Welcome to the Rich Coach Club, the podcast that teaches you how to build your dream coaching practice and how to significantly increase your income. If you're a coach and you're determined to start making more money, this show is for you. I'm master certified life coach Susan Hyatt, and I'm psyched for you to join me on this journey. You're listening to episode number 22, here we go.
Are you a life coach with no life? I know that might seem like a funny question, but I’m serious. There is nothing more depressing than a burnout life coach who hates her life. And I’ve met so many life coaches that complain to me that it’s so hard to find clients and it’s so hard to make money consistently.
Well, if you’re a life coach and you’re struggling to get people to hire you, let’s start by looking at your life. What’s a typical day in your life? Does it feel stale and boring, or inspiring? Is your life filled with pleasure, adventure? Are your days filled with beautiful moments and experiences, or most days, are you basically sitting at home in your frumpy sweatpants checking emails, stressing about the fact that you don’t have enough clients and feeling lethargic and uninspired?
If you’re not enjoying your life, people can sense it. Even if you post the prettiest photos on Instagram, clients will intuitively sense that something is off and they won’t be inspired to hire you. That’s why, if you work as a life coach, it’s so important for you to actually have a life.
You need to practice what you preach. You need to be a role model for your clients and lead by example. You need to build your own big beautiful inspiring life so that you can help other people do the same thing. That’s what we’re discussing on today’s episode. As always, let’s begin with your Two-Minute Pep-Talk.
Here’s your Two-Minute Pep-Talk for the week. This is the part of the show where I share some encouragement and inspiration to get your week started off right, and I try to keep things to 120 seconds or less.
What does it mean to live a big beautiful inspiring life? What does it mean to you personally? For me, it means that my day I filled with beautiful moments, and these moments aren’t necessarily flashy or fancy. In fact, they’re usually not. They’re usually very, very simple.
Some of my favorite moments are that moment when I’m sitting with my favorite blue porcelain teacup and a book, or that moment where I’m jogging outside in the crisp air, that moment when I’m slipping into super silky PJs at the end of the day. Oh my god, I can’t wait for that later. That moment when I’m riding in the back of an Uber or a Lyft car and I look up from my phone, look out the window and admire all the twinkly holiday lights – those are just a few of the little sweet beautiful moments that make my life feel rich.
What about you? What are some beautiful moments and rich moments that you would love to experience during your day? For example, I have a client who hired me years ago for weight loss. And one of the simple things that we did to create presence at mealtime for her was I encouraged her to get on Etsy and order a cute cloth napkin. And she even takes a cloth napkin now with her on plane rides to remind her to be in the present moment, to really use all her senses while she’s eating.
And it has completely transformed her life; not just her body, but bringing presence into everyday moments by just having a little $5 napkin. When your day is filled with beautiful moments, ten your life begins to feel different. You feel more inspired, more grateful, more alive.
So if your life has been feeling stressful, stake, or boring lately, you probably don’t need to go out and buy a bright red Lamborghini. You probably just need to make space in your day for little moments of beauty. Start there.
So I want to encourage you to write down three beautiful moments that you would love to experience during your day. Write them down, and then go create those moments. Create what you crave.
Now, we’re moving into the part of the show where I give shout-outs to you; shout-outs to listeners, clients, all the wonderful people in my business community who make this gig so much better.
Today, I want to give a shout-out to Mary. So, Mary left me a five-star review on iTunes and she says, “Susan Hyatt is the real deal. Her podcast is jam-packed with great insights, inspiration, and information. If you’re serious about moving forward, subscribe and join me over in Susan Hyatt’s Rich Coach Club on Facebook. I’m so grateful for all the value Susan adds to my life and business on a regular basis through her free offerings. Susan’s work is absolutely first class. I can’t say enough about her generosity of spirit, her infectious marketing, and how grateful I am to call her my coach.”
Thank you so much, Mary. That absolutely made my day. And hey, if you have something to say about the show, please send an email to my team or post a five-star iTunes review about the show, or post something on social media and tag me, and you might hear your name on a future episode. I love giving shout-outs to folks in my community, so holla at me. Thank you so much for the love. I love you right back.
