I'm at an international adult figure skating competition this week, and it got me thinking about why we stop doing hard things — and what happens to us when we do.

This episode is about doing the hard thing. Not the hard things that life hands you without asking — the sickness, the loss, the layoff, the breakup. I'm talking about the hard things you choose. The ones where your brain says "maybe I could do that" and then immediately talks you out of it.

I tell you about getting a score of 11 when the skater before me got a 22, sitting in the kiss and cry trying to figure out what just happened, and why I skated away from that knowing I need to grow my capacity for embarrassment — not avoid it. I share the difference between tolerating embarrassment (grinning and bearing it, hoping it never happens again) and actually growing your capacity for it (feeling it all the way through, having your own back, and moving on to the next thing). I talk about why courage isn't a personality trait — it's a skill you build, and how you can be courageous in one area of your life and terrified in another. And I tell you about the skater who's brave enough to compete but scared to start her business, because that's exactly how it works.

I also tell you why paying the entry fee is the easy part, why "what do I think I can do?" is the wrong question, and why fulfillment isn't something you find — it's something that arrives when you start doing things that scare you on purpose.

Key Takeaways:

Life hands you enough hard things you didn't choose. You need to add hard things you do choose — things that scare you, light you up, and make you think "fuck yeah, I did that."

"What do I think I can do?" is the wrong question. It's the question that keeps you small, and it gets more tempting the older you get.

You won't die from embarrassment. I know because I've been dead last by a lot, and I'm still here. You need to grow your capacity to feel embarrassed, not avoid it.

Tolerating embarrassment is grinning and bearing it and hoping it never happens again. Growing your capacity is feeling it all the way through, having your own back, and moving on to the next thing.

Courage isn't a personality trait. Nobody is naturally courageous. It's a skill, and once you know how to grow it, you can grow it anywhere, on demand.

You can be courageous in one area and terrified in another. The skater who competes without flinching but is afraid to start her business? That's all of us.

Fulfillment isn't something you find. It's something that arrives when you start doing hard things on purpose — growing your capacity for embarrassment and your ability to create courage.

Book a call with me: If you listen to this and something in you goes "oh, that's me — I need that," I want to talk to you. It's a free discovery call, just you and me, and it is a courageous first step. It might be the first time you let yourself say out loud what you actually want.

Book it here: amandahess.ca/bookacall

I'm at my competition until Saturday and heading home Sunday, but I want to talk to you next week.

Links referenced in this episode:

amandahess.ca/bookacall

Somewhere along the way, you were taught there was something wrong with you. How you looked, how you spoke, how you were in the world. So you spent years trying to prove that wrong, and no matter how hard you worked at it, you kept coming up short. You don't feel like a hero. A lot of days, you feel like a loser. That's where this class starts, and it's why I called it The Anti-Hero.

This episode is the replay of the live class I taught this week, and I did it differently than I ever have. No slides. Just me, a whiteboard, and the women who showed up. In it I walk you through why the voice in your head never shuts up (it's not what you think, and you can't think your way out of it), what emotions actually are and why you've been playing whack-a-mole with them, and why shame is always a liar. I teach you the 3 steps I use with every woman I coach, in the order they have to happen: regulate, allow, think on purpose. And I tell you about the girl in the Babysitters Club books who I was never going to be, and why Loki is the character I want you to think about instead.

I also cried on this one. I didn't plan to. I was telling the story of the first time someone said to me "you were never the problem," and it caught me. I left it in, because that moment is the whole point of this class.

Key Takeaways:

The person you've been measuring yourself against was never real. No woman has ever been her, and you were handed her anyway.

That voice in your head isn't keeping you honest. It's your nervous system stuck in survival, and you can't reason with a body in panic.

Regulation isn't "calm down." It's pebbles on the other side of the teeter totter, small and daily, until the hard days don't tip you.

You don't need to tolerate more emotion. You need to grow your capacity for it, the same way you'd build a bicep.

Shame is a liar. It was trained into you, and anything that was trained in can be untrained.

It's not "how do I do this." It's "who do I need to become." You're one belief away, not one strategy away.

Book a call with me: If you listen to this and something in you goes "oh, that's me," I want to talk to you. It's a free call, just you and me on Zoom, and it might be the first time you've had someone completely on your side while you say the thing out loud.

Book it here: amandahess.ca/bookacall

You are not the only one. I promise you that.

