I recorded this while walking. I’d just finished a 40-minute jog-walk, I was sweaty and out of breath and definitely not looking cute, and I decided that was the exact moment to record my first podcast episode. Not because it was the right time, but because it was my time.

I’ve wanted to do this for years. My husband and I actually had a podcast back in 2020, right before our second baby, and then life got unmanageable and it slipped away. Now I’m in a completely new season. For the first time in almost eight years, all three of my kids will be out of the house for a few hours a day, and I can feel the energy shifting in me.

So instead of waiting for the fall equinox, or for the kids to officially be back in school, or for everything to be “ready,” I acted on the urge the second I felt it. On September 1st, apparently. This wasn’t part of a grand plan. Just following my energetic shifts, season of life, knowing and capacity.

Here’s what I actually want you to take from this. Seasonal shifts happen way more often than we’ve been taught to notice. We’re conditioned to wait for the new year, the birthday, the Monday, the moment life finally calms down. But life doesn’t calm down. It doesn’t hand you free time out of thin air, and it will throw you curveballs that were never in the plan. Your mom falls and breaks her hip. A business or job you gave over a decade to disappears overnight.

If you wait until you’re “ready,” you’ll be waiting forever.

Action is how you figure it out. Not journaling about it, not pondering it, not posting about it on Instagram. Doing it. Everything my family built over the last few years, including my husband’s multi-six-figure strength and nutrition business (which hit $200K in revenue in August), came from getting curious and getting into motion before we ever felt ready.

And I want to call something out, because I lived it: safety is an illusion.

Whether you work for someone else or you work for yourself, the paycheck and the stability and the so-called certainty are just a story. I was partnered with a billion-dollar company for 13 years, with golden handcuffs and a great income, and I couldn’t see the cage until it was gone. But golden handcuffs aren’t only for people running big businesses or making millions. They’re the stable job you’re miserable in. They’re the influencer model too: the UGC, the brand deals, the affiliate links, the network marketing. It gets sold as the safe, easy path, but if it only works when you’re posting constantly, selling constantly and turning your life into content, you’ve just built yourself another hustle trap and called it the dream.

When I had kids, I hit my fork in the road. Everyone was sharing their families online, so I tried it for about two months, and the first time a stranger said my two-month-old’s name like they knew her, I got the biggest ick of my life. So I scrubbed my babies from the internet and figured out how to build without their faces or their names. I got so much backlash for it and of course now it’s mainstream. That’s usually how it goes when you do something before everyone else is ready to understand it.

As I’m sure what I’m starting to teach now will be too. That’s Leadership 101 baby!

You’re allowed to change your mind, by the way. You do not have to stay consistent for the sake of being consistent. Changing course isn’t burning your life to the ground. Sometimes it’s the most aligned thing you can do.

My kids change every three months. When I moved back to the Pacific Northwest, I started lining our whole life up with the seasons and with our actual energy instead of forcing it into someone else’s calendar. That’s the thing I teach and the thing I live. You build the life first by listening to yourself, then you build everything else around it.

So this is me practicing what I preach. Sweaty, out of breath, no production plan, no end goal. I just had something to say and I said it.

If you’ve been sitting on something you’ve wanted to do for years, consider this your sign. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. It just has to be something. And if it stirs something in you, tell me about it. Slide into my DMs on Instagram, comment here, reply on my Substack. I genuinely want to hear it.

xx Amy

P.S. This fall I’m guiding a small group of women through my new 6-month program, built on everything the last few years taught me about making real money in a way that actually fits your life instead of eating it. Spots are limited and the waitlist gets first access before I open the doors to anyone else and the 15 VIP spots will sell out. [Join the waitlist here.]

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I didn’t get into entrepreneurship to work my life away. I got into it because I realized in my 20s that building a business online was what would allow me to have the freedom to work as much as I wanted & live creatively.

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I was already working my life away waiting tables, interning, going to classes and all for what? To pay for college, rent and bills and still be over-drafting daily? To graduate with debt I could never pay off in a creative field that would pay me jack shit? Even at 25, I knew money would be a struggle forever if I didn’t find a path that allowed me to be rich with both money and time.

I knew there had to be a better way, and I was willing to learn how to trust a stranger (which was very hard for me) online in order to chart a new path for myself.

That being said, I do love working and when your job is both fulfilling, creative and all yours, it’s hard to pull away. Plus, money makes life easier. Let’s not pretend that’s not true because it is.

For years, I would just grind non-stop to make my dreams a reality. 24/7, I was posting 3-5X a day on social media, going live all the time, pouring into my clients, mentoring women who wanted to work with me but after going full time with my online business. Just a year into making my dreams a reality: I knew I needed to start enjoying the life I was creating more than pushing for money or accolades.

That’s when I started my first garden (a few small plots in the backyard of our rental home), started taking weekly micro-adventures (we coined this term in 2013) where we’d go on road trips to hike through Oregon, and we started to travel internationally once a year.

That morphed and changed through the years, and the entire point of sharing this with you is to remind you that if you have a business that’s taken over your life, it might be time to re-evaluate if it’s really what you want.

I think it’s hard sometimes to admit something we used to want doesn’t align with us anymore. Especially when it’s a career you’ve given over a decade to or a business that was the dream at some point. Just remember, you always have a choice.

You can either change the way you run the business, or you can change the way you do business entirely. Sometimes it’s a choice you make, and other times the Universe makes that choice for you.

Before kids, I created a schedule unique to my energy cycles where for 4 years, I worked 3 weeks on and one week off every month, and that really worked for my husband and me because we could grind as much as we wanted but then also, who vacations monthly? We did, and if we wanted to stay abroad longer, we’d just plug into work on an island in Tahiti or on the rooftop of a hotel in Rome.

Now that I have kids, I don’t have the luxury of working as much as I want. I also have no desire to travel all that much. Not only that, if I had to choose to spend time with my kids making memories over working, I’m going to choose my kids every time. This was the part that confused me the most about becoming a mom.

I was under the impression from what other businesswomen claimed, that you’ll always be a career-first woman, even after you have kids, but what happens when that’s not the case? What happens when your entire life is built around YOU being the career woman and your partnership with your husband is that you both work?

