Bringing Your Dreams to Life with Amber Lilyestrom

 

Amber is a business mentor, branding expert, author and speaker. Her work has been featured by Forbes, Entrepreneur, SUCCESS, Mindvalley and Working Mother Magazine. She is the host of The IGNITE Your Dream podcast and author of books, Master Your Money Mind and Paddle Home.

Amber’s transformational mindset work helps her clients to bring meaningful expansion to their work, creative lives and personal missions. Her introspective approach is a catalyst for deep transformation and powerful change in organizations and individuals. Amber Lilyestrom

 

 

Links:

Website: Amber Lilyestrom
Podcast: IGNITE Your Dream
Instagram: @amberlilyestrom

 

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Transcript: 

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Amber is a business mentor, branding expert, author and speaker. Her work has been featured by Forbes, Entrepreneur, SUCCESS, Mindvalley, and Working Mother Magazine. She is the host of The IGNITE Your Dream podcast and author of books, Master Your Money Mind and Paddle Home.

Amber’s transformational mindset work helps her clients to bring meaningful expansion to their work, creative lives and personal missions. Her introspective approach is the catalyst for deep transformation and powerful change in organizations and individuals.

Jayne Havens: Amber, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast. I’m so excited to chat with you today.

Amber Lilyestrom: Hi, Jayne. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Jayne Havens: Before we get started, why don’t you share a little bit about yourself? Give us a rundown. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Amber Lilyestrom: Yeah, so I am a business growth strategist. I am a branding expert. I’m a podcaster. I’m a mom to a 2- and 11-year-old. I’m a wife, and I’m a poet and artist. And I live in New Hampshire. I’ve built a really successful business over the last 10 years working from home and really following and honoring my dream, you know. What that dream has looked like, well, I know we’re going to get into that more today.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, exactly. So the topic that I wanted to discuss with you today is I think really what your business is all about, which is bringing your dreams to life. And I was thinking about this. I often get on to calls with people who are interested in becoming sleep consultants, and they share really real and realistic goals with me. Maybe they’re a stay-at-home mom, and they just want to support one or two families a month while prioritizing the care of their own children. Maybe they’d love to have some extra spending money to wallpaper the kitchen or take the kids to the beach for a long weekend.

You know, sometimes I’ll speak to postpartum doulas who tell me their goal is to phase themselves out of overnight work within the next 5 to 10 years. Really reasonable, right? They do so, or they want to do so, because they know that working overnight won’t be sustainable forever. Then the second they launched their business, all of a sudden, it looks really different, or they’re trying to do something really different. I wonder why that happens, and how can we bring ourselves back home to our own actual goals rather than chasing somebody else’s dream?

Amber Lilyestrom: Yeah, well, I think it’s easy to get caught up in the swirl, right? I mean, everybody here knows what it means to be a Pinterest mom. We’ve all had that moment in the kitchen where we’re making our kids birthday cake and we’re like, “We’re going to make that fox, and it’s going to be the best-looking thing on the face of the planet.” Then you get to the end of it, and it literally looks like it has been in a car accident, you know.

And so I think it’s easy to get kind of caught in the romanticism of what other people have created. But what we’re missing in that is really understanding multiple things. The first is the actual dream and vision that person had, right? So like their original dream. We’re going to put that on the shelf. We’re going to come back to that. The second piece is like all of the life experience and all of the skill sets and the knowing and the blood, sweat and tears that led them to be able to create what they’re creating in that moment.

And so we sometimes take that for granted when we see it in other people. Because we think, “Oh, it shouldn’t be that hard to make this fox cake from Pinterest.” Then we realize, like, I don’t have that skill set. And so then it’s like, “Well, I’ve failed. I’m just going to buy cakes for my kid from now on.” And you could do that, but you also could just practice more. You also could get more education, and you could learn how to get better at it. Eventually, you could make a really great fox cake too. I’m using this metaphor very intentionally.

But I think if we come back to this original dream thing — I think this is the question that feels really, really important to center for this conversation today for every single one of us here — it’s to remember what our original dream actually is and was. What I mean by that is like the real zoom out for your life. And so I want to, if it’s okay, Jayne, can I just ask you, like, what was your original dream that led you to do what you’re doing today?