It’s time for an interview. And today, I’m chatting with Amy Love. Amy is definitely a woman who is living a big, beautiful, and inspiring life. She’s not sitting at home creating a permanent dent in the couch. She’s out there and she is living.
Amy has the most fascinating story. She became a doula at age 18. She spent four years – the past four years – traveling and working all around the world. She used to run a farm in New Hampshire. She also owned a spa. I have so many questions for Amy.
I’m so curious to ask about Amy’s current coaching practice, what she specializes in, how she finds clients, and more. So let’s talk to Miss Amy Love.
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Susan: Welcome to the podcast, Amy Love.
Amy: Hello, so happy to be here.
Susan: I’m so excited to have you here because we were chatting in Savannah. I was so lucky to meet up with Amy while I was running an event, and she, of course, is location independent right now, so she can bop around anywhere. And we were having an amazing coffee, and I got the idea to invite Amy onto this podcast because she represents so many amazing things that, I think, many entrepreneurs are super curious about, one of which is having a location independent lifestyle. And also, Amy is a great example of something that’s near and dear to my heart, which is being a multi-passionate human being. And I think, often, on these internet streets, focus, focus, focus on one thing, one thing, one thing, which is true. And also, many of us are multi-passionate. So, Amy talk to us about – let’s go back. Let’s go way back. You’re from Texas.
Amy: I am from Dallas, yes.
Susan: Dallas, Texas, and a fellow southerner. So you started your entrepreneurship journey doing what?
Amy: I started super young. So I always sort of had that spirit. It was like a family joke of, like, selling the Girl Scout cookies, and my dad was in sales, so it was not, “Do you want boxes?” It’s, “How many boxes do you want?”
Susan: Oh my god, you guys, write this down. That’s already a gold tip. Like, you go into it with the assumption, like, you’re buying from me.
Amy: Oh, you’re buying, and you’re buying a lot. I was top sales like every year. It worked like gangbusters, it was so funny. So it was always kind of obvious that I was going to do my own thing. In school, I was the one that got the marks, like controls talking, doesn’t follow directions, and now I get paid for that, so it’s amazing.
Susan: Same, that was always my conduct report.
Amy: Yeah, so they kind of knew. But I actually had a lot of health challenges as a child. And when I was around 11 to 13, I had migraines every day for two years, and it was horrific. And hospitalizations and all that didn’t work and it was finally an herb feverfew that worked for me. And just the fact that this was outside the realm of anything I was raised with. It shook me awake. So I started, like, doing a lot of exploration into alternative medicine, you know, like how things can be different than we expect. I was exposed to a lot of thought leaders, like Louise Hay and Marianne Williamson and Wayne Dyer, and I started seeing, I can take ownership of my life and I can question everything I’ve been taught. So I was actually on a premed path at that point and shifted gears to go into massage therapy and started my own spa at 18.
Susan: What? Wait, you started your own spa at 18 years old?
Amy: I did. In fact, I started it really at 17, but I couldn’t get my lease yet. They wouldn’t let me sign.
Susan: Oh my god, my husband, who is a commercial realtor, I can’t wait to tell him this part of this story, that you had to wait to sign your lease.
Amy: I so did, yeah. And it was really soon after I signed it, I was like, let’s go. So I did that and I did that for a few years and loved it. I was a birth doula – I helped women – at 18 years old – I’m helping bring new life into the world.
Susan: Wait a minute, so you’re running a spa at 18 years old and, oh, by the way, you were also a birthing doula?
Amy: Yes, I was.
Susan: So tell me, at 18 years old, what was your drive, desire, motivation for being a doula? Because most 18-year-old girls I know, that is the last thing they would want to get involved in.
Amy: Well, I had been in childcare from the time I was, like, 10. I started babysitting as soon as my mom would let me take, like, the American Red Cross certified babysitting course, I took it. I printed out business cards. I was going around to neighbors, like, “Hi, I’m Amy, I’m 10, and I can babysit and I’m certified.” You know, we have a family friend who tells this story to this day – and her son’s now in the military – and I used to babysit him when he was tiny. So I was already in that mindset. And I worked in the nursery at the church and I had worked at different childcare centers. And I just loved everything about babies. And as a massage therapist, I started doing prenatal massage and helping moms, so I saw all the things that they needed. And then, just like being with women in that connection, in that space – I had done rounds at the hospital as part of my premed path and got to witness a birth. We got to witness a surgery, we got to do all this cool stuff, but I got to witness a birth and it was, like, the most life-changing thing. I thought there was no person, and now there’s a person. This is amazing.