The answer is, you can have both! You can be a family-first career mother. It’s just going to take some time to learn how to turn off the hustle culture and work more in flow with your life. It’s a children-first mentality, but that’s why I love helping mothers build a life this way.

You can make your children your priority and make a shit ton of money without being on your phone at the park, filming every moment of every day and making your children think that talking to your phone is normal.

We are so very lucky to live in a time where you don’t have to choose, but so many women are new to this and don’t know how to grow and scale in a way that will allow them to work less and make more money.

I, on the other hand have been at this for 15 years. So, I want to share what I’ve learned with you.

Your kids are only going to be this young once, and I’d rather live in a shack than miss their childhood. So, last summer I did something very scary for an ambitious mother who stressed about providing for her family (hand in hand with her husband who is also an entrepreneur) and was going through an ego death.

I allowed myself to take a full summer off of work for the first time since Summer of 1999. What happened next was not pretty. I had just lost all of my income to a partnership ending, and every bone in my body said to hustle and figure it out. Everyone around me was jumping to something else, but there was this intuitive whisper that encouraged me to pause.

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Unplug from personal development, social media, everyone I used to work with and just take a fucking beat! When you’re in survival mode for over 20 years, I’m just warning you, your body doesn’t know what to think. I was so caught up in this role of being a “leader” and helping everyone else, I had forgotten about myself. What did I want? I had a clean slate to build from, but all I wanted to be was Mother.

I felt guilt, I felt judged, but more than anything I felt like nobody could relate.

Now, it could’ve been a series of things: being postpartum, entering my 40s, changing careers, entering a new season of life or all of the above just mixed together like a perfect storm brewing inside of me, but I felt like a bomb was going off inside of me.

I started experiencing grief, confusion and loneliness in a way I haven’t felt since I was getting sober almost 20 years ago. I started detoxing from the push and grind that being at the top of a billion-dollar company for over a decade had instilled in my DNA.

When summer was over, I couldn’t wait to get back to work, but I realized through that experience that if I was ever going to be able to rebuild, I had to figure out a way to make it possible while parenting 3 kids under 7 (including a toddler) and being present in my own life, and I’m here to tell you that it’s 100% possible.

Is it scary? Fuck yes. Will you have to go against pretty much every “success” principle being taught from funnels to social media growth to treating your life like a color-coded calendar? Yep. Is there some woo you’ll have to believe in? Yesssss, but are there other versions of success that very few people understand? FUCK YES!

Here I sit in my backyard a year later. Today is our last “official” day of summer break before the kids go back to school, and for the first time in 8 years, all of my kids will be in school. It’s only going to be 4 hours of focused time that we’ll get to work, but that’s more than we’ve had in a very long time.

A lot can happen with 20 hours a focused time a week! Shit, I created 2 multiple six-figure offers with far less focused time than that over the last 2 years…

Over the last year, with this new way of flowing through life while honoring my ambitious spirit, the reality of providing for a family of 5 (in one of the most expensive states in the US) and only being able to work part time while passing the baby back and forth, I’ve supported my husband in building his first multiple six-figure online business in the health & fitness space. The best part?

Without grinding non-stop, without partnering with an app that takes part of your commissions and forces you to post multiple times a day to be a sales engine, without a checklist that’s filled with Zoom calls, partnership meetings and content shoots.

I didn’t take this summer fully off, but I did use it to recalibrate, and while I’ve loved supporting him, I decided I’m ready to go all in on my own coaching business again. I had to let go of all my clients last year to honor this energetic shift, which was also very hard for me. But after taking a sabbatical for the last year to take my system for helping women create a more aligned life and turn it into a full-fledged 6-month experience, I can see how intuitively I knew that it was the right choice.

Not just for me, but for the 15 women I’ll get to guide through that VIP experience in the fall. Even writing this, I’m so anxious to open up the doors, but in alignment with what I teach, I’m waiting for the kids to be in a good rhythm first.

It’s in my nature & part of my design to take ideas and put them out into the world immediately, so taking years to allow myself to fully live what I’ll be teaching was completely out of my comfort zone. It took really trusting in my path and stop looking outward for the answers. To trust in my knowing but also give myself time to fully understand where I was supposed to go.

I let myself heal. Since making space for myself, I’m going to be a better mom, business owner, wife and mentor. You have to believe that putting yourself first is in the best interest of everyone you touch. Otherwise, you’re trading your time and energy for money, validation and even love. It’s an exhausting way to live.

So even though our world is opening up a little bit with the kids getting older, it’s still a very busy, action-packed life filled with back-to-school obligations (PTA, volunteering, room mom, etc.), extracurricular activities (Girl Scouts, swim lessons, sports, etc.) as well as being the type of parents who want to adventure and play (hiking, exploring, road trips and travel) and let’s not forget the house projects that happen from living on 10 acres, my garden, making bread weekly and hobbies!

So, how in the world does one build a business with such a full life and with so little time?

The answer is going inward and first asking for it. You can’t build something you don’t believe exists. Did you forget how to dream through the hard lessons that life teaches us? Did you forget that it’s all part of guiding you to your right path? It’s time to remember that this is your life and there are no rules to how you have to live it.

Alignment doesn’t happen from adopting everyone else’s frameworks, ideologies or schedules. Books like The 5 AM Club, planners created by influencers, sleep schedules, posting schedules and PDFs promising quick overnight success are all distractions from how you are uniquely designed to create, parent, work and live!

We live in a cookie-cutter world, so when you go out and create a life that makes no sense to people, that’s when you know you’re in complete alignment with yourself because your life was never meant to make sense to others.

For me, success looks like: getting paid to sit in my backyard and write about my life. Having thousands of dollars hit my bank account while sitting on a plane to Florida to go visit my 80-year-old mom. Spending summers making memories with my kids filled with camping trips, fishing, going out on the boat and hiking. Waking up and spending every day with my best friend (my husband) while we continue to build a life together. Traveling with my family multiple times a year and showing them the world.

Nowhere does that require me to be a millionaire, drive a G-wagon or live in a multi-million-dollar house. It also doesn’t require me to trade my time for money, travel for speaking or work events or put a company before my family values.

