Hi, I'm Andie! 

I'm a mindset coach, trauma healer, and speaker who works with high achieving, hyper-logical clients to help them heal their trauma, build their self worth and let go of their self sabotaging patterns at the root so they can live a rich, full life.

 

From early on as I can remember I always struggled to feel like I was good enough.

Growing up... 

this thought consumed my head and changed my actions without me even realizing it. It didn’t matter whether I was in the classroom, at practice, or alone with myself… I always felt like I was missing something, like I wasn’t as good as the other girls my age and was broken in a way that they weren’t.

I lacked so much confidence that even having to say my name during class for attendance would make my heart flutter and my stomach nauseous.

Overtime, the shyness and self identity around not being “cool” started to get in my head and caused me to subtly pull away and hold back in sports and making friends.

When I graduated high school I was ready for the next step of my life.

I decided to go to college half way across the country from where I grew up. I moved from Chicago to South Carolina with no car (and no uber at the time), no friends, and no idea what I was getting myself into. I joined a sorority but had similar social struggles around feeling “cool enough” to be friends with those around me. 

The culture shock in the south was more extreme than I imagined and I remember actively avoiding my freshman year dorm after my roommate and her boyfriend openly criticized my Catholic religion and Jewish friends from home because they were Baptist. I felt like I was in another country.

I started experiencing intense panic attacks. I remember so many nights waking up in the middle of the night hyperventilating crying and having no idea why and having to sneak into the bathroom so no one would wake up and make a comment.

It wasn’t until the second half of school that things started to turn around. I worked hard, met friends, and accepted my “dream job” in corporate consulting in Washington D.C.

 

My entire life I lived by the narrative of "I'll be okay once..." Once I finish the semester, get into school, get the guy, lose the weight, etc. The narrative gave me a sense of control that whatever unsettled feeling I'd been avoiding deep below the surface, wasn't going to be forever. That one day, after enough time had passed, it would go away. 

When I finally started my dream job I thought I had made it.

Since I was little I had always thought… “Once I start this job, everything will be fixed” but that was not the story. I quickly realized just how horrible the job was and in order to navigate several mentally abusive managers, horrible hours and work locations, unnecessary stress, and so much more.

I started to rely on running and eating less in order to gain a sense of control and allow myself to get through the day. I’d wake up at 5am every morning and run 10+ miles a day in the dark through the streets and monuments of DC. If I didn’t, I was so unstable that I would often have an uncontrollable panic attack during the work day at the office.

 

 

I continued the pattern of “I will be okay once…” in different situations within the firm I was at. I thought if I could get on a different project, different manager, different type of work, or different location THEN I’d be okay, but it never happened.

It was around this time that I also started binge eating uncontrollably. I already had a full on adult eating disorder and was so scared by the new binging patterns and terrified to gain weight that I knew something needed to change.

At this same point I was navigating a situationship with a guy at work who had all the “cool” vibes that I’d typically avoid. He came up to me the first day of work, and somehow we ended up next to each other on a plane headed to training later that week. As work was crippling around me and my eating was out of control, he would continue to suck me in and then avoid me on and off for two full years.

 

I sought out a therapist…

and then another when the first didn’t work, to help me with my eating, exercise, and boy problems. Months in, I realized that as helpful as therapy was, it wasn’t helping me fix the problem so I took matters into my own hands. I joined a coaching program to work on the eating disorder, and started pouring into the personal development world, applying everything that I learned in hopes that things would start to shift… and it did!

As I started to understand and let go of everything causing my low self worth and unsettled and stuck feelings, I started to feel more calm, clear, and content in my every day. This clarity created a domino effect. I started waking up with random urges to do things that didn’t make sense… to play the guitar, or move to Denver (a city I’d never been to). 

 

Eventually this same feeling had me making some bigger moves.

During this same time…

I continued to follow those same urges and accidentally manifested a man in the army, whom I quickly fell in love and traveled all over the country with before he was set to be deployed 10 months later. I ended the year with a fiancé and memories to last a lifetime, but with next to no money in my bank account. In the midst of getting to know him, dating and falling in love, I put work and a ton of savings into my business but not to the extent it needed in order for it to thrive. I was mentally holding myself back and lacking confidence. Deep down, part of me didn’t think I could do it. So as he left, the looming reality of knowing that I either needed to figure it out or go back to my old firm set in.

This was the kick in the butt I needed to get my business off the ground and running. The fear and anxiety of the deployment were high when he left so I leaned in and focused. My business became the thing I poured myself into in order to manage the scary unknown of what my husband was going through and what our future would be.

No one prepares you for the fear of a loved one being in a combat zone for an extended period of time.

