our manifests with each other. And the more I was involved in it and realized other people were do the same thing with manifesting, the more excited I got about it.

Because whether people believe in manifesting from a spiritual perspective or even just a practical perspective, if you don't know what you want, it's very hard to go out and then try to find it.

DINGMAN: Right? Well, see, that's very interesting to me Corey, because you know, you were describing yourself as very type A earlier. And please feel free to disagree with me, but I think of the Law of Attraction as a sort of, I don't know, quasi-mystical, somewhat spiritual idea. This idea that, you know, by putting your intentions out into the world, it draws things to you.

What was it like for you to experience these kind of — I don't know — like inverse outcomes as compared to the type of person that you think of yourself as?

SEEMILLER: Well, you know what was fascinating — I didn't even realize this till sort of the end of the book, it was one of my epiphanies — was that I really, really wanted to do things that were more flow state. And things that would allow me to let go of control. But what I was doing was I was trying to control letting go of control.

And it was such an irony. And, I mean, there are some points in the book where my close friend in there, she continues to say, like, "You can't control this. That's the whole point of it. And you can't use manifests as s a checklist. You really have to let it go into the universe."

And I'm like, well, I don't want to let it go into the universe, because I don't trust what's going to happen. And so there was a point in which my type A was competing with my let-it-go personality. I actually named these alter egos in the book. I called them the general, which was the type A personality, which was just constantly telling me what to do.

And then the other was the Zen master. This idea, like, just let it go, be at peace. And these two parts of my personality just kept fighting the whole way through. I wanted to be more zen. I wanted to let go. I wanted to have more flow, but I was just strangleholding it the whole time.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, you also tried some other less practical things, like crystals at one point.

SEEMILLER: Yes, I did try love crystals. [LAUGHS]

DINGMAN: Tell us about your experience with love crystals.

SEEMILLER: Well, I decided to go in and buy a whole bunch of things. And so of course, I bought rose quartz for love. And I did all this stuff. And I got home and I was told to hold them in my hand and think thoughts of my future love. And I just ended up with a sweaty palm.

... I'm like, I don't know. But then again, you know, maybe they worked. And I just didn't know. It would have been worse without them. But nothing remarkable happened.

DINGMAN: Well, one of the reasons I'm curious about these various attempts, Corey, is that something I have a sense of you doing as you make these efforts is not just making your way to finding a person, but also, it seems like getting to know new parts of yourself.

SEEMILLER: Oh, 100%. I was terrified of rappelling, but had sort of accidentally agreed to rappel with someone that I wanted to impress and ended up really liking that. So, I think I pushed myself a little bit kind of to the edge, both sort of spiritually and emotionally — as well as physically. And I'm grateful because that attitude, that yes attitude of, "Sure, I'll try it" — that whole process of saying yes to things was actually what healed me.

DINGMAN: Right, right. I mean, I think that's such an important takeaway from your story, in my mind, is that even if somebody listening to this is skeptical about something like love crystals — which I hear you are as well — or the Law of Attraction, it seems like the deeper message there is that if you want something meaningful in your life to change, you have to open the door to parts of yourself that you've kind of prevented yourself from engaging with.

SEEMILLER: Exactly. And in doing so, you learn what you like, what you don't like. You learn about your boundaries. You learn about even in the future. It taught me what kinds of things I wanted to look for in a future partner, even though that's not really what this story ended up being about.

DINGMAN: One of the other things I know was important to you with this is that this isn't just a memoir. It is explicitly in description, an LGBTQ memoir. And as I understand it, it was important to you to write about the lesbian experience in a way that you had not seen it validated or reflected in other stories.

Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that and what you were attempting to do here specifically to counteract that?

SEEMILLER: Heartbreak is universal. Healing is universal. Love is universal — at least the quest for those things. It doesn't matter. It cuts across all types of demographics. Yet when I was struggling, I wanted to find some protagonist that felt like me and see them be OK. And I couldn't find anything. The books and the resources we have in the LGBT community are quite broad.

But you get mostly things about self help about coming out, or you get really, really traumatic memoirs about horrible things that have happened to people by virtue of their sexual orientation. And those are also very important contributions to the literary community. There was sort of nothing in the middle that felt like it just normalized same-sex relationships.

The second part of it, though, was that while it is normalizing it for people, there are still many, many people who identify in this community that are in the closet and don't feel safe talking about their experiences.

And so this happened to me with my first relationship, where we didn't tell anybody we were in a relationship. And after nearly two years of being together, we split up and I was heartbroken. And because we hadn't told anyone we were together, I couldn't tell anyone we were apart. And I felt so alone.

So I know there's people out there that might be having a relationship with someone and they're not out to anyone and they have no support if something with that relationship goes awry.

And maybe they can pick up my book and they can say, "OK, I see myself here. I'm going to be OK. Corey's in my corner here." And so in the one sense, it normalizes our experience, but in another sense, it hits a niche of people that really need to have some validation.