We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amy L. Miller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Amy L. thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Taking risks when it comes to both my career and life trajectory is just…who I am. Being stuck or stagnant is the worst sensation for me, so when I begin to feel this way, I immediately look around for things I can change to get out of that. I’ve left relationships (including a marriage) because they weren’t quite right, left a W-2 job for entrepreneurship, quit before I had a plan, had a baby with someone I barely knew (nine years later, we are still together and the kid is doing great), and gave up a steady therapy practice to do things my own way in coaching….only to pivot and take a job as the interim director of a large humanist congregation for two years and then (now) come back to the coaching practice.
I don’t know what makes me want or need to take these sorts of risks, but I will say that generally speaking, they have paid off. Not always financially, but in each case, my spirit was buoyed by the shift or the change in circumstances.
The greatest risk I’ve taken professionally was rebranding my coaching practice and then almost immediately accepting a job as the interim director of the Ethical Society of St Louis. It’s the largest organization of its kind in the US, with well over 300 members. I had to immediately take on roles I’d never even considered, much less performed: from staff management to regularly scheduled keynote speaking to co-crafting a budget of over $600K. It was a very steep learning curve and a deeply challenging two years, both personally and professionally. I resigned once, only to be persuaded to try again; I did complete my two year contract at the end of 2024. I learned a LOT, personally and professionally.
Ultimately, I don’t regret the detour, but I will say that rebuilding a practice after two years away is uniquely challenging and a bit stressful!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I was a highly sensitive, largely-ignored middle child growing up in the Midwest and so I read books voraciously…often wildly inappropriate ones.
(Advantage of your parents not paying attention to you as a Gen X kid is you could kind of do whatever you wanted, including consume whatever media you could get your hands on. My musical tastes were also a bit…beyond…it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized “I want your sex” and “Like a virgin” were not appropriate songs for young kids to sing at the top of their lungs, but it seems like I turned out ok?)
Anyway, I will always believe that my immersion into reading novels from a young age gave me perspective into the different ways all manner of other people think and see the world. So I have what amounts to a vast and deeply sympathetic understanding of human behavior and motivation, which allows me to be a highly effective counselor and advice-giver. I can almost always predict and name what someone might be feeling.
I ALSO love telling people what to do, so becoming a therapist/coach was really sort of inevitable.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, though, or how to get there, for a long time. I finished undergrad with a degree in English lit. WTF was I going to do with that?! Unknown. So I moved to NYC…just in time for the 9/11 attacks to happen (literally the week after- I moved 9/3, turned 22 on 9/6, and then the world changed forever on 9/11)
It caused such a panic in the city and I saw how discombobulated everyone was. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how or where to start.
I moved back home to St Louis around the holidays that year and decided to leave my future path up to “the universe”. I was also a singer and had some friends who were songwriters in Nashville. I decided to apply to ONE grad school for social work and if I didn’t get in, move to Nashville to try my hand at being a studio singer (recording vocal demos for songwriters to shop around to the stars). Don’t ask me why at 22, giving myself such limited options seemed wise. I do not know.
It turns out that I applied to what was then (and still is) the #2 social work masters program in the country, and for whatever reason, they accepted my application.
I’ll spare you the next 20 years of my life, but the shortest version is this: we learn what we most need to know. I had a hard time verbally expressing myself, probably due to all those years as a quiet and ignored introverted bookish child.
So I specialize in: relationships, communication, conflict resolution and repair, and emotionally intelligent leadership. I started out as a traditional therapist, but I switched to coaching a few years ago because I hate having rules and restrictions around the kind of relationships I can build. I want authentic human connection to lead my work. I am an excellent relationship coach, full stop. I have a unique ability to almost immediately identify the patterns in the relationship and work quickly to disarm each person so that we can make progress.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
I have never done any formal or official “marketing”…to be honest I simply don’t have that skillset or the money to pay someone to do it for me! So historically, my authentic voice is my brand. Period.
Almost all of my clients are with me because they like me as a person, and oftentimes they found me via my social media or through a direct referral from someone who knows me personally. I have a distinct style of communicating and an open, funny, likable personality. I’m also spicy, love to cuss, and can be extremely blunt in a way people either really love or super hate.
So my most effective strategy for growing my clientele, as simple as this sounds, is just being unapologetically myself. People can tell, and they admire it and want to practice doing it for themselves.
(Or they read my book, or are randomly in the audience when I’m singing or speaking, or hear me on a radio show/podcast, or meet me out in the world, or find something I wrote on the internet, and find me that way. Casting a wide net, doing lots of things that bring you joy and allow you to express your truest self. is the best strategy, in my experience.)
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I learned how to Provide Mental Health Services.
I use title case to illustrate that this is a prescriptive thing that providers are taught. We learn how to be Therapists and are drilled into about Ethical Guidelines and Evidence-Based Practice and Right and Wrong ways to interact with clients.
But it’s all predicated on weird power dynamics and normed on white people (usually men.)
And, our training sometimes has us mistakenly interpreting normal human things as pathology and assigning medical diagnoses to regular, predictable human behavior.
So in rejecting the formalized Mental Health framework and using my clinical experience to provide “life, leadership, and relationship” coaching instead of Proper Therapy, I had to also unlearn a bias I had that didn’t take coaching seriously. When in fact, I am freer in this practice. I can hug my clients, if it’s appropriate. I can go to their weddings, if they invite me. I can join a client for a yoga class because they feel nervous going alone. I am just much freer, but I had to unlearn the bias I had that told me there are Right and Wrong ways to provide people with the emotional and practical support they need.
(Don’t get me wrong, therapy is VERY important and meaningful work especially for trauma! Coaching is not appropriate for all things, and is not appropriate for trauma treatment, psychosis, mood disorders, and other legitimate medical concerns.)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rootsandkeyscoaching.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rootsandkeyscoaching/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rootsandkeyscoaching
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amymillerlcsw/
- Other: TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@rootsandkeyscoaching
Buy my book: https://www.amazon.com/Easyish-Keys-Relatively-Easy-Relationship/dp/1735780502
Scheduling appointments: www.calendly.com/rootsandkeyscoaching.com
Image Credits
All professional photos by Jenna Grissom of JElizabeth Photos in St Louis (https://www.instagram.com/myfriendjennathephotographer)