So I wondered how to be involved with that. So I took the Bradley Method class at like 18, and you’re in there with all the other couples. That’s so funny. But I started assisting in births and doing the massage portions for moms, and then it was just like a natural progression. So I got certified through DONA and started doing doula work. And it was amazing. It was just very, very demanding because you are on call 24 hours a day two weeks on either side of a due date. And when you leave, you don’t know how long you’re going to be gone. So it was really hard to do everything that I wanted to do and be there in the way that I wanted to be there for the moms.
Susan: That is just unbelievable that at such a young age, you had such a sense of being organized and showing up and being devoted to what you said you wanted to do. I mean, this is fantastic. So we already have spa owner, we already have doula, then there’s more. I know because I’ve heard this.
Amy: Yeah, there’s so much more. I did the spa. I had my own, and then when I moved, just to another town within Texas, I did work at other spas, like a hotel spa and I was a wellness manager [...], like, worked with global brands to do events, and that was a blast. I really enjoyed that. And then, I kind of couldn’t handle doing all the physical work anymore. I had, again, those health challenges, so I had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and all kinds of stuff going on, so I could not keep doing massage at the level I needed to bring in the income I needed to bring in. So I decided to go back to school. I was on a business path. I got a part time job at a small corporation as a receptionist, and very quickly moved into an office manager role. And then, I noticed that these leads were being thrown away by the salespeople. Part of my job was to print out the leads, hand them to the sales people, and I literally watched them throw them in the trash because they came from the website. And this was, like, in 2000, I’m going to say, 2000, 2001. And they didn’t believe that anybody would ever buy anything online.
Susan: Wow.
Amy: Kind of mind-blowing now, but I literally watched them throw this away. So I want to the owner of the company and I said, if you will teach me how to sell, I will take these leads and work them because I really believe that there’s potential here. So within about a year’s timeframe, I was a multimillion-dollar sales producer for that company. I moved into head of sales and marketing, took the entire corporation global and sold buildings all over the world.
Susan: Oh my god, okay, so let’s talk about this for a second. Let’s break this down for people listening who have a hard time with sales; why do you think you went from zero to top of the company so quickly?
Amy: I knew that there was such a possibility there. I believed in the product 100%. I knew that we were selling a really top-quality product. This was in the equestrian – this is really funny. I sold horse barns and metal buildings. I was 21, I think, and I had plumb and fuchsia hair and a tongue ring and I was selling to all these guys in boots and jeans that totally did not take me seriously. And my name was Amy Love, which they didn’t think was my real name. They thought that was my stage name or something. But I just didn’t take that. I was like, no, you’re dealing with me. I would get a lot of that, especially in small town Texas. I would get a lot of, like, who’s the boss and let me talk to the man and all. And I was like, you’re dealing with me. Here I am. If you want it, I got it. So I just really believed in the product and I just sold the heck out of it. I just knew it was possible. And I had already seen what being online could do. I knew that we were going that direction as a country and an industry, and I thought, they’re missing out so much. It was just like a little local thing and I just saw these people throwing potential away. And some of these customers would email two or three times, “I need a quote on this, I need a quote on that…” and they’re sitting in the garbage.
Susan: Wow, so okay, I want to back up a little bit. Here you are, pink and fuchsia hair, nose ring – did you say nose ring?
Amy: Tongue ring.
Susan: Tongue ring – tongue ring? Multiple colored hair, like 21…
Amy: I mean, it was tastefully done – the hair was tastefully done, but yes, it was bold and bright, yeah.
Susan: Right, obviously not the stereotypical barn saleswoman or person in this very patriarchal industry, selling the crap out of it, and the reason why is because you knew it was an amazing product that would help these people and you also knew they were missing out in the online arena.