Plus, the more you stop adopting other people’s philosophies and start to create your own, the more authority you’ll have over your life.

So yeah, I didn’t make the most money I’ve ever made this summer but that’s not always the goal now is it? What if the goal was to make just enough money to be able to live life in accordance with what you want?

Nobody is on their deathbed wishing they worked more and had more money in their bank account, but they do wish they had more time.

The money will be there, but your kids? They won’t always be little, and I’ve listened to the countless women who have cried on social media about the regrets they had about focusing on their career when their kids were little. That won’t be me and I also won’t be struggling, broke, miserable and never see my husband either.

I’m typically one that learns the hard way, but not in this respect.

If there’s one thing I think all ambitious women know: we can make money. That’s not the issue. The issue is going to be how to make money with an entirely different energy once you’ve decided you’re ready to relax into life. That having your dream life doesn’t mean more, it actually means less. That there will always be temptations to push for “more,” but I’ve got news for you…

So here’s what happened: we still averaged $10K months, we fully enjoyed and soaked up summer, I carved out the launch of my coaching program that’s coming this fall slowly and methodically with a lot of thought and love instead of pressure to perform (you can join the waitlist here). So while my nervous system is still not completely used to this way of creating a living, it’s 100% aligned with how I want to live my life. It felt crucial for the action packed summer months with the kids home from school without putting pressure on ourselves to work work work. Which meant less yelling, less stress and more trust that the money will be there when we are ready for it.

If you can’t take a luxurious amount of time to enjoy your life, then you don’t own your business. Your business owns you.

One time we were in Greece and we had a tour guide. Her name was Gina, she smoked constantly, her skin was weathered and there was something that felt sad about her. I’ll always remember while visiting the beautiful island of Milos, her telling me that her favorite place on earth was the Florida Keys and she’d move there if she could. Just so happens that was one of my favorite places on earth as well…

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It was a great reminder that you could live in the most magical place on earth but sometimes your soul will forever crave something different. Is it craving a different reality or a place in time that you lived in a previous life? I think this is just part of being human. Especially when you get to be Gina’s age. You get to look back on all your experiences, the people you met along the way that are no longer with us and what you loved most about the places you’ve visited.

Some of us don’t have one set dream but you won’t know this until you’re there and some will never experience it. Moving, in my experience has been the ultimate dopamine fix. Which has me thinking, are we meant to live in one place our whole lives? Didn’t our ancestors migrate? Don’t we move with the tides of the moon? Maybe this is why so many people struggle with screens, gambling, sex, food and spending. Maybe they need change more than they think?

That’s the beauty of such a long life though isn’t it? That you can try on new identities, experiment with where you live, get to know yourself unapolegetically and you know why you’ll be happy? Simply because the pursuit is happiness.

I’ve been listening to my heart whispers since I turned 18 and moved out but I didn’t just get an apartment and go to college. I bounced around constantly. I moved all over South Florida from Orlando, to North Miami Beach, to downtown Miami and even Homestead for a stint. My last stop was a dingy apartment behind Fox’s Lounge off US1 before I took the leap to chase my dreams of leaving that city behind me.

I left my home city of Miami, Florida when I was 21 with a suitcase and my cat. I was at the height of my drug & alcohol addiction and thought that if I left and started new someplace, that things would get better.

Well, the saying “no matter where you go, there you are” is true and I ended up desperate in an AA meeting at 23, getting sober and meeting my future husband. I got my own place, I would ride my cruiser bike to and from work, I started running, knitting and would go on dates with my cute boyfriend who treated me like a queen. For the first time in my life, I didn’t wake up hungover, I had no drama in my life and I was in a relationship that was about growth, sobriety and building a life together

It was such a dream come true to learn how to live life differently and be loved..

We left Oregon a year into our relationship to pursue the dream of living the city life. An artsy elder millennial dream come true complete with interning at Anthropologie creating the window displays, riding the BART to work, going to Art School, eating at 5 star restaurants and shopping in the Haight. We lived in a tiny 500 sqft apartment on the corner of Van Ness right by Ghirardelli square. I would walk down the street in my wetsuit and swim in the bay, ride the bus to work/school, go meet my boyfriend for lunch during my break between classes and work and it was the first 3D experience I had in my newly sober life. We eloped at the San Francisco court house to start our new life together but we had no idea what we were in for…

Within a few years, we missed Oregon life. So we moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon instead of back to Eugene and rented a house in the burbs. It was our first time renting our very own house instead of an apartment or studio. We would walk our dogs around and look at all the beautiful homes and landscaping. I dreamed of having a big garden one day, so I started a few beds in my backyard. We’d go into the city, grab coffee at the hip coffee shops, get tattooed and hike every week but the rainy dreary winters pulled us to the high desert with 300 days of sunshine.

It was a dream come true for a couple in their early 20’s who were both newly sober. Especially for me because I never thought I’d be able to afford to live in a house! Even though it was rented, we felt like a family.

The next stop was renting a vacation rental in Sunriver, Oregon. Out our door we had miles of paths we could bike ride, hundreds of hikes, more delicious food for date nights and during the winter nobody was there. It was just us, our dogs and the quiet snow. I decorated our home with plants, we decided that we didn’t want kids but we were very happy being plant and fur parents. We started traveling a lot and on one trip our pipes froze destroying our rental. We had to move, everything was destroyed by the water — so we decided to get a house in town.

This was a dream come true because we officially could live anywhere we wanted after years of grinding with my online business. Freedom felt good and I was intoxicated with it because as an Aries, it’s how I’m meant to live…

We loved living in town. We were super close to everything, could hear the summer concerts from our back deck and we actually didn’t mind living in a neighborhood with kids screaming at all hours of the day but a trip to Puerto Rico and our lease coming to an end turned into another big move.