Links referenced in this episode:

amandahess.ca/bookacall

Watch the class on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3p72xhYOE

Today I have my client Annabelle on the podcast, and I'm so glad she said yes.

When Annabelle and I first started working together, she was sitting in the car with her husband in tears. They had just moved from Denver to Northwest Arkansas with a 4 year old and no family nearby, she had opened a business a few months earlier, and she was working 12, 13, 14 hours a day. Not sleeping. Not eating. Opening her laptop first thing in the morning and adding to her to do list at 2am. And still feeling behind.

If you have ever thought "if I just work harder, I'll finally catch up," you are going to hear yourself in this conversation.

A year later, Annabelle doesn't work evenings. She doesn't work weekends. She doesn't open her computer on a Sunday. She has time with her son that she's actually present for, and her business has grown, not shrunk. Her husband left his job to come work with her.

We talk about what changed and how she did it. The 15 minute walk that sounded almost too simple to matter. Deciding when she stops working for the day, and then actually stopping. The guilt that came with both. Why her to do lists were making everything worse, and what she does instead now. How she stopped treating other people's emergencies like her own, and what it took to believe she was allowed to.

And I want to say this clearly, because Annabelle owns a business and you might not: none of this is about business. This is about what happens when you're rushing, guilty, and behind in your own life, and nobody ever showed you another way to live it.

In this episode:

1. Why working harder keeps you feeling behind instead of caught up
2. Regulating your nervous system in a way that actually feels good, not like another item on the list
3. The guilt loop: guilty at work, guilty at home, present nowhere
4. Boundaries that hold, and the belief you need underneath them
5. Why perfect isn't available and what to aim for instead
6. Letting things off your plate without deciding you failed

Annabelle designs beautiful custom closets at Up Closets of NW Arkansas. If you're in the area, go look her up. Find her here: https://upclosets.com/nw-arkansas/

You are not the only one. I promise you that.

Takeaways:

1. Working harder is not what gets you caught up. It's what keeps you feeling behind.
2. Your nervous system comes first. Everything else you're trying to fix sits on top of it.
3. A 15 minute walk sounds too small to matter, and it changed everything for Annabelle.
4. If you don't plan it, you won't do it. That goes for rest as much as anything else.
5. A boundary isn't something you ask other people to keep. It's something you decide and then hold.
6. Nobody's emergency has to become your emergency.
7. Perfect isn't available. Calm and honest is, and it works better anyway.
8. Letting something off your plate is not failing. It's choosing where your time actually goes.
9. You can have a full life and a growing business without burning yourself down to get it.

Want to explore working with Amanda? https://amandahess.ca/bookacall

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 underneath it is the same quiet belief: that there's something about me I need to fix.

In this episode I talk about where that belief comes from, how far back it goes, and why it was never yours to carry in the first place. I share how "making a mess" got baked into my identity as a kid, and how so many of us walk around with a version of that: the hot mess, the scattered one, the one who's bad with money or bad with love. And I get honest about what actually happens when we beat ourselves up for it. We shrink. We get smaller and less visible and less willing to go build the life we actually want. You can't make big waves with your wings when you've convinced yourself you're the size of a fly.

I also tell you about throwing my hip out this week training for a figure skating competition, and the exact moment my brain tried to turn it into proof that I should have known better. Having your own back isn't something you master once. It's a practice you come back to, one moment at a time.

Key Takeaways:

1. If punishing yourself actually worked, you'd already be healed. You've tried it for years, and it keeps doing the opposite of what you hoped.
2. "Holding yourself accountable" is often self-punishment in disguise. It hides in the lists, the systems, and the "hot mess" identity we carry around.
3. The stories about who you are (scattered, clumsy, bad with money, bad with love) were baked in during childhood. They were never the truth about you.
4. Beating yourself up makes you shrink. You get smaller, less visible, and less able to create what you actually want.
5. Radical acceptance of a messy life beats chasing a perfect one. Show me a person and I'll show you a messy life. Perfection is a setup, not a standard.
6. Real change comes from learning to have your own back: regulating your nervous system, growing your capacity for big emotion, shifting your perspective, and setting boundaries, again and again over time.