Amy: Yeah, they didn’t have a way for somebody to request a quote online. Somebody had to literally – it was a really basic crappy website and it didn’t have an online brochure, it didn’t show colors. It had two really old pictures of a barn that had been done – it was like a Polaroid that had been scanned in, and I’m like, oh no, no, no, no. So I built the entire new website. I hired an industry professional and we worked together to build an online color picker. We revolutionized the entire advertising campaign. We put up billboards, we were in all sorts of magazines, we went to conventions. And it literally took the company global. I mean, I had a barn nearly in every state. We shipped out to Hawaii. I sold barns to Jamaica. It was crazy.
Susan: You know, okay, here you are. At 18, you had a spa and you were a birthing doula. At 21, you’re the top of this barn sales company. And then, when did you get the twinkle or nudge or make the decision to do what was next?
Amy: So, I was actually really stressed out because, again, I built this to such a large following and we didn’t really have the support – the company ownership really wasn’t willing to hire more people. I was doing so many roles and I thought, you know, I am really getting this tug to go back into the healing field. And I was getting married and I was moving across town. I had a home – my husband to be already had a home, so I was commuting a lot. I thought, this is just not – this isn’t what I want to do forever. This has been great. This has been fun. This has been a challenge, but this isn’t what I want to do forever. So I knew I wanted to get back into the spa world, but I didn’t want to be doing the hands-on massage and doing eight massages a day.
So I actually came up with the idea to do a spa party company, where I would have a group of massage therapists and estheticians and nail technicians that worked for me and we would go onsite so somebody’s home or lake house or event center and we would put on a spa party and do everything on location. Because I had already done massage at people’s houses, I’d done corporate chair massage for, like [...] and Fujitsu and these kind of companies that bring it in, so I thought, let’s just take it to the next level. And we did, because within three months, it was a multi six-figure company. We got national media attention.
Susan: What? Stop it.
Amy: It’s crazy. We were named Best of Spas by Bright TV and I was on NBC within three months.
Susan: Wait, stop, stop, so much goodness. Okay, so here’s what I love about this story, is that she took something that wasn’t working but that she loved and decided how to change the way it was delivered. So, massage was being delivered in a new way. So, so often, coaches will say, “Well I hate one on one coaching…” or, “That retreat sucked so I’m never doing retreats again.” But really, if you love coaching, you love the art of coaching, you can present it in so many new and different creative ways. And so, that’s exactly what you did. Now, within three months, getting national news attention, how did that happen?
Amy: How did that happen? I think that I sent out a press release, I did contact my local, like D Magazine, D Bridal. We did a bridal convention. And Dallas Bridal Convention is enormous. At least it was at that point. I don’t know what it is today. I imagine it’s still very big. And so we had only been in business that short time, but I had my staff come in, we just formed a line across the top of the booth – like we had a booth at the convention – and just within two days, we handed out 10,000 flyers, business cards. I mean, we were just talking to people, talking to people, talking to people. And I booked a lot of work from that, and I think it just got out from there.
Susan: Wow.
Amy: I can’t actually remember any specific spark that did it, but it was all of a sudden, like Lucky Magazine and DailyCandy, Home and Garden, all these things were coming in and I’m just like, “Oh wow, this is great. This is amazing.”
Susan: Oh my gosh, okay, so then what’s next, miss multi-passionate?
Amy: That’s the deal, multi-passionate, right? But I focused on each of these things for two to four or more years at a time, so it wasn’t, like…
Susan: It’s not all at once…
Amy: No, that’s too much. So again, I was having health challenges. This is such a recurring theme. And then I would get to a certain point, get to burnout, have an adrenal collapse. I was having lots of issues and pregnancy loss and all kinds of things. So I got to the point where I was like, I just literally can’t keep doing all of these events. I did a 4000-person event the weekend before my wedding, which I planned all myself. It was just insane. So I thought, you know, I can’t just keep doing this. And we found out about, you know, real food. I got some food allergy testing back. I had to make a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes and I really started going more into nutritional therapy. And so I went and got all of my certification for nutritional therapy through the Nutritional Therapy Association, and my husband loved the training so much that I did, he actually did it the year after I did. I'm so lucky, he was so on board, so supportive, really wanted to be involved in my business. He comes from a software background so that was not his milieu at all but he did it. And so I was a group leader in his class and we knew right from that start of that business we had had so much success with online business before and I had even done some consulting at that point for other people in the Dallas area that we knew we were going to be moving.