In hindsight, this wasn’t part of the dream at the time but as I sit here writing this I realize that maybe it was part of the plan all along, just on a different timeline…

We packed up everything and drove 4 days to Miami with our 2 dogs and cat. We put the animals on a plane and flew to Puerto Rico with just a few boxes. We had sold and donated 8 years of crap we had accumulated, rented a home on a cliff with 360 water views, a pool and had so much fun making life long friends. Daily living consisted of swimming in waterfalls, becoming a certified level 1 free divers, scuba diving off the beach, working outside and having the most sexy, romantic dinners on the beach in Aguadilla. We eventually moved to a beach house in Rincon where we had endless beach walks, paddle boarding and surfing. The dogs loved running in the waves and I didn’t think life could get any better than that…

Three years in Puerto Rico was the longest we lived anywhere before kids but another dream was calling my name, so I decided to listen to it…

We moved back to the states because a childhood dream was calling me and I was so close to my home state at this point. Why not explore that too? We rented a Condo in the Florida Keys with views of the ocean and sunset from every angle, a roof top yoga deck with ocean horizon views for as long as the eye could see, kayaking to the cut every night to catch snapper and make fish tacos, paddle boarding through the mangroves, making out on the sand bars and eating at all the restaurants I loved as a kid. It was in that Condo that we got pregnant with my first baby and decided to buy our first home.

The Keys was and will always be part of the dream of my inner child. A place I’ve started taking my kid’s every winter but once we decided to start a family, my body craved a yard, picked fence and some chickens. So my dream changed once again…

We found a home in Jupiter, Florida. For the first time in our relationship (it had been over 10 years by that point) we could take the photo of us with the keys to our new home and post it on Instagram. With just over an acre we got chickens, turkeys, started a garden, had a massive shop that we turned into a gym, a relaxing lanai, I loved watching the storms in and man did I love that house. We had great neighbors, a massive bathroom, would walk the canals and look for alligators, go the tropical gardens, I started an orchid collection and rare hibiscus plant garden and we had another baby during lockdown.

I was loving suburban life in my home state but I was married to a mountain boy who was restless and was sick of the man made beaches. I loved my home but lockdown changed our trajectory again and a new dream became realized…

We missed the Pacific Northwest. There was just something about going to a pumpkin patch in the fall, cutting down your own tree for Christmas, seeing the spring gardens and trees, the misty fog over the Douglas fir trees and the mix of maritime cities & National and State parks with endless adventure at your fingertips plus access to so many incredible states within driving distance.

I missed the mountains, the long stretches of windy roads and the personality of all the cities and shops. I grew tired of the strip malls and wanted to raise my children with the nostalgia of the seasons changing. I always wished we had white Christmas’s as a kid, so we bought 10 acres on the Sound in Western Washington with views of the Olympics and moved our family into a tiny cottage up on a hill.

When we moved here, I could never see myself ever wanting to leave this property but then we had a 3rd child and 3 years into having a family of 5, lately, we’ve felt a shift in our priorities yet again. Your old life will always be there waiting for you but what else is out there? Here’s what we’ve realized this summer..

There was the dream I had for them when we were a family of 4, when they were toddlers and now there’s the dream I have for them as young adults and a family of 5. Having that 3rd child does change things. With our kids turning 3, 6 and 8 this year, we got hit with this sudden realization that this is going to go by so fucking fast and I’m not sure if you’ve realized this by now but we love new experiences and adventure!

We decided to have kids (after a decade together) to have fun and share our life with, not do never ending chores with. Somehow along the way we just created more work for ourselves and now that they are old enough to help, it’s just not what we want for them or us. Never ending projects and never ending property maintenance isn’t for a young family that wants to make memories together.

I had a magical Motherhood here when they were all little and wanted to look for mushrooms, be part of the gardening, the trail systems felt huge to them and we would spend our days wandering the property but now, we crave community and ease. We want them to be able to ride their bikes to their friend’s houses, play with neighborhood kids and be surrounded by active families with the same love for the great outdoors, active living and we do go to Bend to chase the sun.

But for now, we are here, soaking up the last few weeks of summer living one of my many favorite dreams that maybe one day I’ll revisit. Enjoying this incredible state before our favorite season hits, the kids go back to school and we cozy up for another (and maybe our last) wet, cozy Fall in Western Washington. I’m in no rush to leave but there is a small window that this transition will be easy for the kids (while they are still young) and the clock is ticking…

All this to say that not all of us are meant to just live in one place our entire lives and there’s many versions of “the dream.”

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I know when I go to a fellow mother’s house, it’s either well organized or it’s not. I have literally never judged either one. I think both are a breath of fresh air, and I want to urge mothers to stop opening up their homes to the world with the hope of becoming “relatable” just to make money online.

Real money that can be made online does not need to include your children, every single hardship you go through as a mom, parenting, or an open-door policy to your home. You have to remember that while you are trying to create and run a business, there does need to be a level of privacy for the sake of your children.

I also think bringing social media culture into our homes needs to be delayed. My businesses have involved social media and sharing bits of my life and perspectives for 15 years, and my kids have no idea what Instagram is, don’t watch YouTube, and haven’t been introduced to video games.

We are still focused on reading lots of books, mastering emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, potty training (I have a toddler), the sciences, and ya know… slip and slides? Normal kid shit.

I hate that this makes me a “90s mom” by today’s standards, but really, I’m just raising my kids the way I was. I’m not a “butter mom” because my kids have a garden to release praying mantis eggs into that we hatched on the kitchen table. I’m not a “trad wife” because I just made them sandwiches with the sourdough bread I baked this morning while they wore socks I knit for them. I’m not an “adventure mom” because we love camping, exploring with our kids, and playing outside.

I’m just their mom, and these are all extensions of myself. Bits and pieces of the way my mother raised me that I loved, and adding in my own aspects of motherhood that I value. Every year my capacity changes, my kids get older, and I’ve learned to adjust my expectations of myself as a mom to fit my children’s needs. Not the other way around.

Can't a mom just have some hobbies that create core memories for her kids without it being a trend? The labeling is out of control. But I get it. I tried to label myself in the beginning, too. I was homeschooling and starting a hobby farm, and it can feel kind of intoxicating to link up with such a loud community to feel a sense of belonging. But then I had a bonus baby while having to build a new business, and life changed. Overnight I had to put my homeschooling dream on hold and focus on my little world.