Jayne Havens: Yeah, so my original dream was just to be able to use my brain again. Prior to getting into this line of work, I was a stay-at-home mom. I had two young kids. I had a former really successful career where I felt smart and productive and accomplished, and then I found myself home with my kids. Loving it but also feeling a little empty inside. And so my original goal was to use my brain, feel like an adult, and make a little bit of money. Like a little bit of money. I never had any huge goal or big dream. It was literally like make some pocket money, use my brain, and feel like an adult again. I think those were my original goals.

Amber Lilyestrom: Yeah, I love the clarity of that. And also, underneath it, in honoring the original dream of being a mother and having a life that was aligned for you in the way you wanted to mother.

Jayne Havens: Yeah. And you know what? I had a lot of guilt around starting a business at first, if I’m being completely transparent. Because it was hard for me to admit that being a mom wasn’t enough for me. I felt really guilty about that. As somebody who was raised by a stay-at-home mom, who was an amazing mom, I didn’t want to say, I think, to her or to myself that that lifestyle wasn’t enough. I know what a privilege it is to be able to stay at home with your kids, and I didn’t want to admit to the world that I wanted something more than that. So that was something I had to get over in my own brain before actually getting to work.

Amber Lilyestrom: And so you’re beautifully illustrating the power of our dreams. Because what our dreams do is, they walk us up to the line to look at those things. They encourage us, and they challenge us to have to look at the things that perhaps we’ve been avoiding. And what I say is like, your dream is like a shadow. It’s always going to be there. It’s never going to leave. It’s going to follow you around.

And so the work that I do in the world is like, I’m so interested in knowing what people’s dreams are. Because the second you talk to somebody about their dream, without making them feel like they have to honor it or do anything about it, but you see the twinkle in their eye, you see their aliveness come to the center.

I’m really passionate about that. Because what I believe is, more people in society that are alive with their dreams, the better society is for it. Right? I think humanity, I think our children are impacted in really powerful ways. Like if you talk to your child about what their dreams are, look at them, they have no inhibitions. They have no reason to believe that they can’t do the thing that they have in their spirit unless someone told them otherwise. And so I think that’s just so pure, and it’s such a powerful reminder of the power of a dream.

And so I’m just super obsessed about talking to people about what their dreams are and then literally sitting there and taking it seriously and saying, “Okay, friend. If the dream is in you, it’s for you. What are we going to do to create that reality for you?” Because there’s really, I mean, of course, there are infinite other number of options. But I think the most sacred path and the most aligned path and the most exciting path in our lives is to dance with our dreams and try to go bring that thing to life. You just don’t know what you’re going to find along the way.

So I think the next question for everybody here is like, “Okay. What was your original dream?” And then what was the original dream beneath that? How did these things sort of stack up like bricks? What are the dreams? Follow them back. And what you will discover is the most honest, truthy part of yourself.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, it’s interesting. As my business has grown, I have made a really intentional effort to stay true to my original dream. Because, you know, it’s interesting. The whole purpose of me starting this business was to be able to use my brain and feel productive and feel accomplished but still be the primary caregiver for my kids. I didn’t want to put them in daycare. I didn’t want to hire a nanny. I wanted to be the one taking them to ballet and picking them up with snacks. That’s what I wanted to do for my kids.

As my business has grown, if I’m not really intentional, then I can’t do those things anymore, right? Like if your business grows to the point where you’re out of touch with your original dream, then all of a sudden, like, what are we here for? I’ve had to have several conversations with myself and make really good intentional choices to slow things down sometimes.

When I’ve noticed I don’t want my work to get in the way of my parenting, I don’t want to not be able to pick my kids up from school and make them dinner and play ping pong in the basement, I want to be able to do all of those things. And so I have to remind myself that the choices that I make in my business have to align with my original dream.

Amber Lilyestrom: I love it so much. I mean, what a beautiful example of what it looks like to create a balanced business. I talk about it as like a life-first business, to be able to create that reality for yourself and your kids. The thing is, I was just on a conversation with a colleague who is trying to make a really hard decision right now about whether or not she’s going to close her workspace that she’s using or keep it going. It’s sort of like an installation of the community. She’s really, really struggling. I asked her about this original dream question.

