About me.

The rambling story of how I ended up teaching others how to be holistic life coaches.

My entry into creating a life I loved began in the 80’s, in the time of big hair and lots of eye makeup. Back then I was a competitive swimmer. My high school swim coach brought in a man who trained us in using our mind to visualize outcomes we wanted both in the pool and in our life. Mindset training wasn’t talked about back then. So it was really “out there”. I used it constantly for my swim races, my tests in school, to get jobs, etc. It really changed my life. This was my introduction to mind/body work and I loved it.

As I approached college, I already knew the mind/body space was something I was drawn to. The only thing I thought would relate to that was to get a degree in psychology. So I majored in that. I learned so much about the human mind and psyche. But there wasn’t the “how to create your life the way you want it” part.

The summer I graduated from college I got married and had applied to grad school, thinking I would become a therapist. Soon thereafter I walked into a local coffee shop where I grew up and bumped into a well known therapist in my town. He pulled me aside and asked why I wanted to go into therapy. He was nearing retirement and had insight I didn’t have. I told him I wanted to help people create a great life. He said, “Amy, therapy is a lot of things, but you are going to spend much more of your time with your client working on their past and current situation, you won’t have much time to help them create their future. Go become a life coach instead.” This was the early 90’s and life coaching was hardly recognized. I told him I could consider it. I didn’t become a life coach at that point, but the seed had been planted.

Instead of going to grad school, I became a volunteer coordinator for a couple of years and dove into being a mom. Soon after our first child was born, we started foster parenting to what would be 84 foster children over the next decade. I had 3 more babies in the next 6 years.

My 4th child was born in 1999. At that point I was a mom to 4 kiddos and a foster mother to others who were living with us in rural Minnesota. Much of my focus and attention at that point was to the care and upbringing of the kids. We had built a home in the country to have space and nature for the family to exist in. A couple years previously, I had been introduced to yoga through the gift of a video for my 30th birthday. At that point I didn’t know a lot about how yoga was actually a whole system for creating a holistic life that felt free and unencumbered, and was meant to be learned and applied to my everyday life. I just knew I felt better after practicing.

Although I was just touching on the tip of this holistic journey, it called me to dive deeper. With that pull, I completed my first yoga teacher training, and then another. After a couple of years I was teaching a lot of yoga and bought a yoga studio and was growing that through the addition of amazing staff . The following year I opened a yoga teacher training school.

During the first year of that program , a student told me about a life coaching training program she had taken. I immediately signed up and two months later was flying down to Tampa, Florida to be trained for 5 days. I left there with a ton of information, but realized on the plane ride home i didn't actually know how to deliver this information to a potential client.

I worked with a few clients over the next year but wasn’t seeing that lasting change I was hoping for. I figured I needed more training. So I dove in and got more training, including a year-long program in holistic nutrition and wellness, and an intensive, year-long success coaching program. I learned so much good information and tools.

Concepts of something are good, but not life changing all on their own. Too often, we learn a new tool, try it out on our life, but quickly go back to our old self. There was something missing in my work with clients but I couldn’t figure out what.

Then one Saturday I was teaching a four hour long workshop in my yoga teacher training school and at one point said, “Knowing how you want your life to feel and then shift to become that new version of yourself is where lasting change happens. This is the holistic approach to changing your life.” As the group wrote that statement down, I realized I hadn’t ever combined my life coach training with the holistic model of living that I was teaching every week. It hit me that combining those two things is what I did in my own life with incredible results. Why hadn’t I combined these two things in my coaching? Within a few days, I shifted my coaching approach to combine all those great coaching tools I had learned, with the holistic approach I had been teaching. Instantly, my clients started seeing lasting positive changes in their lives.

It worked so well I started a second company that focused on holistic life coaching for people. I realized when we try to compartmentalize our life and try to change just that one area, without focusing on how we want our whole life to feel, we make short term shifts, but not lasting ones.

I added this new model I created into my yoga teacher school and those students began creating massive shifts in their life too. Watching the incredible changes through these students solidified to me how powerful the combination of holistic living and life coaching were.

We are living in a new world, one that many of us felt was coming. It is a time where we are slowing down and taking a collective pause as a unified world. People are realizing they have been like hamsters on a wheel for far too long. They want something deeper, something more fulfilling. This is a perfect time to dive into that calling you have felt to build your career helping others in the holistic field. The powerful combination of life coaching tools, quantum physics, mindfulness, body work, cutting edge medical research, and traditional spiritual practices can be aligned to create a new paradigm for living.

That is what this program entails.

Combining the most powerful practices and application tools available to help your clients shed all the parts they no longer need, to reveal the free, vibrant, person that was underneath it all along.

The ability for a person to experience physical and emotional well-being, freedom from limiting or self-defeating beliefs, clarity, abundance, vitality, and creativity has never been more attainable. The vast array of information available to us points to one conclusion, that what we seek is already within us. This program is a method to put this understanding into practice.

Fondly,

Creator, the Holistic Life Coach Training Program at HeartWork