We were going to be moving from Dallas to Connecticut to finish our training. I knew that we wouldn't be there forever, and I thought, okay, this has to be online, this has to be location independent, I can't have a brick and mortar again because I'm not going to build up a local community and then move. And so we just from the get go set it up that way. And so I started my practice, my nutritional therapy practice online, working with clients via phone and internet. And then as an answer to my client's requests, they always wanted a recipe or they wanted a how to, I started a blog. And at the time I didn't know anything about blogging, I didn't know there was any potential in it. It really was just to help my clients. But it took like gangbusters and really grew a following of its own and we just - we were on Facebook, all these things, and it grew to over 200,000...
Susan: Wow.
Amy: Yeah, really, really quickly in two years. And then we just started incorporating more into the blog. So that took on a life of its own, I still have the practice, we were living in Connecticut...
Susan: Can I back up for just a second? So I love the fact that you decided once again to follow the breadcrumbs and say like, okay, I'm not going to have a brick and mortar anymore because we're doing this training in Connecticut, it makes sense, and becoming location independent was a decision born from the way your business was evolving. It wasn't...
Amy: And our life.
Susan: Yeah, right. And so one thing that I really admire listening to all the different stories and the different reinventions is that they all happened as a result of you paying attention to what lights you up, what people were asking for, and you noticed a gap in what was being offered and what you could deliver.
Amy: Right, yes, absolutely. And everything sort of built on the next thing because I still, even to this day, use a lot of the things I learned running a spa. Not just the business but literally the energy work and holistic methodology to how I work with my clients. So it all builds on each other. So we were living in Connecticut and our time there was sort of up and we had this big open-ended question like, what could we do? And at that point we sort of said, well, we could work from home, home could be anywhere. We just had this almost endless options of where we could move or what we could do, so naturally we decided to move to the seacoast of New Hampshire and start a farm because why not?
Susan: Okay, this I love so much because let me tell you something Amy Love, there are many cheesy things about me and one of the cheesiest things, secrets, is that even though they're completely patriarchal, I watch Hallmark holiday movies like they are going out of style. I know the formula, I argue with the storyline, and I still watch them. And one of - I was telling my husband last night as he was grumbling about the second Hallmark movie of the night, I was like, holy crap, Amy Love moving to New Hampshire for this Christmas tree farm is a Hallmark movie plotline, but let's talk about it.
Amy: Oh my god, that is hysterical. I love it so much. Yeah, if you look at me you don't say, well, there's a farmer. You just don't. Matt and I, my husband, we had never had more than dogs, a fish, a hermit crab. We didn't know. It started with let's move, we want to be more self-sufficient, we're nutritional therapists, we're really into real food, and we're looking for a certain quality of product that it's very hard to find. We wanted organic, soy-free, pasture-raised, heritage-breed. All these boxes to check, and it was really hard to find that at this time. This would have been in like, 2011 I think. And it was not as mainstream yet, and so we thought okay, well we can do this.
We're going to move to the country, and I had read all these books and taken all these classes. It all made it seem pretty easy and straightforward. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but man, I did not know. So we thought we would just have chickens and we were like, great, backyard eggs, this will be wonderful. Then maybe we'll have a few extra for meat birds and then well, if you're going to have chickens, it's not that much harder to have ducks, and then we should probably have a goat or two or three or four so that we can milk them. And then if you're going to have all that, we might as well have rabbits and pigs. So anyway, we ended up with over 200 animals within two years.
Susan: Oh my god. What?
Amy: Yeah. And it was just my husband and I in the middle of the woods in New Hampshire and running my practice full-time, still doing the blog, he was doing software development full-time from home. All this stuff was going on and then we had the farm too, and the house that we bought, the property that we bought was not actually set up to be a farm. It was a beautiful home. And so we had to build barns and put in fencing and we had goats living in our basement for a time because of all the coyotes.
Susan: This is like, this is an example of - this reminds me of quick starts, which I am, and it's like, well how hard could that be? I'll just build a farm, and now you got goats in your basement.