But I said to her, if you play the tape out, you decide what that duration is. It might be a year. It might be 3 years. She has a three-year-old. It might be 4 or 5. It might be 10. What are you going to regret? Like, what are you going to wish you could get back? And your first answer, it’s like a flashing red sign. And so that thing, I think this is the coolest part about being moms who have businesses.

Because I walked away from my 10-year career. I was one of the top sort of marketing professionals in the country. I was rocking in my job. I loved what I did, but I became a mom. And what I knew so quickly was that just these two things weren’t going to go together, and I was going to have to build something.

People always say to me, like, how did you do that? I mean, I literally was doing the nap time hustle at the start of building my business out. Yeah, my daughter was nine months old. It was like the second I got her down or didn’t, I would be going to do my work. I would get so much done in those two hours that I had of her nap. But to me, it was like there was just no other option. Because the reality was, we didn’t live in a family dynamic where my husband’s career was going to pay for our life.

I had to make money. That was the truth. But I was not willing to suffer. I think this is also important to talk about. And I feel this in you, Jayne. I wasn’t willing to suffer. It didn’t mean that things weren’t going to be difficult or complicated. But I wasn’t willing to suffer in this way. I just knew there had to be another option, and so I built this business. I chipped away at it and the same. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice, and I’m still not. I keep these particular hours.

My husband is an entrepreneur now as well. We have our whole schedule down with the kids and how we do that. We also homeschool and nature school and all these things. So we figured it out in our model, in sort of reflection of our original dream. And so all this to say, if you’re listening to this, we hear you. Right? I hope that you can hear Jayne and I share our stories and just feel like a sense of possibility for what’s possible to create in your world in your way. I think that it has to be like that.

Because if it’s not, going back to the original part of this conversation, it’s going to be incongruent. It’s, A, probably not going to work very well and, B, it’s going to cause tension in your life that’s not going to be great. And so honoring the original dream and honoring what’s really, really important to you are always the pathways, I think, to true fulfillment in the most meaning. Ultimately, what’s the point if we’re not centering those two things?

Jayne Havens: One question that I often get asked is, how much will I have to work? When people ask me this question, I feel like maybe they aren’t cut out for entrepreneurship. But I totally want to hear your thoughts on this because maybe I’m not looking at it the right way. I’ve always viewed my business as something that I get to do rather than something that I have to do. I’m wondering if you think that there’s room for sort of the personality type who’s asking like, “How much am I going to have to work?” Because for me, even when I had limited time, I wanted to do it. I didn’t have to do it. So I’m wondering your thoughts on that.

Amber Lilyestrom: I mean, I don’t know that I have a devil’s advocate here. I think I’m pretty much in your camp. You know, I was a Division 1 athlete. And in order to become a Division 1 athlete, you have to do sprints, and you have to train when your friends are going out and drinking and having parties. Summertime looks like early morning workouts before I was going to work as a college student and all this for pre-season training. Like I’ve just known I’ve always had that level of work ethic within me because my goals have always been very specific and not easy things ultimately.

I am the breadwinner for my family at this point in terms of how our financials are set up. And so in order to do that and maintain — I think this is really important to say out loud — a 15-hour work week mostly. Tomorrow I have a retreat for a few of my mastermind members, so it’ll be a longer week. But that’s my average. Being able to do those two things at the same time, it means that I have to use my time more efficiently in a more valuable way, if you will, and make those hours count. Because again, I’m not trading. It’s like she gets home from nature school, and we’re together.

Yeah, so I think that it’s a get to I think I really look at my business as like an opportunity to be in my creatorship and being of service. I love helping people. I love people, so I love getting to hear where they are. I love learning about them. I love helping them create a path. It’s just like I could do it all day. I mean, I literally have to shut myself off because I really enjoy it so much.

So I think that that’s a little bit of a Pollyanna answer. But there has to be some part of the original dream that comes back to what you said. Like, I want to use my brain. I want to be challenged. I want to be of service. I think that’s ultimately what entrepreneurship. That’s the spirit of entrepreneurship at the root.

Jayne Havens: Was there a time when you were working more than 15 hours a week, or have you always imposed such sort of firm boundaries?

