profile

Amanda Hess Coaching

I specialize in helping neurodivergent women control their thoughts & anxiety

Featured Post

Your brain doesn't need to calm down.

Hey Reader, You have probably been told to calm down more times than you can count. Breathe, think positive, stop letting it get to you, as if you had not already tried all of that a hundred times. Here is what nobody tells you. There is nothing wrong with you when your mind will not settle. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is scan for danger. And when there is no real danger in front of it, it goes looking. A short reply, a look you could not read, a text that still has not...

Hey Reader, You're not lazy. You're not too sensitive. And you're not failing at the things everyone else seems to find easy. You might just be cold-blooded. Stay with me, because this reframe genuinely changed things for me. Some of us are warm-blooded — we stay fairly steady no matter what's going on around us. And some of us are cold-blooded. If you're cold-blooded, your surroundings decide a whole lot about how well you function. The noise, the mess, the too-little sleep, the overfull...

Hey Reader, Something goes wrong, and before you've even had a second to think, you already know whose fault it is. Yours. The apology is halfway out of your mouth before you've checked whether you actually did anything at all. I want to name that, because most of us don't even see it happening. We just call it being responsible, being the woman who owns her part. But there's a difference between honest accountability and quietly assuming that every hard thing traces back to something you did...

Hey Reader I am offering a class that I know is desperately needed. It's called The Anti-Hero. This class is for the woman who cheated. The one who did the cheating. And the shame and guilt is something she has been trying to deal with ever since. This class isn't about accountability. You tried that. It doesn't work. It isn't about forgiveness either, because you tried that too. If it was as simple as forgiving yourself, this wouldn't still be keeping you from feeling free of it. And if the...

Hey Reader, You keep telling yourself that once you catch up, you'll finally get to rest. Once the list is done and things calm down a little, then you'll slow down. So you push a little harder, you stay a little later, and you promise yourself it's only temporary. But the catching-up never actually comes. That's the part nobody tells you. Working harder doesn't move you closer to caught up. It just keeps quietly moving the finish line further away, and it keeps you feeling behind no matter...

Hey Reader, If punishing yourself worked, you'd have healed by now. That's a line I said in a class recently, and I can't stop coming back to it. Most of us have been taught that when we're not getting what we want in life, the fix is to punish ourselves. We just don't call it that. We call it "holding myself accountable," or "making sure I don't make the same mistake twice," or needing a system and a list and someone to keep us on track. It hides in all these reasonable-sounding places, and...

Hi Reader, Last week I was coaching a client and she told me about taking her nephew to do that indoor skydiving thing. He kept standing up and sitting down. Standing up, sitting down. He could not make himself do it. So she pushed him. And then she felt guilty, because he hated it. But here is the thing. Nothing went wrong. He tried it, he knows it isn't for him, and he never has to wonder about it again. Here is what I told her, and it's what I need you to know too. Sometimes we need a...

Hi Reader, The guy who cut you off in traffic isn't an idiot. He's a person having a day you know nothing about. I know. Some days that's very hard to believe. But notice what your brain does the second someone frustrates you. It reaches for a label. Idiot. Selfish. Rude. It's fast, it feels true, and it saves you from actually having to understand them. The label is cheap. And it costs you more than you think. This week on the How To Love Yourself No Matter What podcast, we start with a...

Hi Reader, There's a trap I watch women live in for years. "I'll be happy when." When the house is calm. When the hard thing is over. When I finally have it together. I'll say this gently. That day isn't coming. Not the way you're picturing it. The messy and the hard don't come in a separate box from the beautiful and the good. Same box. Same life. It's 50/50. And that's not proof you're failing. That's just how it works. So we stop waiting for the mess to clear. We lean in. And then we do...

Hi Reader, New episode is up. This one matters. I think you need to hear it. You've been told the problem is that you don't love yourself enough. Love yourself more. Try harder. Think positive. And it hasn't worked. Here's what I want you to hear. It was never a self-love problem. It's shame. Shame is quieter. It hides underneath. It runs the show when you're not looking. So in this episode we name it. We look at it. We start to loosen its grip. That's where the work begins. yes? Listen to...