Amy: Yeah, and we went through hurricanes and blizzards, we had an earthquake. Who knew New Hampshire would be so exciting? One thing about New Hampshire is that it snows a lot and so we had to dig the animals out, like, paths to their houses, paths for them to get out and run around and free range in the snow. And you'd get two feet overnight, three feet the next day, and it's like, oh my gosh, hours and hours of digging, digging, digging snow. It was intense. Again, we didn't know anything about this before we started going down the path. So again, reading books, taking classes, I connected with people in the community as soon as I got there, through meet up. I started going to events to learn more about what I didn't know because we wanted to do it right. You have 200 lives depending on you. So this is not something that you can take lightly. It wasn't just, oh, well we got these animals and we're totally irresponsible about it. It was we are doing everything the right way, we're breeding, we're doing everything like following bloodline - all these things that I had no idea even existed.
Susan: Wow, amazing. And so then after doing this for how many years?
Amy: Three years.
Susan: Three years you did this and then when did you get the idea that you wanted to make another shift?
Amy: Well, we had actually - we lost a pregnancy and it was like a shatter through the middle of our lives because we had done all this work to build up our nest and I had done all this work on healing and then to have that devastating loss just rocked me. So I actually had to - I said okay, I mean, immediately, that is it, this is over. Because while I was pregnant Matt was doing the farm chores by himself, I was being so careful like god forbid I get kicked by a goat or something. I had to stay in and every day he was getting more and more miserable doing all the chores. It was just too much. And I thought, this is not sustainable, this is not what we - this is not it. And so we downsized the farm.
We sold the animals and took a winter away. And we had a house sitter come and stay at the house but there weren't any animals there. We of course took our dogs with us, did a winter away, went back to Texas, did some road trips from there. Just to kind of come back to center and heal a bit and just realign because I feel like - and I see this in my clients a lot that when they go through this huge transition and say that they do have children or something, those first three years, you lose yourself, and it's the same thing when you're dealing with 200 animals. You lose yourself. So I remember crying at the salon like, getting my hair done like oh my god, there I am. Where have I been, you know?
Susan: Right? So you were like, this isn't it, we need to heal some, and then through the process, this is what I like is that you took time to really grieve and to pay attention enough to see yourself at the salon and to hear your next calling, which was what?
Amy: Well, I actually read a book. It was just this weird little e-book, I don't even know how I found it. And it was about this couple that lived in a van and I thought, wow, that sounds hard and also amazing. And I just happened to say to Matt, "What if we did that? What if we sold everything? We can work from anywhere, what if we just sold everything, downsized, and did that?" And he's like, "You in a van, this is what you want?" And I'm like, "Well, maybe not." So we went and drove like Sprinter vans and tried to like - I'm like, well there's the bedroom, oh, that's it. There's no kitchen, there's no bathroom, that's not going to work for me. We actually ended up with kind of the biggest tour bus that you can get but we decided okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go back to New Hampshire, we're going to downsize everything from 3000 square foot to what we were going to live in was 400 square feet, and we're going to get this tour bus and it's going to be a two-year plan. Because we knew we wanted to travel but we had our three dogs and it was not going to work for us to be flying to Europe with the dogs and trying to find an Airbnb or whatever. We thought, okay, we're going to do - our dogs were older, we're going to do a west coast year and an east coast year, see the things that we want to see. We've set up our business so that we can work from the road, so let's do this, let's meet our community in person, let's do this real food road trip, we'll write about all the farmers markets and restaurants and all the cool things to see in the different cities, and we'll do this for two years. Well, we're still doing it four years later.
So we've done west coast, east coast, west coast, east coast. We've gone to all 50 states except for the Dakotas and it's not on purpose. We keep trying to plan the Dakotas and it's funny, now it's a joke that every time we plan the Dakotas something comes up. We lost our dogs at the end of last year and we started doing more international travel. So that's kind of where we are right now with the travel is that it's been four years in this tour bus and we've done Canada and I mean, it's just - I'm in Miami right now.