Amber Lilyestrom: Yeah, always. This is like a shocking answer. People are always like, “I just don’t even believe you.” I’m like, “No. Seriously.” I have almost an internal shutoff switch with myself, where I’m just like — it’s like I reach a certain level and I’m like, it’s like, oh, no, my mom guilt kicks in. I just got to be with my kids. It’s like, I need to go see them. It’s like, it recharges me.

Recently, I’ve just started like — it’s almost like embarrassing to say this, but I started doing meal prep. We weren’t really great at that as a family before. My husband would make some meals. He’s a decent chef, you know. I’m really good at cooking, but I just wasn’t finding time for it because I was just overwhelmed and stressed.

And so I started implementing that into my weekends and then I go shop. It’s like the most amazing thing. I want to go cook dinner for my family. It’s like, I got to go. The sun is setting. We live in New England, so right now at the time we’re chatting, it’s like dark at four o’clock. I want to go in, and I want to cook a meal for my family. I want to have a family dinner every night. These things are important to me.

So I think this is, the bigger question is like, what are your values? What’s important to you? What are the non-negotiables? What do you not get replays on? Then how do you make those things be the things you honor? And my business does not come first. It has to work for my life, and that’s just kind of like the line that I hold for it.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think that that’s really special. As somebody who trains other people to do the work that I do, one thing that I see happen really often is that people try to build their businesses to look like mine.

I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that. Because I’m more than happy to share my business model. I’m an open book. I love for people to learn from me and do as I do. But I also think that the reason for why I’m successful is because I do it in a way that works for me. And so how much of what you learn from somebody else can be put on autopilot in your own life? Do you have to figure it out for yourself to some degree?

Amber Lilyestrom: Yeah, but I do think that we have to try the other person’s model first, because it’s our form of learning, you know. You think about when you teach your kids something, and then you realize they’re literally mimicking exactly the way you do something. Because that’s just how the human brain learns, right? There’s like the monkey see, monkey do kind of thing.

So I have a lot of respect for that because I think back to how many mentors have I copied in certain ways without realizing, you know. Because I just thought that was the right way to do it. And so one of the big sort of like initiations I think that happens for people as they start to realize, okay, I do want to grow this thing, it’s like it won’t work anymore when you’re kind of like in someone else’s frame. That’s the moment where we get to get really creative, and we get to do this real self-honoring work of like, “Wait. But what’s my style?” How do I do my art and becoming really passionate about your own method and your own methodology?

This is why it’s really important to have mentors like yourself who will say, “That’s awesome. I love that you’ve mastered that.” I realize that this part is becoming maybe more challenging. What would it look like for you to do it your way? Like if you didn’t have a roadmap, if you didn’t have somebody else’s framework to follow, what would your instinct do?

I really love doing this with people. It’s asking them lots of questions and redirecting them back to themselves in their own wisdom, because they have it, and then allowing them to lean on it. Because you and I both know, as teachers and mentors, they’re going to thrive when they’re operating from their own knowing and from their own skill set. And that’s a really cool moment as a teacher, to watch when that sort of like clicks in.

Jayne Havens: Yeah. One of my grads said — I can’t remember if she said it to me. I think she said it to me on my podcast. She said that her business finally started to take off when she stopped running it to look like mine. I thought that that was a really beautiful thing. Because the way that I run my business works for me. She figured out that when she truly stepped into her own authentic self, that’s when her business was going to work for her.

I love to try and help people feed up that process. But I think you make a good point. Like, this is how people learn. I’m never upset to see people showing up looking like me. A lot of my grads, they sound like me. They write like me. They coach like me. They’re learning from me. That’s fine.

Amber Lilyestrom: That’s right, yeah.

Jayne Havens: And I’m okay with that. If I wasn’t, I think I’d have a lot of mental stuff going on in my own brain. So I’ve made my peace with that. But I love seeing when people show up as themselves. The faster we can make that happen, I think the better. But it’s a process, and I think people are scared. People are scared to formulate their own verbiage. You know, it’s really, it’s overwhelming.

Amber Lilyestrom: And if they’ve never done it before, they don’t really have anything to go off of. And I’d be curious. For you, like there’s the being a sleep coach and having the skill set of that work, which is its own unique offering, and then learning marketing and marketing copy and writing and then automations and systems. It’s like all the things. Social media. It’s a tidal wave of things that you get to learn at the front.