Come to my free class: I'm running a free class called The Anti-Hero on Monday, August 24th at 12:00 PM Pacific. It's all about shame, and about learning to have your own back in a way you've probably never heard before. Come find out what it feels like to stop being the woman who's always punishing herself, and imagine who you get to be on the other side of that.

Save your seat: amandahess.ca/shame1

You are not the only one. I promise you that.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. amandahess.ca/shame1

Today we're talking about something I've wanted to make an episode about for a long time: infidelity. Specifically, the woman who cheats.

If that's you, I already know you're carrying a crushing weight — the secrecy, the panic, the shame society piles on top. Because we've all been told that cheating is the ultimate, unforgivable relationship sin. But after years of coaching and hundreds of women, here's what I've come to believe: cheating is the symptom, not the start. It almost never shows up in a vibrant, healthy relationship. It shows up after years of what I call the invisible sins — chronic emotional neglect, stonewalling, contempt, weaponized incompetence, being starved of affection and visibility. The partner who looks great on paper while you slowly disappear inside your own home.

This is a judgment-free zone. I'm not here to make excuses or decide who's right and who's wrong. I'm here to explore what was actually happening, what was missing, and how you move forward.

So I ask the questions I ask in coaching. Before the affair ever started, what were you tolerating every day? Who did you get to be with someone else that you weren't allowed to be in your own relationship? Was it about the sex, or the feeling of being wanted and prioritized after years of feeling like furniture?

Here's the part almost nobody says: the perpetual giving is what created the vacuum in the first place. You were never taught how to know what you want. You were taught to perform — be a good girl, look good, keep it all together — and then you woke up one day feeling nothing. That's not selfishness. That's what happens after a lifetime of being told your desire is dirty and your job is to keep everyone else okay.

I don't do the shame-to-guilt thing you see all over the internet. Guilt is just as damaging as shame. And no — if you're listening to this, you are not a narcissist. What you need isn't more punishment. You've been holding yourself accountable every single day, or you wouldn't be here. What you need is to learn how to have your own back, how to move through the heavy feelings instead of shoving them down, and how to turn want and desire back on in every part of your life. When those things come online, everything else gets easier.

You were never the problem. And you are not the only one. I promise you that.

The free class: I'm teaching a class on all of this called The Anti-Hero — because you can be the hero of your own life even if nobody else sees it. Monday, August 24th at 12:00 PM Pacific, about an hour, completely free. Sign up at AmandaHess.ca/shame1 or through the link in the show notes. I'd love to see you there.

Takeaways:

1. Infidelity is often viewed as the ultimate sin, but let's be real: relationships can be super complicated and messy, with many hidden issues lurking beneath the surface.
2. Cheating is more of a symptom than the root cause of relationship problems, highlighting the need for deeper self-awareness and understanding of personal desires.
3. Many women don’t even know what they want due to societal pressures to perform and be ‘good,’ leaving them feeling empty and unfulfilled in their relationships.
4. In the quest for happiness, it’s crucial to learn how to advocate for yourself and embrace your desires, rather than feeling guilty or ashamed for wanting more from life.
5. Emotional neglect and invisible cruelties in relationships often lead to infidelity, as individuals seek validation and fulfillment outside their primary partnership.
6. To truly move forward from any shame or guilt surrounding infidelity, it's essential to tackle those feelings head-on, developing a stronger sense of self and what you truly desire.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. amandahess.ca/Shame1

This episode is all about judgment: why we're so quick to hand out labels, and what happens when we stop. It started with a lightbulb moment at a family gathering that turned into a bit of a masterclass in how fast our brains reach for judgment over understanding.

We're digging into why choosing to believe that everyone — yes, even the guy who just cut you off in traffic — is doing their best can genuinely change how you move through the world. When we trade judgment for empathy, we lighten our own emotional load and make room for better relationships, too.

Grab your drink of choice and settle in — because understanding ourselves is the first step to understanding everyone else.

Takeaways:

• In a world filled with judgment, understanding that everyone is doing their best can radically transform our personal interactions and emotional well-being.
• Our brains naturally categorize actions as good or bad, but breaking free from this binary thinking can lead to more compassionate relationships.
• Being a life coach means navigating through my own judgments while helping others; it's a continuous journey of self-discovery and empathy.
• When we approach difficult interactions with understanding rather than judgment, we create an environment where everyone can thrive, including ourselves.

Links referenced in this episode:

• amandahest.ca/bookacall
• instagram.com/theamandahess