You can't think your way out of grief. It lives in the body — and no amount of rationalising, staying busy, or being "so strong" will move it through you. In this deeply tender conversation, Amanda sits down with Lou Hynes, The Grief Guide, to explore the part of grief we almost never talk about: what's actually happening in your nervous system when the worst has happened, and why "just feeling your feelings" is impossible when your body has gone into freeze.

Lou knows this from the inside. In 2022, her husband Pete went from feeling a little unwell to dying of meningitis in a matter of hours — leaving Lou, at 40, to go from planning Christmas with her three children to planning his funeral. What followed was sixteen months of doing everything "right": functioning, coping, being told how strong she was — until one Mother's Day weekend her body simply stopped. She woke unable to move or hear, in what she'd later learn to name as a dorsal vagal collapse. That was the moment everything changed.

This episode is a masterclass in grief literacy — for those who are grieving and for everyone who loves, works alongside, or wants to show up for someone who is. Lou and Amanda dismantle the invisible "hierarchy of grief" that ranks whose loss counts, unpick why our society goes silent exactly when connection is needed most, and offer genuinely practical language for supporting someone (hint: stop asking "how are you?" and start asking "how are you this morning?").

And underneath it all runs a thread of real hope. Not the tidy kind that promises you'll get the old you back — because, as Lou says with striking honesty, you won't. But the kind that says grief can be alchemised: that the version of you on the other side can be more authentic, more purposeful, and more fully yourself than the one who came before. If you've ever carried a loss you weren't sure you were "allowed" to name, this one's for you.

Ready to go deeper on your journey of personal growth?

1. Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resources
2. Start with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voice
3. Subscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

What if the reason all that personal growth work "isn't working" has nothing to do with the courses, the books, or the teachers — and everything to do with the step you keep skipping? In this solo episode, Amanda Parker gets refreshingly honest about the trap so many seekers fall into: collecting wisdom faster than we can live it. After years of coach training, psychic development, and shamanic study, Amanda realised she could be a quoted expert on topics she wasn't actually embodying — knowledge that lived in her head, not in her bones.

That gap has a name: integration. And closing it, Amanda argues, is where real transformation happens. She shares why continuous learning can quietly become a form of procrastination, why the self-help backlash misses the point, and what changed when she gave herself permission to stop buying new books and start living what she already knew.

You'll also hear the story of a gloriously collapsed layer cake (proof that reading the recipe is not the same as baking it), a practical 30-day experiment framework Amanda uses with her own clients, and a compassionate word for the neurodivergent brains among us who chase the dopamine of new — plus what's waiting on the other side of sticking with one thing long enough to develop quiet confidence.

If you've got a stack of half-read self-help books and a backlog of exercises you've never done, this episode is your permission slip to pause, digest, and let yourself catch up to everything you've already learned.

How to Get in Touch:

• Website: www.amandaparker.co/
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/
• Substack: substack.com/@theamandaparker

Ready to go deeper on your journey of personal growth?

1. Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resources
2. Start with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voice
3. Subscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

If you're honest — do you actually like yourself, or are you waiting until after the promotion, the launch, the relationship? In this episode, Amanda turns the microphone on her own coach, Matt Chavlovich — the man who has seen her at her most stuck and most doubtful — and asks him everything. What unfolds is a conversation about the one thing hiding underneath every goal you've ever chased: can you soulfully say "I like me" — before the thing, not after?

Matt's path here was anything but a straight line: a professional football career that taught him to listen to his intuition under the pressure of 15,000-seat stadiums, a decade in the corporate world where he realized he cared more about who his people were becoming than the targets they were hitting, and the courageous leaps — leaving a secure career, leaving a marriage that had run its course — that came from finally trusting his inner voice. He also shares something he's rarely spoken about: the spiritual faith he found not through religion or family, but through survival — sitting alone in a church at 13, offering up a pressure that was too big for him to hold.

And because it's Matt, the conversation is full of the reframes he's famous for: why perfection is "a juvenile conversation," why you don't have a commitment problem (you're just committed to the wrong things), why decisions become easy the moment you know what you're trying to build, and how a 30-day experiment can introduce you to a version of yourself you haven't met yet. Amanda brings her own stories to the table too — launching free oracle readings in a spirit of play, closing a 14-year-old credit card that was quietly leaking her energy, and claiming her new moniker, The Untamed Oracle.

If you've been waiting until "after the thing" to feel like you're enough — this episode is the door. Whether you walk through it, and how fast, is entirely up to you.

How to Get in Touch: https://www.mattchavlovich.com/

Ready to go deeper on your journey of personal growth?

1. Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resources
2. Start with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voice
3. Subscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself