Category: Coaching

I talk a lot about time and energy management. I’m passionate about supporting people in getting their time and energy back because I don’t want anyone to be forced to slow down, or worse–shut down completely. I want people to actively CHOOSE a better way because I know what happens when it’s forced on you and it’s brutal. 

Years ago I was told I had a chronic, life-threatening illness that would cause me pain for the rest of my life AND take years of my life away from me. My personal world was in shambles, I was in an enormous amount of emotional and physical pain, and I was trying to parent 5 children. I DID NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS.

My body disagreed, and this diagnosis was the final straw that forced me to stop moving (literally and figuratively) and get radically honest with myself. It was time to get real and stop avoiding the painful truths I’d been avoiding for my entire life.

I used to pride myself on pushing through the hard stuff, never slowing down, always being busy. It’s a badge of honor in this culture, being busy and overwhelmed. It’s as if we’re measuring the value of our lives by the degree to which we’ve overcommitted ourselves.

So if being busy and overwhelmed is so miserable, why are so many of us committed to it? And why does our culture reward it?

The better question is this: What are we all AVOIDING? 

Chronic busyness is an excellent way to avoid what we don’t want to see, what we’re afraid to deal with. 

Slowing down and creating more time and space means there’s room for the hard stuff to come up. It means we have the time and energy to look at our careers, our marriages, and every other part of our lives and ask the question, do they measure up? Are we living lives full of meaning, or full of appointments? 

To be clear, I don’t have it all together and I certainly don’t have all the answers. I also completely understand that some of us have more obligations and commitments than others.

What I’m talking about is filling our lives up with appointments, meetings, classes, and (insert extra thing here) without asking ourselves if the time and energy cost is worth it. 

My commitment to myself is to continue to slow down, to let go of the kind of busyness that’s about avoiding, and to ask myself the hard questions. This is how I saved my own life so many years ago, and it informs how I coach my clients every single day.

If you need support in getting your time and energy back and creating the life you truly want to live, we’re here for you. 

♥️, 

Jen

I was 18 years old when I got my first credit card. A company set up tables on our college campus and gave away free t-shirts to anyone who applied for a card. I’ve always loved a free…well, anything…so of course I applied. Within a week, a shiny new card arrived in my mailbox with a $500 limit. 

Of course, I didn’t register a “limit”…all I saw was FREE MONEY.

I was a poor kid from middle of nowhere Alabama, and at that point in my life $500 might as well have been $100,000. 

It was a fluke that I even ended up going to college–no one in my family did. I can’t remember what I thought I would do after graduating high school (maybe continue waitressing at JR’s Wings and Things?), but what I CAN tell you is that I went into utter shock when I got a letter in the mail offering me a full scholarship to my university.

My test scores apparently put me in a range where some schools were offering me money to come there before I even applied. Which was a good thing–because I didn’t know the first thing about applying to college!

And this, my friends, is how I accidentally ended up going to college AND how I ended up in major credit card debt before I hit the age of 21.

No one in my family talked about money, unless it was about not having any. My brother and I used to joke that our family motto is “Expect the worst, and don’t you dare hope for the best.”

The first part of my childhood was spent in a single wide trailer, then later in a small home on a piece of my grandparent’s land. We struggled, to say the least. 

I had no clue–ZERO idea–how to handle money, and this landed me in a world of trouble several times before I finally taught myself to manage money in responsible ways.

I not only completed that four-year degree, I went on to receive a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. Once I moved away from Alabama and began working in the professional world, I dug myself out of the hole I was in through sheer will and a determination to learn as much as I possibly could about debt, savings and investing. I read every personal finance book I could get my hands on. 

And still, STILL, I made major mistakes. I was in a cycle of accruing debt, paying it off, and doing it all over again.

I could have read every personal finance book in the world, but until I dealt with my emotional spending, the psychology of money and the beliefs that were handed down to me from my own family of origin–I was doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m PASSIONATE about money, for one reason and one reason only–MONEY BUYS FREEDOM.

Money is just a tool–and like any tool, it can be used to build something sturdy and secure, or it can be used to destroy.

Having money–for me–isn’t about accumulating stuff, or taking big fancy trips. It’s about the freedom of CHOICE, the ability to make the most important decisions in my life based on my own best interests rather than fear and scarcity. And it’s about having the ability to be generous with others, taking care of my community. 

I’ve spent much of my adult life yo-yoing between extreme deprivation and reckless spending. I am so incredibly thankful that I did the work I did to find more balance in my financial life, to make money a useful tool that works FOR me and not AGAINST me.

If I can support you in creating a healthier relationship with money, it’s my favorite thing to so…so please reach out!

–Amy

Here’s a subject that’s come up a lot for me and Jen lately in our deep-dive inner world conversations  business meetings. What does it mean to be a seeker?

For those of you who listen to Glennon Doyle’s podcast, she talks about being a seeker–and that the nature of a seeker is to always be seeking, but not really finding.  In fact, there’s danger in a seeker “finding” something, because the attachment to that spiritual paradigm, or personality type, or whatever it is can become too extreme and then block the seeker’s own inner knowing.

If you’ve ever wondered how people become enmeshed in high-control groups (“cults”), it starts with being a seeker. (I confess that “cults” are my current hyper-fixation/obsession)

Every wonderful quality has a shadow side. Seekers are curious, open, see beauty and wonder in the world, and teach those of us who are NOT seekers about the magic of being a human being in this wild world.

The shadow side can look a couple of different ways. Seekers can seem fickle, not grounded in reality, and flaky. 

Seekers can also be more susceptible to a phenomenon I like to call, in all caps, THE WAY. They can so desperately want to make sense of the world within and around them that they can give too much of their inner knowing and authority away to some force outside of them, and then it becomes not “a way” but THE WAY.

Finders look for what is already there. They often say things like “the research says…” or ask questions like “what’s the evidence for that?” They’re more logical, more reality-based. They find INFORMATION, check the source, and that’s that. They are our truth-sayers, our grounding rods, the steady hands that guide us. 

And the shadow side? Certainty and rigidity…which then blocks curiosity, personal growth and magical mystery.

Isn’t that interesting? The shadow side for seekers AND finders can involve certainty, knowing THE WAY.

Most of us are going to lean one way or the other on the Seeker/Finder spectrum. But here’s the really cool thing–we can consciously grow that more underdeveloped part! We can practice tapping into the part that is less accessible, and over time it becomes MORE accessible and available to us.

And bringing this back around to your business (I do eventually get there 😉)…

Your business needs the seeker AND the finder. The balance is essential for the gifts that each of these types bring to the table. 

We need the grounding and the dreaming, the security and the risk, the logic and the magic. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a business partner or a team that brings all of these qualities into your business (this is probably the most amazing thing we discovered during our NLW planning retreat).

Or maybe you’re a solopreneur, and you can do more work within yourself to access both your inner seeker and your finder.

Either way, recognizing the value in both of these types and bringing their best qualities into your business could be the missing piece when it comes to growing your business.

Which type do YOU lean towards?

♥️, 
Amy (85% Finder, 15% Seeker)
Next Level Wealth Coaching