This is my first blog post and I feel like this has been a long time coming! I have been contemplating a life change for what feels like an eternity and something inside of me decided to take the plunge now, today, and just do it!

I have known for a while that I wanted to become a Life Coach but I kept making excuses and waiting for the perfect time to change careers. But today is the day, I signed up for coaching school and paid the registration fee, I created a website, and I am writing my first blog…this is a big day for Amanda Richey and my journey to living a Gutsy Life!

I have always enjoyed sharing my opinions and advice with others, which, as you can imagine has not always been well received! That being said, many of my friends often look to me for advice and even a bit of a push when it comes to making big changes in their lives. One of my friends even told me that my voice kept playing in her head telling her “you can do it!” when she was contemplating giving up while summiting a mountain on a strenuous backpacking trip.

I have also spent a lot of my adult life focused on personal growth and pushing myself to get out of the comfortable and into the great unknown. I love nature and spend a lot of time hiking alone. The wilderness to me is a place to find myself and my center. I also love to travel and have spent months, even years of my life, in foreign countries sleeping in train stations, on the floor of friendly local’s houses, in the woods, on the beach, working and volunteering and gallivanting, all while giving my parents severe anxiety because I was going it solo.

Then I started graduate school, got married, and had a baby and well…no more gallivanting and solo trips! Don’t get me wrong I love my husband and baby girl but my life has done a 180 and I didn’t even see it coming. All of the sudden I find myself at a 9-5 job behind a computer, longingly looking at pictures and videos of my baby on my phone because she is in daycare full time, and wondering why I feel so empty all of the time.

I found a group of close women friends in similar situations who all wanted to make changes in their lives. I had just finished reading “You Are a Bad Ass” by Jen Sincero and I convinced them to enroll with me in her DIY “8 weeks to Bad Ass” program.

It was incredible! We all had such a blast and learned so much about ourselves and what we wanted out of life. We began to dream big, and have big goals, and work on going for them.

Now I am sure you are not surprised that in the course of orchestrating this group I realized I wanted to be a life coach! I saw all of my previous life experiences of solo traveling, of through hiking trails, and conquering peaks, and summiting snowy mountains, as a metaphor and a vehicle for change in my life and other’s lives.

This was what I was meant to do! To guide people through their inner desires and obstacles, to help them wrestle and wrangle them, scramble and climb up, over, and through to the other side of their comfort zone to living a Gutsy Life!

I have been working on what I will say to my family and friends when I tell them I am a life coach:

“Oh yeah?” they will ask incredulously “What is a life coach? What do you do as one?”

And my answer:

I am the kick in the but that you need to live the life you know you are meant to be living but have been to afraid to go for. I push you to live a Gutsy Life, to go for it, to live a life on purpose.

I want a tribe of Gutsy women. I want to work with women who are bad asses, who go for it in life, who want more and are willing and have the balls to take it.

I want to be their non-nonsense, no bullshit friend who will push them through their fears to the other side of their comfort zone to a Gutsy Life, a life on purpose.

I want a tribe of gutsy women who can change their lives and change the world.

I feel so inspired because I feel like I finally found myself. I had been lost for so long. I remember now…that bad ass self I was who lost her way in self-doubt in grad school, in grief in losing her mom, in a fog of uncertainty and chaos as a new mother.

All of the sudden I see myself, I see this ‘voice’ everyone speaks of, my voice and it is fist pumping to ‘eye of the tiger’ and ready to be my bad ass, awesome Gutsy self!

If you are feeling lost, and down, and want more out of life and know you are meant for more, I see you, I was you.

I know how it is, you are looking for more, for a life more on purpose and in line with who you truly are. You know that you can be and are worth so much more but you are afraid and uncertain of how to have and be more.

Let me tell you something you are right where you need to be. It is gutsy to be here right now, looking for the way, the change that you need. It takes guts to live a life on purpose! It is gutsy to admit that you are not living your purpose, and it is gutsy to make the necessary changes to have and live that purpose…join me…be gutsy…live a life on purpose.

Stay tuned for more on my experience of living the Gutsy Life and becoming a Life Coach who helps other women do the same.

Be Gutsy! Share the Love!