Susan: It's unbelievable to me because I love that so many of us have so many different sides to ourselves and we talk ourselves out of having so many experiences and trying different things, and one of the things I love about you, it's like okay, so you went from a farm of 200 animals to being in a Mercedes Sprinter and going to 50 of the 52 states and now going international. It's just - I am just in love with this because for those of you listening, how many of you, me included, it's like, oh well I couldn't do that, or we tend to get into this black and white thinking where if we do it it's forever, right? And it's like you owned the farm for three years, you have been location independent for four years. And whatever's going to happen next, it doesn't have to be forever and ever.
Amy: Yes, and I do want to say I'm not in a Sprinter van. I'm in a huge 43-foot tour bus with a bath and a half and all my stuff. Like, I could not do the van. I'm not that cool.
Susan: The Sprinter van was a no go.
Amy I'm not that cool. I actually thought about what - as we were touring things, I thought what do I want on my worst day. When I'm sick, I have the flu, when I've got cramps, when I've just had it with the world, what do I want on my worst day, and I did not want to be in a tiny cramped in space with two or three dogs and my husband and everything. I needed room, I need my king size bed, I need my laundry with me, I cook everything from scratch so it's like I need my kitchen. And that is how I've been able to make it work because we have all of our stuff with us and it doesn't even feel like we're in a big motor home.
It feels like we are at home because when you go from place to place, you go to a resort, you get set up, and then that is home, and we tow our car, so we just go do exploration like we would normally do but then we come home and home is always the same. So it's the same bed every night and all of those things. And that was really helpful for me because trying to think about adding in all the other variabilities of okay, you're going to have a new bed and a new shower and you've got to pack your wardrobe every time and all your equipment and everything else, I thought I can't leap into that just yet. I couldn't make that mental leap. What I could do was say, alright this solves these problems, and then now I just have to worry about mapping out my route and exploring different things in different cities.
Susan: And this is interesting to me because it's also a different way to do the location independent lifestyle. So for those of us listening who maybe have felt like looking at guys with their backpacks sleeping in the airport and whatever, the Tim Ferriss model of having a backpack and shipping a trunk ahead of you to where you're going and that's it, or the expensive, more expensive, I think, version of Airbnb-ing it everywhere you go, this is a really interesting option where you can have a giant motor home decked out exactly the way that you want it, which oh my god, if my husband listens to this episode, I should like somehow block him from ever listening to this interview because this is what he would love to do.
Amy: Yeah, you'll be in trouble.
Susan: I'll be in big trouble.
Amy: No, it's really fun. It's just - I totally, totally agree. I am not a camper, I am not an RV person, I don't want to do that. It is literally - it was the way for us to go to the different places and do the travel that we wanted to do, but like I said, have our same creature comforts at the same time because we totally looked at the Airbnb model and I love that. We still incorporate that a lot, especially now that we don't have our dogs because we'll be like - like when we were in Charleston and we were going to come see you in Savannah so we just did this little Airbnb for a weekend and it's fabulous. But to do that all the time and just be dependent on other people for where you're going to stay and then you don't know what you're getting until you get there, we had heard some kind of horror stories and I thought, well, let's start with this and see where we go. Because remember, we're only two years, and then it was like okay, we've done it for two, let's keep going, and then we've done it four and it's like okay, let's keep doing. And now we're sort of reevaluating like okay, we want to do more international travel, so we are looking at more of an Airbnb model, we're looking at maybe getting a home base somewhere in Europe and then branching out from there. There's so many options.
Susan: Well see, this is what I love about having you on the show is that your story is all about that. That you can ask questions, follow your heart, and there are options. And it may not look like how everybody else is doing it but you can create what you want, and I love the question that you asked yourself when you told me this in person when you asked yourself like, what do I need on my worst day? I think that that is such a powerful question that all of us, whether you're working from a home office or you're going into a cubicle in a skyscraper or you want to be location independent is really thinking about your decisions and thinking about okay, how can I curate things so that I have what I need on my worst day. Because we're all going to have those.
Amy: Always, yeah. And it's really, really important to make sure that you have that support. I mean for me, that's what keeps me going when things get tough. It's like I have that soft place to land, whatever that may be. And sometimes, that's as simple as my relationship with my husband is my soft place to land. So it's like, I just need that to support my springboard to the next thing because when you're living in possibility, when you're taking these huge steps, you still have to make sure like, am I okay? Am I being true to myself? Am I doing self-care? It's really, really important to evaluate that so that you have a strong foundation from which to take the big leap.
