Cindy Chanin is the director and founder of Rainbow EDU Consulting in Los Angeles; its services include independent school consulting, college admissions counseling, standardized test prep, academic subject tutoring, service-learning projects and teen entrepreneurial coaching. “We don’t just tutor subjects or counsel teens; we transform lives.” Learn about Cindy Chanin…
Hometown: Santa Monica, CA.
First job: Performing onstage professionally in Broadway musicals. Tutoring fellow peers in the fifth grade to assist in math and reading. I was hired by my friend’s parents to help their kids study for tests I had to prepare for anyhow! For a 10-year-old, this “early job” certainly proved infinitely incentivizing to study and collaboratively “learn” alongside my peers.
Favorite ways to spend your free time in CA: Hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains or Hollywood Hills; attending Cinespia’s summer movie screening events in the iconic Hollywood Forever Cemetery under the stars with a picnic and fellow cinephiles; visiting my beloved neighborhood haunts — foot reflexology and Kyeritos — after an intense vinyasa flow yoga practice.
Your biggest accomplishment and why: Emerging from early childhood developmental delays, LD diagnosis and academic discouragement to eventually excel in my education and serve as an educational consultant, mentor and guide who empowers hundreds of students to pave their way to academic fulfillment and personal success. I learned that all along I had been asking the wrong questions. Instead of focusing on, am I good enough? creative enough? smart enough?, the questions I needed to ask were: How am I good? How am I creative? How am I smart? IQ and EQ don’t fit inside a box. We have to find the ways in which we are wired to blossom and thrive, seeking out environments that set us up to feel and be successful. Know thyself, and then to thine own self be true!
The biggest obstacle you overcame: Almost dying–only to re-emerge more grateful, audacious and unapologetically “alive” than ever before.
Someone who inspires you and why: My teenage clients inspire me endlessly. It is so energizing and humbling to put our heads together, channel creative ingenuity and harness magic–in their lives and out in the world. I bear witness to the alchemy and transformation that occurs within them each and every time.
Advice to someone pursuing a career path in what you do: Work for the joy and find joy in the work.
Favorite quote: So many – yet these two resonate the most right now: “I am a part of all that I have met; yet experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.” (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses). “Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years. Try some different. Surrender.” (Rumi).
Something someone would be surprised to learn about you: I am the hula-hoop whisperer and hold a personal record of hula-hooping for eight hours, 15 minutes and 23 seconds, set at age 17 at a sleepaway camp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
What makes someone fabulous: Being unabashedly, wholeheartedly, idiosyncratically YOU and not apologizing for that. In being fabulous, you shift the molecules in the room, and inevitably inspire others to step outside the confines of fear and be their best, loudest, most impactful selves.