It’s always terrifying to jump
Amy was pursuing her lifelong dream when she discovered it wasn’t where she needed to be
Amy Taylor-Kabbaz was one of the first women who spoke to the loss of self I felt after becoming a mother. Her book Happy Mama, The Guide to Finding Yourself Again managed to articulate the tension I felt between the profound joy and love for one's children and the grief and sacrifice that can accompany it.
She was also - like me - a former ABC journalist and producer. At the time I found her book we were both working in very different areas to our former careers. She had founded her coaching business, and I was hosting a parenting podcast called Feed Play Love.
Through her experience of motherhood she found a passionate desire to support and lift other women up. At one of the most vulnerable times in your life - becoming a mother - Amy can reach in and help you see yourself clearly, with love, strength and great compassion.
The difference that can make! Instead of struggling through motherhood, Amy helps women to grieve the loss of who they were and to lean into the forces that are changing them.
I always knew that Amy was driven to succeed in her work at the ABC - she loved it. But she discovered that she had a different path to tread. How hard must that be? To pursue and catch a dream only to discover that it’s not the right dream for you?
Amy said she ignored the voice telling her she needed to change for a while, but when she couldn’t ignore it anymore she had to take the leap. And here’s the thing: jumping into the unknown is always terrifying. It can sound liberating and noble but at the end of the day it’s as scary as fuck.
Amy jumped even though it was scary. In doing so she realised that to ‘jump’ is really a profound commitment to back yourself. And once she did that, it changed her life completely.
Listen to Amy Taylor-Kabbaz on A Better World Blueprint on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Amy’s Blueprint:
Some ideas from Amy on how she has lived her life of purpose.
Who is the person who most inspires you?
“My 16 year old daughter, when she came into this world, she had this look in her eyes of ‘help me’. It was so clear. She found the world loud and overwhelming and was born with a lot of physical struggles that then turned into mental health struggles. She spent some time in the adolescent mental health ward in 2021 and 22. It was actually a gift in a strange way. The world was locked down. Everything had stopped and she was in this ward for quite a few months and I could just visit her every afternoon. And I would go and we would just sit there, the two of us, and no devices, no TV allowed. She didn't even talk for a while and we just got to know each other in a whole different way.
“What I learned is that the world is a really, really scary place for her. And I think there's a lot of us who find the world scary and not knowing if tomorrow's going to be any better is really overwhelming. I recognise that in myself, that I'm probably trying to control things most of the time. And then to see her find some form of inner strength and finally go back to school.
“To finally make friends and now she's enrolled to become a nurse because she wants to be a nurse like the ones that helped her. It's literally a daily inspiration to see somebody overcome how scary it is to be here in this world and to do it anyway. There are many days she actually still can't, but I have never seen anybody in my life fight for their life like she does. And it makes me want to do that too.”
Do you have a saying that helps guide you in life?
“One of my absolute favourite guiding sayings that I have lived by for years, it's quite a spiritual one, comes from the teaching of Abraham Hicks, and it is,
‘I am getting ready to be ready’.
“I am a pretty impatient person and I get incredibly frustrated if it's not going the way I thought it would and what ‘I'm getting ready to be ready’ does for my brain and my nervous system and myself is that I know that each backward step is actually getting me closer to being ready and that every day I'm just getting closer and closer. And then when it's here, I will be ready because that's the other part of it, right? Sometimes we ask for all these things and they arrive and we're like, no, be careful what you wish for. So for many years, in my morning practice, that would be my meditation. ‘I am getting ready to be ready.’ ”
Is there a book, movie or piece of art that has had an impact on your life? And if there was, what was it?
“Yes, I have three.
“First was Gone with the Wind, which is why my daughter was called Scarlet. When I grew up, my parents were both in the Navy and we moved around a lot and I found that quite isolating and quite difficult to make friends and quite difficult to settle. We were in Alice Springs and I think I might have been about seven years old and an American friend of my parents in the Defence Force showed me the movie Gone with the Wind and I just remember thinking here is this fierce independent, I-can-take-on-anything-energy and she just became my hero for many years. That just changed me. When I was growing up in Alice Springs, the only channel we had was the ABC. I'd never seen anything or any woman like that in my life. And it just planted something in me.