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You know what’s also so strange about sharing your life online? People really don’t like it when you change your mind. Well, guess what? They can go fuck themselves because now they don’t get to hear about jack shit and it’s fucking glorious. The real flex is nobody knowing what you’re doing, where you are or why you’re doing it.

For a lot of us, we are navigating non-stop change in our worlds, and if we latch too tightly onto labels and identities, then it keeps us from being able to change, grow, and accept that maybe something we thought we wanted isn’t actually what’s best for our family. Then, you totally are fucking yourself for what reason other than to remain constant? Predictable? Palatable? RELATABLE? Be liked? Fucking boring babe.

Maybe it’s just the manifesting generator/Aries in me, but what I want for myself and my family can shift multiple times in one day. I got tired of trying to constantly explain myself or keep people up to date on our life. I really don’t think it’s a necessary part of building a personal brand or business online. I also grew to absolutely hate the eyes on me and my family constantly. It felt icky and violating…

I also can see how, when we love the way we do life and think it’s really fucking awesome, we want to show people and inspire them but my love for my children and our precious little life far outweighs my desire to help mom’s feel better about themselves. I know what it feels like to want others to see how amazing their lives can be too! I also know that you’re creative enough to include your lifestyle, life, and message without making your kids the center of your content.

Every mom is operating under a completely different reality. Different kids. A different number of kids. A different nervous system and partner. Village or no village, or no partner at all. I think we’d all be better off not sharing so much because if you’re truly sharing it all then you’re sharing too much.

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Some moms have a hard time spending more than 3 hours a day with their kids, not because they don’t love them, but because they personally know their limits and yell too much. On the flip side, the moms that love spending all day with their kids could spank them or parent completely differently than the 3-hour moms are willing to, in order to have the kind of kids that obey and listen.

My point? We really don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors, so stop comparing yourself to strangers on the internet. All I know to be 100% true, is the mom who raised my kids when they were 2 under 2 with a thriving business is not the mom who is raising 3 kids under 8 with 2 start ups. That mom is not the mom I am today, because you learn a thing or two with every child you have and life can throw you some curve balls.

You learn to adapt and every couple of months your kids will change for the rest of their lives and so will we. The best part? I have zero need or desire to share any of that at length with strangers anymore. I love that social media and my business are separate from my personal life now instead of everything being entwined the way it was before kids.

We all have different standards for how we raise our kids, and while a standard may feel high to you, it could feel really low to me, and vice versa. Like I said before, I love nuance, and I don’t think we need to put down the way other people raise their kids to elevate the way we do.

But damn, I do want a trophy for never introducing iPads, like EVER.

I think it’s pretty freaking cool that my kids have never swiped and my oldest is almost 8. I also don’t care if your kids have used iPads their whole lives. I really don’t know how anyone has time to worry about other people’s children, to be honest. I’ve got my hands full with my own that are almost 3, 6, and 7.5 and I have every right to feel proud of that decision because it was fucking hard and still is.

That being said, I’m writing this while my kids watch TV in the middle of a hot afternoon after a day at camp because I don’t think screens are all bad. In fact, I grew up a gamer and actually love technology. So much so, in fact, that I went to school for multimedia design because I loved sitting in front of a giant Apple computer so much. My career in social media happened because I love content creation, writing, and connecting through audio and visual communication.

So here I am on Substack living out my early 2000’s Tumblr/Blogger/Live Journal dreams that turned into a multi-million-dollar network marketing business instead, one that ended at the beginning of 2025. I feel like I’m 25 all over again, sitting in my 500 sq ft. studio apartment in San Francisco, putting myself through art school while waiting tables. Not really knowing what the future holds but doing what I love.

Okay, sorry, back on track with what I was saying. I’m really just sick of the polarization for monetization of parenthood on Instagram, because when I’m sitting with a group of moms from school IRL and we are venting to each other about how hard something is, I just couldn’t imagine any of them saying, in the real world, the shit that moms say on social media for validation, to “find their people,” or reach.

I'm also OVER posting that shit on my stories every day to make someone feel better about themselves, or on the flip side, to be dragged by a loser on the internet with nothing better to do but watch my every move with a hard-on for me because I subconsciously created a reality TV show, since I was obsessed with The Real World as a teenager. I'm in my protect-my-peace era even more than I ever thought I was in my 30s, and it's been an adjustment, to say the least.

I think this is an important topic not just for the moms who are tired of sharing their private life online, but also for the ones who want to start creating content and think they need to share things they’d rather not. I still feel pressure sometimes to do a “day in the life” vlog or go on my stories and share about going grocery shopping for my family, and then I remember that shit is so fucking unnecessary to help my dream client and run my business.

What a fucking breath of fresh air to be doing this for so long and to know that I have the option to do whatever the fuck I want with my personal brand, social media, marketing, business and influence. That’s called ownership, my friends.

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“People overestimate how much they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years.” Tony Robbins

I’m a big fan of slogans, mantras and sentences you repeat to yourself daily because you have the power to rewrite your thoughts and anytime you get an intrusive thought, you can turn it around with one sentence.

The reason I love this quote is because it’s actually true and I’ve experienced its truth in my own life and I think anyone who has been on a growth path can agree. The reason why I think this quote is so damn healthy is because everything worth building takes time. Social Media is filled with “overnight, just hire me, do this one thing” schemes. Be smarter.

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When I built my network marketing business which is one of the hardest industries to be successful at, it didn’t happen overnight. This was back in 2010 when making money online wasn’t mainstream and everyone said I was being scammed but I loved what I did and I really felt like I was helping people so I was fine with not becoming a millionaire. I just wanted to own my time, to free my husband from his soul sucking retail job, be home with my puppies and be happy, and help other women do that too—that’s it.

The first year I made just under $10,000.

The second year I made just under $40,000

By year 10? I had made millions of dollars…

I started this substack because I’m in year 2 of a rebuild of my very own business (with no partnerships), how I create wealth moving forward and doing it all while honoring motherhood, having fun with my family and taking care of my nervous system. It’s taken more time than I expected to get here after my multi-million dollar partnership ended and I’m finally feeling like I have a clear path forward.