Susan: So what's - as we wrap this up Amy, I could talk to you all day...
Amy: We so could.
Susan: I know. We have time. We have time outside of the podcast, which is good. What is your next big leap? What do you see for yourself in 2019?
Amy: Well, I've absolutely gone back to working with women entrepreneurs to build the life and business of their dreams. So this is something that I've done on and off for 15 years and then for the past nine years with my business, Real Food Whole Health, the nutrition practice, I worked with women who were in the health sphere and wanted to build their business online that wanted to sort of dwell in that possibility space and see like, what exactly can I do? I have this plan of being a health coach and what does that look like on a bigger scale? I want an empire, I want to do all of these things but without losing my mind at the same time. So I have actually broken that part of the business off from Real Food Whole Health and it is now called The Lovely Revolution, and my mission with this is to help women bring the lovely back, like move over Timberlake, we're bringing lovely back.
Susan: I love it.
Amy: Yes, we are bringing lovely back because so many women, I would see this time and time again, that they would get so into their business. Like, you didn't start your business to end up hating your job, right? They would get so into their business that it went from being like a nine to five to a 24/7 365 and they did not have a life and they were miserable and they're like, I'm burned out, I don't know why I'm doing this, I'm completely disconnected from why I started my business in the first place. And I saw this time and time again, and not just with women in the health sphere, with every woman entrepreneur, with probably every entrepreneur, but women especially I feel like we need more of that beauty, that pleasure, that connection. And we did not have that. So that's really been my goal and that's really what I'm expanding so I've done the podcast with Real Food Whole Health, we're switching it over to Lovely Revolution.
We're taking this more as a lifestyle business because we're going to not only talk about business and life, it's going to be what goes into that, what really is the lovely, where did it go and how are we bringing it back. So what does that look like through exploring a full sensory experience in the world through food, through style, through self-care, through relationships. We're doing in-person events, I've already been doing dinners as we go to different cities, I've been doing that for a couple of years. But we're starting to do more retreats. I just think the time is so ripe for women to come together in person. Like, we've all done this cool thing online but we're behind our screens all the time and we're just super disconnected. So how do we come together as a community, support each other, kind of fill up our cups, and then go back to our empires and make change in the world and leave a legacy.
Susan: I am with you on this. More getting out from behind the screen and connecting with people in actual real life.
Amy: Yes.
Susan: Thank you so much.
Amy: Thank you, this has been fun. I forgot some of this stuff.
Susan: I mean, my god, there's a memoir in the making here. this could be several Hallmark movies. And I want to thank you for your time today. You guys, check Amy out. We've got all the links below about how you can be part of the lovely revolution too.
Amy: Thank you.
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You probably have a to-do list but do you have a to-live list? Alright, I want to encourage you to make a list of moments, memories, experiences that you want to have in the next month. Things to experience. Not just things to do. So for instance, have breakfast outside in the sun, make grandma's famous pasta sauce, wander through a bookstore, swim in the ocean, live life. Keep this list somewhere visible, maybe on your fridge or your vision board.
It's awesome to blast our invoices. Hey, I love to get paid. And reply to emails and lead webinars and work diligently on your business, but listen, also don't forget to live. Thank you for listening to today's episode. This week I want you to go live. Create beautiful moments for yourself and make some memories. Turn off the damn phone. Look up from the screen and experience the world. Design a big beautiful inspiring life for yourself. And when you're leading an inspiring life, then clients feel so inspired to work with you.
Alright, thank you so much listening to Susan Hyatt's Rich Coach Club. If you enjoyed today's show, please head over to susanhyatt.co/rich where you'll find a free worksheet with audio called Three Things You Can Do Right Now to Get More Clients. You can download the worksheet and the audio, print it out, there's a fun checklist for you to check off. Just three things to do. Check, check, checkidy-check.
This worksheet makes finding clients feel so much simpler and not so scary. So head to susanhyatt.co/rich to get that worksheet. Over there, you're also going to find a free Facebook you can join especially for coaches. Bring your coaching practice and your income to the next level at susanhyatt.co. See you next week.