And so I think it’s really cool that you have the structures in place to help people bridge that where they can get to the point of, “Okay. This is how I want to talk about this. This is how I’m going to set up my practice and the way that I do this in my business.”

There’s something really, really special about getting to support people who are at the beginning of their journey, where there’s like that real transition, that real swell of courage moment to say like, “I’m going to do the thing, and I’m going to sign up for this. I’m going to do the trainings. I’m going to follow through.” I have no idea. I’m actually like a little embarrassed. Actually, I think this is such a — Mel Robbins asked this question at an event I was speaking at years ago. She said to the room, “What’s your most embarrassing dream?” She was like, “Turn to the person next to you and say it right now.” It was just a cool moment, because you saw everybody’s eyes like ugh.

But what it resonated for me was this notion that it is kind of embarrassing to say what our dreams are at first, because most of us don’t have a lot of people in our life that are doing much dreaming. I find this so often. Like if you’re listening to this podcast, you understand that you are in a small percentage of people who is trying to improve their life, trying to consciously do something different to change the trajectory of how you’re living.

You’re not common. You are a rare person. And I would imagine that if you were to take a sort of query of all the people in your life, you’re probably a rare percentage that’s actually doing things differently. That’s why it always feels sort of embarrassing to say what your dream is out loud. And this is also why you’re in really great company right now. But that’s a growth edge, you know, to lean into that and to follow that curiosity, that embarrassment to say, “I’m going to see this thing through to try to create a new reality for myself and my family.”

Jayne Havens: None of my friends are entrepreneurs. None of them. Really, I mean, I have a lot of internet friends who are entrepreneurs. I’ve made a lot of friends. But like real life friends and my real life, my college friends, my high school friends, people who I know from summer camp, they all have jobs. And so it’s really hard. Well, I do come from a family of entrepreneurs, which I think makes it easier. My dad understands. My brothers understand. So that makes it easier. But I do think it’s really challenging to have a big dream to grow a business, to have a big dream even to grow a small business, right?

Amber Lilyestrom: Totally.

Jayne Havens: It’s a big dream to grow a small business. And that can feel really almost embarrassing if you try to talk about it with people who are accountants, you know.

Amber Lilyestrom: Who just don’t get it. Yeah, who just don’t get it. Yeah, I had to kind of get to that place. Early on, I remember when Ben became an entrepreneur too. He used to be a police officer. We retired him from that career in 2017. That was three and a half years into my business. I remember just feeling like, we couldn’t really relate to our friends, you know, like our couple friends. It was just like, they all had jobs. They’d be like, “So like what do you do all day? What do you do now?” I remember we just would like sort of stumble over answering it. We were like, what?

I think there’s also a little part of us, like, we felt so grateful to be living our dream. It was actually quite uncommon to be happy. Pretty much, everybody always is just complaining all the time about their job and having to go to work. And I was like, going back to our earlier part of the conversation, I was like, “I really love my work, you know.” And so it didn’t feel relatable. That lack of relatability made us kind of just feel sometimes like outsiders. It is why community matters so much, truly.

Jayne Havens: So much. So much. What if people want to learn more from you? Where can they learn? I feel like your energy, I feel like I was a little bit in the hot seat today. I was like, I was coached a little bit. It felt good and unusual for me to be on my own podcast and have somebody else asking me questions about myself. So thank you. It was like a breath of fresh air. I enjoyed that. If people want to sort of be in your circle and scoop up your energy, where can they go to do that?

Amber Lilyestrom: The easiest place would be my podcast. It’s called the IGNITE Your Dream podcast, naturally. I’m on Instagram @amberlilyestrom and I share all kinds from business to my poetry and my life behind the scenes over there. Then my website is amberlilyestrom.com. You can check out, I have a membership called the IGNITE Your Business Growth Collective. I teach in there every week. And yeah, I have a beautiful community in that space. So any of those places and spaces, we can connect.

Jayne Havens: That’s all fantastic. I feel like I just had a therapy session, so I’m feeling good. Thank you so much for being here, and we will definitely have to have another conversation like this one again soon.

Amber Lilyestrom: Thanks, Jayne.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.