I wanted to document the behind the scenes (to the best of my abilities while juggling family/life/business) because building a legitimate business that we can be proud of, that serves our clients and that isn’t from the luck of a reel going viral— is going to take years.

Not only that, I’m unlearning so many ways in which I used to operate that doesn’t fit this season of life and capacity is real.

I’m creating new boundaries and energetically there’s only so much output I currently have with an almost 3 year old, 6 year old and 7.5 year old but the most beautiful thing about the time we live in is that you can build anything you want on your own terms.

I also want to take this opportunity as a fitness, mindset, business and life coach to say that anything you want to build that will weather the test of time isn’t going to happen overnight and the most fun part is the beginning.

That part? It feels new and exciting but when the reality of the boring activities and skills you have to learn sets in, it can feel daunting at first but if you persevere and keep going then you can continue to refine your process, business and routines.

The part that people quit during?

The messy middle.

The valley of boring.

The slow grind of doing the thing day in and day out with what feels like very little return. The part that I see people drop like flies from.

This is what everyone always said was a scam (because we “weren’t getting paid for our work”) when I was building my network marketing business. I’d constantly see people quit or get distracted by the “next get rich scheme” or be wildly inconsistent.

This kind of behavior will never build any business…

How you do one thing is how you do everything which is why becoming an entrepreneur (and following through with it) is one of the most spiritual and mental toughness processes you can ever take yourself on.

You really have to face your shit or it’ll just follow you everywhere…

You’re going to constantly have to avoid temptation to pivot but more than that? You’re going to have to learn how to manage your mindset during the part that is the most uncomfortable. The part that takes a massive trust in yourself. The part that takes out 98% of people that truly want more from themselves but can’t push through.

So, the next time you think you’re behind or it’s taking too long just remember that you’re not in charge of the timeline and manifestation only works when you are focused on abundance. Every negative thought you have slows you down and toxic energy can take you out completely—if you let it.

Listen to me, your dreams were given to you because it’s what you’re supposed to do. As much as I want to just knit and scoot around in my garden all day, that’s not my destiny. My destiny is to guide women and use my voice as a lighthouse and it yells at me constantly to keep going.

So I listen but I’m going at my own pace and I think that’s the part that you need to take away from this essay the most. You’re running your own race so blinders on, volume up, find your pace and stick to it no matter what. Okay Turtle?

If your dreams weren’t for you, you wouldn’t have them. You only get one shot at this life and my goal is to just make sure that by coming in contact with me—when you’re on your deathbed you have zero regrets because you fucking tried.

Not just “oh I gave it a shot” but you REALLY FUCKING TRIED WITHOUT GIVING UP and got everything you wanted out of life. Not because you worked yourself to the ground to get it but because you learned the art of showing up to build the momentum that leads to your wildest dreams.

You learned how to squeeze every last drop of goodness out of your magic, this life and all the memories you make in between.

When I decided I wanted to “go for it.” I dropped out of college, I quit my waitressing job and I burned the boats. It worked because there was no Plan B. It worked because I was in my 20’s with no kids, no real responsibilities and I was having a quarter life crisis and I felt the urgency to do something about it. It worked because I worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week until it fucking worked.

That’s why I know it’ll work this time too because there’s also no Plan B.

This time, I’m 41 with 3 kids, a mortgage, entering mid-life but there’s no crisis. Only knowing exactly what I want because my younger self created it for me. A knowing that I can create the business of my dreams again because I’ve done it before. I have zero desire to be a millionaire again but I also know that I never had a goal to be a millionaire in the first place.

See how that works?

That’s a gift that I truly don’t take for granted. A gift I want to keep paying forward. The gift that the tides will turn and you will be flooded with money and luck (because you positioned yourself to receive it.)

So once you decide that there’s only a Plan A, then the Universe will conspire to show you a clear path forward but you have to be open enough to see the whispers guiding you. What you don’t realize, is it gets better than you can ever even imagine.

Are you ready for the ride of your life? Make that decision and go for it.

xx Amy

Baby Amy building her first online business from her phone circa 2012 ^

One of my promises to myself is not to stick by hard a fast rules with how I do business, create content or live my life anymore.

I don’t have anyone I need to perform for anymore and it’s been such a massive process to get to this point. It’s just me and my husband calling the shots now and it’s taken a while for my nervous system to catch up to our new reality.

I should write about that! Maybe next time.

Today, I want to talk about what I was thinking about while I was camping. I was thinking a lot about how beautiful this season of life is and how happy I am that summer is here.

My dream life before kids looked completely different than it does now. I never considered that I can have multiple versions of “the dream” but you 100% can.

Before kids, I would've rather died than lived in suburbia and had to pack lunches every day. I lived as a digital nomad both around the states and in the Caribbean. We traveled constantly and I was happy as a clam being a dog & cat “mom.”

One day, I found myself in Europe for the 4th time and it just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Traveling just felt empty. Like someone was missing.

It took us 3 years of discussing it and 10 years together to take the leap into parenthood and my only regret is that we didn’t start sooner because at 41, my body and nervous system is pretty maxed out.

The kind of parents we imagined we’d be vs the parents we actually are couldn’t be any different. It’s really funny what you think becoming a parent will look like vs the reality of having 3 kids 7 and under!

I always imagined I’d be that mom on instagram who is dead set on never changing her life because of her kids — traveling, living on the road and just copy/pasting children into my life. When in actuality, the opposite happened to me.

I welcomed the change and my brain craved a certain rhythm after my first 2 children were born 19 months apart. So began the journey into embracing Motherhood and doing it my way.

I found my dream property, I nestled in, rooted my family here, started a hobby farm/garden, we go camping all summer, we do fireworks, there’s backpacks by the front door, we grill every night, our home smells like sunscreen and bug repellent and I’m absolutely obsessed with it!

I realized on my camping trip last week, when I was fully unplugged from social media that the American dream is alive and well. My kids are growing up with all the same nostalgia that we did and I get to relive it again but better.

I don’t believe that kids are a do over for a messy childhood but the fact that I’m from a broken home and happily married to an amazing man, I have children that love each other deeply, and I’m living the life women in my family tree dreamed of having but didn’t get despite it being their deepest desire — is a legacy.

