I have recently really gotten into listening to podcasts, especially the Rich Roll Podcast. I think Rich has a thoughtful & calming way of interviewing his guests and that he invites in really great people. His vocabulary is exceptional, it’s really made me want to learn more. I used to be a little resistant to podcasts—I think because I hadn’t found the right one yet—and now they are one of my favorite parts of my day. I feel like I really get to know the people that I have heard and that it has expanded my thinking in so many ways. Some of the thought leaders, experts, and creatives I have learned from and listened to in the last year or so are listed below. I keep tabs on all of them on their channels.

• Rich Roll
• David Sinclair
• Dr. Amy Shah
• Guru Singh
• Michael Gervais
• Blake Mycoskie 
• Shane Parrish
• Andrew Huberman
• Nataly Kogan
• Brene Brown
• Adam Grant
• Ryan Holiday
• Karamo Brown [and now I LOVE Queer Eye!]
• Tim Ferriss
• David Goggins
• Alexi Pappas
• Laird Hamilton
• Dan Buettner & the Blue Zones
• …and more

Often when I listen to these podcasts, I want to add my own commentary. Oo! Oo! I have an opinion or a thought or I can relate to this or I have a solution!

I haven’t ever been a guest on a podcast. But some day, I think it would be really fun to be. In order to test this out, I’m doing a little practice here. I am posing 3 questions to myself as if I am the host…and I am also the guest. Thanks for indulging me.

Host Amanda: Take us back to the beginning. So you grew up in Southern New Hampshire, athlete, go to school. Tell us a little bit about that time for you and what you were like.

Guest Amanda: I’ll attempt to summarize the first 21 years of my life as best I can through the lens of these 3 themes—family, ambition, and experience. It’s interesting to look back on those years now because I see them as the “before” time in my life, and I have a very distinct “after” time in my life. So, you’re getting the essence of the “before” right now.

Let’s start with family, and to me family is both the crowd you were born into and the family we choose for ourselves. When asked to toast at a holiday or dinner party, I often will say “Here’s to friends as family, and family as friends” because I do believe that my closest friends are my family, too. My early years are soaking wet with wonderful times with really good people. I have two parents who love each other very much, and love us. I have two brothers who have both overcome adversity and achieved success in their own ways—one brother who was diagnosed with Autism early in life, who has gifted me the empathy and perspective that I would not have otherwise received. I grew up in one of those classic New England neighborhoods with block parties and kids running around in the summer evenings. We spent summer times on the New England beaches, and my early memories are laced with the melodies of the likes of Van Morrison, the Eagles, Beach Boys, and some of the other classics. When I think of my family—both blood and chosen—I have nothing but a positive stream of memory.

Thinking about ambition—I pose it this way because so much of my early years represented my ambition and pursuit towards something. I wanted to be the best athlete, the best student, the best friend that I could possibly be. I wasn’t a great athlete early on, but I found my stride on a cross country team at a young age that then taught me—I have a unique endurance engine. Being 5’5” with little “ups” I wasn’t cut out to be the basketball player I was hoping to be and tennis wasn’t fulfilling my desire to contribute to a real team environment. Then, someone suggested lacrosse. I have no recollection of actually saying “I’m going to start playing lacrosse” [if you ask my dad, he would probably remember], but it was one of those momentum-shifting decisions that I made in my life. Finally, I had found the perfect fit for my unique athleticism and hand-eye coordination on the lacrosse field.

I started playing lacrosse as a sophomore in high school after contributing to a high school state championship my freshman year on the tennis court. I was…ok…that year. I could run but my skills still needed refinement. Then, something happened between sophomore and junior year—I invested enough time, I found something I truly loved, and I shined. By the end of my junior year, the colleges weren’t banging down my door for sure, but I got a call from the Syracuse coach who said she would like me to visit and could really see me as part of their program. That changed everything. Suddenly, I believed. And, long story short, with 4 offers in my inbox, I selected Boston University as my program. But, I will always be so so grateful to that Syracuse coach who said that one thing that changed everything for me, and it has served as a great reminder of how impactful what we say can be on a young person. That was ambition.

I’ll sum up those earlier times as a series of experiences. I tend to picture that time in my life almost episodically. Pictures of places I’ve been will pop into my mind and I’ll remember that “frame” in my movie, but I don’t always have clear storylines. So, what I do remember are

• enjoying conversations with adults since I was really young,
• bringing my brother Craig around to his different activities such as horseback riding, health appointments, exercise, grocery shopping, the farm,
• playing on sports teams, experiencing the triumph of winning and the devastation of being cut from teams,
• going to events like prom, homecoming, sports games,
• hanging out at the local spots like Dunkin Donuts of 7-Eleven with friends [yes, we did that],
• soaking in precious & intimate time in the car whether that was on the way to school, at a sports tournament, traveling with family, where you could uniquely capture the attention of the person you were with,
• experiencing good music, good friends, the harshness of adolescence,
• pressuring myself to be the best student and athlete and person I could be,
• navigating the voice in my head, and so so much more

21 years is difficult to summarize in just a few paragraphs in a way that’s interesting, so I attempted here to give a flavor of that “before” time. And, what’s compelling to me about that time is that there are such stark differences from that “before” time to where I am now. The biggest difference is my faith. I remember being so confused about the nature of the universe. Who am I praying to? Is it wrong that I don’t want to go to church? Not understanding the way the world works can lead to a lot of confusion as a younger person. Now, I have unmistakable faith. I absolutely know that there is more to life than just our human experience.

Host Amanda: So, what changed?

Guest Amanda: Like I said, everything. Everything changed. But arguably, everything always is. The difference is just if we notice the changes or if we are immune to them. I find that the key is that the expected changes don’t rattle us as much. But, the ones that surprise us are the ones that bring awareness to the fact that yes, things are changing. Like I said, though, things are always changing.

I am incredibly grateful for the lacrosse career I was able to have. As a college athlete, I played in every single game I was healthy for, and I started most of them. We were consistently ranked—as high as 7^th in the country at one point—I played in an NCAA Elite 8, and got to experience what it was like to play in the Carrier Dome. We traveled all over for games, and even went as far as Australia for a team trip. This was a unique experience. I pushed the limits of athletic prowess, and like I said, I’m grateful.

My senior year, like I said a few times now, everything changed. In October of 2010, I was on the receiving end of a shot and took a blow to the skull. Without getting into crazy detail, from that moment forward, I began a journey of recovery from concussion and all the elements of Post-Concussive Syndrome. I took a leave of absence from school, moved home, and delt with the physical and emotional repercussions of that scene in my life movie. I quite literally could not do anything. No exercise, no schoolwork, no reading, no technology—I even struggled with pulling thoughts forward in some instances. My brain wanted to do nothing. I had hit what felt like rock bottom.

That was my “moment”. Everything after that is the “after”.

When I look back on that time now, I realize that this was my experience of completely wiping the slate clean. I was stripped of everything I knew about myself—my identity as a high-performing athlete and student were gone. I had to get comfortable being in this place of nothingness, and over time build myself back up to who I wanted to be.

It would be really easy for me to look back at this time in pain. Was I in pain? Absolutely. And those around me were, too. But I can now say with absolute certainty and authenticity that I WOULD NOT CHANGE ANYTHING about that experience. I am GRATEFUL for it. So so grateful that I learned these lessons early in life.

Without getting super specific here, because I will probably share more in a future podcast episode [lol!], this was the start of my spiritual journey. For some, a book can enter a life and be the impetus we need. That book for me was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It opened me up to the power of meditation on the brain, and I started meditating every day, morning and evening. It was almost as if that opening allowed me to turn my kayak around from rowing upstream and go with the current because everything from that moment started to flow. I learned about nutrition and its impact on the brain, so I cut sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and everything artificial immediately. I learned about neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to bounce back, and I was able to retrain my brain how to remember things, how to read, and how to listen to the point where I actually feel like I’m smarter now than I was before. I met the right healers who each in their own way exposed me to the next thing I needed to know in order to pedal forward. I built myself up differently, and quite honestly, I like this version of myself better. I can literally never go back there again.

Host Amanda: So what’s different now? What’s changed in your experience? How have those lessons impacted the last 10 years since that all happened?

Guest Amanda: What’s really sometimes shocking for me to realize now is the impressive contrast between those two before and after scenes. When I was going through my healing, there were two months where I slept on my parents’ floor every night—22 years old, and so paranoid as a result of the Post-Concussive Syndrome that I couldn’t sleep in my own room. Now, that feeling and experience are so foreign to me that it is so phenomenal to know that I am completely healed. I know for many athletes who go through these types of traumatic experiences, those feelings may never go away. Hopefully there is someone out there who takes a little solace in knowing that someone like me was able to make it through.

The undercurrent of all of this for me is that melody of spirit in absolutely everything I do. Like I said before, I have unmistakable and unshakeable faith. What I’ve been able to experience over the last ten years has made it so. I’m not quite sure how yet, but one of my goals in life is to provide others with that gift of absolute certainty.

I’ll share a few ways that has impacted my life.

First, intuition. I’m not perfect, but I have a better sense now than I did before of listening to that feeling and knowing that it’s a real feeling. For example in my professional life, I initially turned down my first professional office job at age 24. Once I hung up the phone after declining, however, I knew I had made the wrong choice. So, I called back and they were still willing to hire me. I knew I needed to prove myself and dig myself out of that hole, and I believe that I did. That moment taught me what intuition felt like because that was absolutely the right decision. I tap into that feeling all the time to know if I’m making the right moves in my life in general, and I continue to grow in that every day.

Next, I channel spirit in everything I do—both professionally and personally. I’ll give you a for instance here—I often get called in to support my colleagues in developing messages, which could be as simple as a LinkedIn post or as elaborate as a multi-day presentation and meeting to a large group. I have developed this ability to listen to what someone is trying to say, to allow it to “model” in my subconscious, and to put the story together in a way that articulates what that person wants to say in a way that others can understand it. Some may say this is just a human skill I have, but I know this comes from another realm. It wasn’t something that I was ever taught to do explicitly, but I have watched others do these types of things, and I can see how they channel spirit, too.

Finally, or final message for this particular interview, what I’ve realized about this connection to spirit is that as far as I have come on my journey with my faith, I’m only just beginning. I have more questions than I have answers. But what I’ve realized is that I need to continue to pose those questions to the universe when I have them, and I trust the answers will come back. For example, it took me about a week to come up with a topic for this blog post. Rather than fret over it or come up with something that didn’t feel genuine, I put that question out to spirit of what I should write next, and when I struck the keyboard this morning, these ~2500 words just flowed imperfectly out of me.

Like I said, I have many questions for spirit and that’s part of what I’m here to do, to continue learning. One of those questions is about how I translate this spiritually-led life to others so that they can experience what it is like to live from your truth. I do this with those I lead, but I’d like to do it better. Spirit, how can I do this for others? How can I be of service?

Thanks so much for interviewing me today, it was an absolute joy to be here.

When you realize MAGIC is real, it will consciously change everything.