 

There were so many difficult moments that tested my strength during the deployment, but the one I remember most clearly happened on a Thursday night in April when we had plans to talk. Something in me could tell things were not good before they even happened. He missed the call time and my messages, and a quick google search instantly showed me the attack that had happened on what I assumed was his base. It was over a day before he responded back and because of the security of the situation, he wasn’t able to tell me exactly what happened for several months. I could tell how much it rattled him and as much as I was relieved to hear from him, I was also flooded with a new level of fear for what was to come for the remainder of his time there (I share the full story in this blog post here).

While he was gone, I never knew what was real or what was fake, I never knew how much or how little danger was really going on, I never knew how hard it truly was for him, how scary it was, or how much was going on. I just kept focusing on the future… the next text, our next facetime call, and one day our wedding.

I started developing terrible skin rashes and stomach problems that no doctor understood. I didn’t want to talk to friends or leave the house because no one understood. I kept planning a wedding and going through the motions of picking a dress, and a venue, and going to a bachelorette party, but I was never really there. The only thing that brought me back to the present was my business.

 

I finally leaned on the tools I had and rather than listening to all my doubts and worries like I had been, I finally DECIDED it was going to work, and almost instantly I started seeing moves. I signed my first big clients, hit my first 10, 20 and 30k months, launched my first group program, gave a TEDx talk and so much more. It was incredible and it helped me survive and navigate the time until my husband finally came home. 

I can still remember the day he returned so crystal clear. I had flown back to Denver and both my parents and his were there to greet him as he walked off the bus. I couldn’t stop crying and when I ran up to him he grabbed me and pulled me in a hug and it felt just like home, like everything had changed but nothing had too. 

Despite it being incredibly common to experience marital issues, divorce, cheating and so much more during a deployment, when my husband came back we saw how all the hours we poured into facetimes, all the times we turned towards each other rather than away, all the times we showed up despite the bad wifi, weird hours, and difficult schedules, paid off. Despite being only 25 years old we were dedicated to each other.  Kevin and I have only known each other for 3.5 years, and one of those we were half a world apart, yet many people comment on how it seems like we’ve been together for 10 or 15 years based on how we act. I credit that to the deployment… The distance, difficulty and pressure gave us space to grow our relationship so much quicker than most people get to and because of the choices we made we are so much stronger now.

The months that followed we focused heavily on moving in together, helping him heal from what he’d been through, and preparing for our wedding.

By the time the wedding came around in Jan 2023 we had seen some very low points and some of our friends and family had started to hear stories about the deployment.

What Kevin and I had gone through together created a richness to our wedding that couldn’t really be mimicked. While no one tried to make our wedding about the deployment and it was only brought into speeches in the most tasteful and respectful of ways, there is something about the level of patriotism that created a very deep emotional experience… even when Kev and I just wanted to party lol.

I’ve been told by so many people who were there that night that they’ve never been to a wedding with that level of love and energy in the room. It gives me chills just thinking about it and I have distinct memories of looking around the room watching men who I never EVER would think would cry, get up and leave the room to gather themselves. It was incredibly touching and special to feel the support and love, and to have a massive party afterwards with all of the people that were there throughout it.

 

Following the wedding it became clear that Kevin and I needed to get the heck out of Denver. The city had become tainted by deployment vibes and everytime we were back in Chicago we felt so much more calm and at peace with ourselves.

We set a budget, made a list of what we were looking for, and put the feelers out for an apartment somewhere on the north side of the city. The apartment manifested itself in the most easiest and unintentional of ways and in June 2023 we moved across country with the help of our family, got our first family member Boatie, and set up shop in the apartment that was coincidentally two blocks away from our wedding hotel, a short walk to the venue, and in the same neighborhood as the church.

It felt like such a full circle moment and the expansion that came from deliberately choosing to rent a place much nicer than what we were used to (3 bed, top floor, renovated and clean, steps away from the lake, etc.) allowed us to manifest Kevin a much better job, me to make some massive structural changes in my business, and more.

It also was the final shift we needed to truly feel like the deployment chapter of our lives, and the gray cloud that had been following us, was left behind.

 

During this time...

we focused more on laying our foundations and creating a family with our new dog. Part of that was with my business. As it grew, I did too and I realized how helping people heal their self sabotaging patterns was really just a stepping stone to a bigger mission - helping people go beyond what they thought was capable, accomplish their goals, and find true satisfaction and nourishment in their lives. In the beginning of my story I didn’t feel content… let alone satisfied, and now through all the steps I’ve taken and all the growth I’ve done I can say that I DO feel incredibly satisfied with who I am, and nourished and inspired by the life I live.