You know what my vision board looks like now? I don’t have one because I really can’t think of anything better than the life I’m living right now. It’s such a simple, fulfilling existence that only Motherhood could’ve given me.

I mean sure, there’s a nice boat we want to buy and we want to live bi-coastal in about 5 years but kids changed me because my life isn’t about me anymore and I really can’t describe how good that feels. I know everything will come when it’s supposed to.

I used to just make shit happen and now I’m more like — we’ll see what happens!

I’m perfectly happy being home and for the first time in my life, I can say that. If you’re a cycle breaker don’t forget what a massive accomplishment that is not just for you but for your children. It’s truly a huge achievement that isn’t celebrated enough.

That’s not the kind of thing you can put on a vision board. That’s only the kind of thing that can happen when you listen to your intuition, have deep gratitude for how green your grass already is.

If it’s not a fuck yes then it’s a fuck no — trust that the whispers you are hearing are guiding you to your happy destiny.

xx Amy

Anyone else love a good cry?

Today was one of those days where I felt like I hit “rock bottom” with aspects of managing Motherhood and I wanted to share a text one of my mom friends sent me after my very public display of humanness today:

“It feels like there really are so many expectations for us to do more for our kids than we got, and we’re doing it with less help than our parents had. It’s wildly unsustainable.”

With that, I decided this week is a good time to go over my Summer ins & outs and re-design my life for the next 3 months because everything came to a head today. As mom’s we can’t feel shame about dropping the ball once in a while but we can reflow our life and decide what’s not working for our family unit and set some new ground rules.

I’m laughing as I write this because I went from the mom who just wanted my kids to free play and be homeschooled with very little structure to the mom who had her kids in 5 activities, private school, soccer games on the weekends moving from activity to activity with a gusto!

What in the actual fuck! This is so me though.

That’s part of how I learn. I swing from one extreme to another, till I find a really good middle ground. I’ve never had school aged kids before, or kids at all for that matter. There is quite the learning curve to all of this.

So, if you're a mom reading this— just remember that you’ve never had kids this age before either. Whatever age that is, and there’s no playbook for our individual family units, schedules and support systems.

It’s okay to go back to the drawing board and personally, I do it every season change. That’s how I overcome and prevent burn out.

So now at least I now what I don’t want, right?

May I add, I’m also running a business that’s brand new and working on another one that’s coming to the public in the next few months. Writing this has been incredibly cathartic because I forget how much I juggle.

So, how did this even happen?

I will tell you exactly how this happened. I have this deep desire to give my kids everything they want and open their eyes up to all the possibilities out there but it just can’t happen at the expense of my mental health.

I’m a “yes” person learning no.

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So, I sat quietly after my release listening to some of the conversations the other parents were having at the birthday party tonight and was reminded that they have uncles, grandma’s and grandpa’s that are constantly there to help them as they navigate their careers.

That’s not my reality but I’m starting to build a village of other mom’s and friend’s, now that I’ve been here for 6 years and I feel so deeply supported and seen. As someone who lived nomadically for over a decade, I kept leaving the communities I’d build and have to start over.

I also have to remind myself that most families these days only have 1 or 2 kids and I’m over here with not just 3 kids but 2 young kids and a toddler.

The nervous system of a mom with 3+ (little) kids is completely unhinged and I’m constantly reminded by strangers that “I have my hands full” wherever I go but I love having 3 kids. In fact, some days I’m sad that I don’t have more.

So today, I stop dropped and journaled, I cried, I wrote, I hung out with my goats, hugged other women and I’ll head down to the garden to eat peas and smash my hoe into some weeds while listening to Cat Power and feeding my chickens after I get the baby to bed.

Some days nervous system regulation looks like throwing around heavy weights, dancing my heart out and running at full speed and others it means breathing and communing with nature. Either way, nervous system regulation is a MUST whether you have kids or not.

All this to say, I’m eliminating all extra curricular activities for summer effective immediately. All we have till Fall is Summer Camp and Camping. A nice slow Summer with long days and a new perspective on how fast your schedule can become unmanageable if you’re not careful.

xx Amy

Something people don’t say out loud (that I will) is when you’re starting over, even if you’ve done it before, you do start from a new perceived nothing. Building your own thing is completely different than partnering with a corporate company.

What I had forgotten about being new at something is how dysregulated your body gets. Add on being postpartum and having kids and whewwww, it’s been a journey to learn how to take up space again.

To be SEEN in beginning again even though I already achieved so much!

To build self-trust and feel confident in what I’m helping people with. It’s not just a product that I can use and be like “oh I like this, I want to share it with others.” What I’m building is my life’s work and there’s so much pressure there.

I realized that the reason why this feels so much harder is because I am truly doing this all by myself, which is why it’s so important for entrepreneurs and business owners to be part of a community. You realize your issues aren’t unique and it helps you not spiral on hard days.

It’s the visibility! Over the last 2 years I’ve gone back to school on “me.” Just like I did when I was 25, which has been so humbling and weird. You don’t just wake up one day and say “I’m going to lose myself today.” You just, do.

Then you have to go through this whole ego death when you really just need to be working and it’s INCONVENIENT to say the least.

I already went to all the Tony Robbins seminars, read all the self-help books, and yet here I am again with a brand new brain (thanks to my 3 beautiful children) that I have to re-learn plus none of what helped me before is what I wanted anymore. I just didn’t resonate with the things my “before kids” self did.

On top of that I’m unlearning all the ways in which I built my first business because when I had my babies, I wasn’t in a build or even growth season. I was in a maintenance season. I’ve never built a business with a mother brain and heart. Or with my priorities being my family first above everything else.

I like to relate everything back to seasons because it’s a big part of my practice as a business owner and coach who has embraced slow living. Spring is very much a seed-planting season and for the first few years of starting a new business it’s going to feel like that.

When I had my babies I was more in an Autumn season. I was enjoying the fruit of my labor and maintaining my garden. So building a business with babies has been interesting. It’s an entirely new ballgame, especially when being present is one of your biggest goals as a mom but building a business takes SO. MUCH. TIME.