“Then many, many years later, I was an exchange student in Japan when I was 15 and I took a book called The Power of One by Bryce Courtney. And again, you can see the theme here. He was this bullied misfit of a boy in a boarding school who didn't fit in and couldn't find his voice and didn't know who he was and through boxing and then advocacy really found this power within himself. And at the time I was in an all Japanese, all girls school. So I felt like I was the misfit that didn't fit in there and I didn't know how to communicate. And again, that just carried me through so many years of knowing that there's this power of one.
“And then the final one is a reflection of the work that I do now, which is a book called Circle of Stones by Judith Duerk. And it's basically a collection of stories of what happens for a woman when she is properly initiated into womanhood. I cannot tell you how often I've read it. Like the dog-eared marks, the underlined sentences, I have picked it up over and over again. I think I read it for the first time about 15 years ago. And when I read it, something just in me was like, that's what this is all about.
“So it starts off by saying, ‘How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place for you to go to be with your mother, with your sisters and the aunts, with your grandmothers and the great and great, great grandmothers, a place of women to go, to be, to return to as woman. How might your life be different?’ And that's what I feel like has guided the last 15 years of my life, I want to create places where we go to learn the ways of women like that.”
Listen to Amy Taylor-Kabbaz on A Better World Blueprint on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
What is your favourite thing in the world to do?
“I absolutely love sitting at the dinner table with my three kids. I absolutely love it. They are funny. And then we have deep political conversations (they're very Sydney Inner West kids). We talk about gender fluidity or what the vote is at the moment or what they saw on TikTok. And then I usually get quite ranty and they roll their eyes and say, ‘Is this a feminist moment, Mum?’ I adore the interactions with my kids now. And my other favourite thing to do at the moment is I wake up at five every morning and at five thirty I meet three other women with our dogs and we walk through Sydney Park in the Inner West for just over an hour every day, the four of us.
“Some days we solve the problems of the world, but mostly we just laugh to the point where there are people who walk at the same time as us and they're all the way over the other side of the park. Like there is a lake, there is a bridge, there is a hill. They're all the way over the other side and they will say to us as they come around and find us, we could hear you laughing from the other side of the park this morning. And I'm home by seven every morning to wake the kids up for school and it's like I've set my day. It's just the best.”
What’s the best thing you ever did?
“This is a hard one because obviously having my kids was the best thing I ever did and totally changed my life. But when I really sit with it… and I've never thought about this before, but I think the best thing I ever did was download my first meditation when I was 28 weeks pregnant with my son, I’d been told that I needed to be on couch rest and I hated that idea and was in such a world of ‘Why is this happening to me?’ and ‘What's wrong with me?’ and was just in such a horrible hard place because I realised in that moment that the way I was living my life was putting my baby at risk.
“And so I downloaded this meditation. I don't even remember what it was now. I think it might've even been like a Deepak Chopra, your stock standard, let's-just-start-here type of meditation. And I couldn't even finish it. It was really uncomfortable and I found it really hard, even though I'd been doing yoga for years.
“To just sit there and breathe and start to focus on being kind to myself. I think that's probably one of the best things I've ever done because that was when I took another path.”
What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
“So like I said, I come from a military family. A family who was so amazing and were so supportive but very strict and very ambitious and you do what you say you're going to do. If you set a task, Amy, you finish it. Like, ‘Suck it up, princess, you're going to school’. And years and years later, my sister and I were traveling through Asia. We were leaving Vietnam to go to Cambodia and we were both incredibly unwell. We had stupidly had ice in our drinks the night before and it was coming out of both ends. We were so incredibly unwell, like scarily dehydrated. And we were at the airport in Vietnam.
“And we rang my mum and dad and my dad said to us on the phone, because we could see on the board, there's a flight to Phnom Penh and there's a flight to Sydney. And it was like, ‘What are we going do? Are we going go home?’ Because we are so unwell. And he said, at the time, ‘Amy, there's no shame in a strategic retreat’.
“And it was such a moment, it makes me teary and it's so ridiculous because it's a military term, but it was finally permission to say that just because you said you were going to do something, sometimes it's okay to retreat and say it's not working for me. And I was in my mid-20s and I'd never had permission for that. We ended up going to Phnom Penh and we were fine. We took Hydralyte and never drank any ice again, but it has actually been a guiding sentence for me from then on.
“I use it with my kids; that there's no shame in a strategic retreat. You have a plan and you go all the way as far as you can. And when you realise it's not going to work for you and the casualties are too high for the win you retreat. Think, what is the impact of the win? And there's no shame if you decide that you can't do it anymore. I use that all the time. That totally changed my life.”
Listen to Amy Taylor-Kabbaz on A Better World Blueprint on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.