I had kids because I want to PLAY, ADVENTURE, and ENJOY them. I want to savor every minute and that requires A LOT of work on my regulation because I realized that a big part of how I regulated before kids was working!

Which worked for us then. I never burned out because we created a really beautiful, stress-free life and would work 3 weeks on and travel once a month and take a week off. That’s the same flow we follow in the Summer when the kids are home for camping season too, but THIS is why most women just give up.

IT WAS MY DREAM LIFE but so is this…and the last thing I want to do is miss it because I’m stressed. That’s entirely optional and I’m opting OUT.

This is why so many moms create momentum in their businesses then once summer hits they fall off. Nobody taught them HOW to do this! How to find their own flow, and I didn’t have kids yet so I had no idea how hard it is.

All this to say, I couldn’t do any of this if I didn’t figure out HOW to. You would think that building a business is just about marketing, creating, taking care of clients, sales, and all the boring back-end stuff, but if you don’t want to burn out it’s about your insides.

If you don’t know how you operate, how to redirect your thoughts, self-coach, regulate your body, and manage visibility then yeah, no wonder you can’t stay consistent.

Not because you’re not smart, a hard worker, or inspiring, but because you burn out and then you repeat the pattern with a new opportunity.

In the 13 years I was in direct sales, I saw women burn out all the time and I would obsess about how I could help people see their dreams through. I had NO IDEA that all of this was what a lot of the women with children were dealing with.

And before you say anything, I’m running a business with my husband while also trying to build my own with a toddler at home. It’s hard but when you’re an entrepreneur this is what you do. You figure it out.

Listening to personal development can only take you so far. It only took 3 babies and being in my 40s, losing my multi-million dollar business & having to star over to finally realize that it wasn’t just their mindset.

It was three things:

Their nervous system.

Their flow with seasons.

Their individual design.

So as I sit here with my new routine of writing a Substack (yay for actually doing it again) on the couch while my kids watch their Saturday night movie, I’m also outlining my new curriculum that’s going to cover everything I’ve learned in these last 15 years.

The things I did to become a millionaire in my 30’s, the things I wish I knew, and what I’ve implemented in these last 2 years to have a six figure launch with my first course and build a six figure subscription business (both in two different industries).

What I’m building is what I wish I had all those years ago when I couldn’t help people the way I wanted to because I hadn’t done enough research yet and was so new myself.

Don’t be afraid to be a turtle, trust in your timeline, and remember that going slowly will always be better than pushing till you burn out.

xx Amy

I’ll share more about myself as we go on but for today I just wanted to share what’s been brewing in my brain as of late. We have so much to talk about.

A hill I will die on is to never share from an open wound, but when you’re ready, share relentlessly what you learned from your scars. You will literally change lives and it’s so fulfilling. I have many scars that I want to share from, and I’m rebuilding myself and have been going through a rebirth since the loss of my first business a few years back, becoming a mother to 3 beautiful children and turning 40 last year.

Some were changes I planned for, others I knew were coming and then of course were the curve balls I wasn’t anticipating along the way. I want these short weekly essays to be about the two truths that exist for a mother who chooses entrepreneurship and what it really looks like behind closed doors.

The duality of the masculine and feminine, embracing the seasons and learning how to flow with the seasons and manage the emotions that comes with all of it.

A place for women who want more from their life to visit and be reminded of what it actually looks like week by week to build a business from nothing. It’s like a potion you conjure up that nobody can replicate because it’s all yours. A pinch of an idea, a spoonful of your own experience with a dash of how it can help others.

You can literally create magic from thin air, isn’t that so cool? That’s what taking your life’s work and packaging it into the perfect place for women to gather & see their own personal power looks like, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say sometimes I wish I didn’t choose this path. Which is why I wanted to start this substack.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows but the person you become along the way from allowing yourself to be seen publicly, make mistakes shamelessly and embrace your humanness is something that has made my life so rich with experience.

I’m smart enough to know at 41 years old that I didn’t choose this path, this path chose me. Sure it’s hard but so was waiting tables for 10 years and constantly see an overdraft fee in my bank account. The way I see it, it’s not just as simple as getting a job or starting a business, but more of listening to your own intuition and playing the game of life. To me, life becomes so much more fun to see what you can do and to be constantly evolving. The problem lies in being far too serious as adults and acting like we “have” to do life a certain way, and it’s such bullshit.

So more than likely, if you’re here and reading this, you know that you want to create a different life where you get to spend a luxurious amount of time with your partner, your kids, and YES YOURSELF, but you can’t wrap your head around what that actually looks like in real time.

That’s what I hope to bring to this space. I think it’s important as a trailblazer to open up about what life looks like week to week and write about motherhood without putting my kids and their privacy all over social media. For now, this feels like the safe space that people want to be. Where people want to hear from me and can see in real time the reality behind the glitz and glam of Instagram.

Don’t get me wrong, as a creative I love content and marketing is so much fun. I see sales and marketing as a way to connect my services to my people and help close the gap for them, but I’ve gotta admit, it can also feel a little draining when I just want everyone to know me better.

In this season recording a podcast isn’t feasible with a toddler at home but right now I’m editing this while the kids watch a movie and that’s exactly what you need to hear. Be committed what you want to build but flexible with how you do it.

You see, there’s two of us. There’s the version we see as ourselves and there’s the version everyone else sees. I’m done trying to be understood and feel heard, but we are multi-dimensional people with so many fascinating layers, and all I know is it’s really helpful for me when I can see the inner workings of someone who has created what I want.

So if you want time freedom, disposable income, no debt and want to live a slow life then I recommend tuning in weekly because that’s what I’ve built and I’m about to do it again but in a completely different way.

A way that honors a slower pace of life rooted in nature, fun and creativity.

All I know is I want to write a book someday and I was told to write more. So here I am, writing my little heart out till we have the time to start a podcast this winter. That’s the first bit of advice I’m going to offer here. Just because you don’t have the bandwidth to start the thing you’ve been wanting to do for years, doesn’t mean you can’t start SOMEWHERE.

For me, this is my somewhere, because when you are building a business from scratch while running a business simulatenously, and have three kids under seven, yes, you do have to pick, and I picked Substack.

See you next week,

Xx Amy

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