It was one of my very lucky days, probably close to two years ago now, that I found Amy Oscar and her beautiful blog on-line. Today I call her a friend but we’ve never (yet) met in-person. I’d also call her an inspiration and one of my teachers. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as we enjoyed doing it.
Formal bio’: Amy is an author, teacher and intuitive consultant, encouraging you to develop a personal relationship with the Divine. In 2010, she wrote Sea of Miracles: An invitation from the angels, the story of what happened when she began writing a magazine column about angels with Doreen Virtue. In 2009, Doreen and she co-authored a collection of stories called, My Guardian Angel: True Stories of Angelic Encounters… (Hay House, 2009).
For her informal bio’ and a deeper sense of what Amy’s about click here.
Take a deep breath, settle in and enjoy your time with Amy Oscar.
Amy Oscar
Cherry: Hello Amy. I so appreciate your willingness to be interviewed for the Confidence Chronicles, True Stories of Becoming Strong. I’ve interviewed a number of women who have valuable stories to tell. Now I’m excited to interview you and, once again, validate everyone’s humanity – that even the people we admire and see as successful have self-doubts and can at times lack confidence.
Amy: Oh yes! So true.
Cherry: Your work has taken you from successful system analyst to trainer, to features’ editor, writer and author. And now you have a successful online course called Soul Caller, which I had the good fortune of taking. When I read about your journey on your website, it appears seamless, Amy, so easy. I was wondering if you ever doubted your ability or engaged in any negative self-talk when you were going through all these career transitions?
Amy: Oh, of course. Every step of the way I had doubts. However, I wouldn’t say negative self talk is something I do a lot of anymore, but I used to.
Also, there was nothing seamless about my career, it was kind of a bumpy, jerky train ride which I followed. It led me.
Some people, like my daughter, are born with an idea of where they’re going and what they’re going to do for the rest of their life so they just charge toward it. But I’m not that person, I had to feel my way.
I kind of fell into my jobs of systems analyst and also magazine editor. My life’s more a story of I fell into it, and did the best I could without drowning.
Cherry: I led my life in a similar fashion – falling forward into things without an overarching plan – beyond providing for my sons. I took many paths that were wonderful, but I, too, wasn’t like your daughter. I use to doubt myself – and was told by some people – that I “should” have been more focused and known the one thing I was to do all my life.
How did you move through your periods of self-doubt?
Amy: I’d move through the bad times the same way I would move through the good times. I think it’s important to say that from my perspective, people like you and me and probably a lot of your readers who struggle with confidence, are sensitives.
Sensitives are people who are highly responsive or susceptible to outside stimulus. They probably don’t like crowds or loud noises, and sensitive people get the idea that they’re, well, too sensitive. “Don’t be so thin skinned”, people tell you, right?
I learned the hard way, but one of the gifts of being sensitive and being in situations that were uncomfortable was learning how to get out of them. I learned to get out of things that don’t work for me, which could be seen as a backwards approach to finding what did work for me and becoming so-called successful (which is completely in the eye of the beholder).
I’m on the same journey everyone else is. But the tools or the skills that I use to get out of hot water, out of uncomfortable situations, are my sensitivities, my intuition. I feel my way out of things the same way I feel my way toward things.
I trust my gut more now. When something feels wrong, I don’t do it.
I’m 54 years old. I’ve spent the last I would say ten years of my life reorganizing my world so that I can say no to things that don’t resonate for me.
Cherry: Yes! I have found that to be one of the gifts of aging. I, too, pay more attention to the consequences of not listening to my gut. My instincts would be saying, “Cherry, that’s not a wise idea.” but then I’d think I was being silly or oversensitive and I’d do what my gut had been saying not to do. And the outcome wouldn’t be positive for me. Knock on wood, I never had any major disasters, but it wasn’t the right course for me.
Amy: Those disasters really don’t come to people who do listen to their intuition. I mean, sometimes we need to get hit a little in the head. But if you don’t listen to guidance, if you continue to plow forward, thinking you know better than intuition, that’s when you get into crisis, right?
Cherry: That’s a good segue into asking you about guidance. You speak about a call-and-response world. Call-and-response in terms of calling to the angels, calling to a higher power and getting a response. That’s part of your everyday life.
Amy: Yes.
Cherry: When you talk about believing in and having conversations with angels, which you do, I think many people understand, but there’s probably just as many who might think that’s weird and tell you as much.
Amy: But it is weird.
Cherry: Oh, okay. <laughing> Well then, we’ll forget going down that path.
Amy: No, let’s go there. This could also be one of the gifts of aging. I mean, maybe the reason I didn’t perceive angels or that level of guidance in my twenties and thirties was because I wouldn’t have accepted that it was real unless an angel had stood before me with wings and a halo and said, “It’s real, pay attention.” But, you know, that never happens.
When I did accept angels and start to talk about it, I didn’t receive a lot of negative response. It would be important to know that my day job is reading angel stories/episodes, from people who write in about them, for a national women’s magazine. I work with one of the world’s greatest angel experts who has a column in the magazine. And as a result of doing that, angel stories are part of my resume.
I did get one negative comment from a person who worked in my office. She came by my desk to ask me to lunch, we’ve been friends for years, and she saw all the mail on my desk and laughed. “It’s so funny how people believe in this stuff isn’t it?”
I said, “I believe in it.” And she responded, “You’re kidding!” , because I seem so normal, right. I’m this person that works in the office, and wears jeans on casual Friday like everyone else. I order Caesar salad with chicken just like she does but she couldn’t wrap her head around a “normal” person believing in angel stories.
I think angels come to people in the form that they can be comfortable. I’ve heard stories of angels showing up as nurses in the ER, as helpful strangers when your car breaks down in the storm.
But I’ve also heard stories about glowing, white beings on the beach. Angels can take any form they like is my understanding.
The well-know archangel form often comes in a dream, for example, or at a sick bed. A lot of people will describe that and other people will often debunk what’s being said or was seen and say “It was the powerful drugs you’re taking”.
I’m a witness to the reality that the angels walk among us, and that they’re here to help us, and that they’re real. I describe myself as a witness most often.
Cherry: I’m sure you do powerful work with yourself, as you do with clients, through your strong connection to intuition and the Divine. With that connection, when do you find that you still grapple with, if at all, self-confidence or self-doubts?
Amy: I think for me, confidence becomes an issue when I’m trying to sort out what exactly I am. So when I say I am an intuitive consultant…Oh, no, wait. I’m a writer. Oh, no, wait. I’m writing a memoir. Oh, no, wait. I’m writing a course called Soul Caller. So I still work at that constantly, maybe because I’m a bit of a shape-shifter. Maybe that would be a better brand for me.
Also, I never finished college. So my biggest confidence issue is accepting that I’m a self-taught learner and that I have an encyclopedic university level degree in life, but I don’t have a master’s degree. I’m one course short of a bachelor’s degree in marketing when I was hired out of my last class at school in State University of New York to start a magazine with my professor.
I never went back and finished that course, that class, and my credits aged out. So, in order to get that bachelor’s I’d have to take 30 credits. And I don’t want to spend money on that to be honest. So, I want you to know this about me because this is a confidence issue for me, I’m in a Master’s/PhD program in California where I fly to California because they gave me the accreditation for the degree that New York won’t grant me.
Cherry: This relates to my work in Borderless Thinking and how we get caught in mindsets; that we’re acculturated with certain belief systems through our families, or through society. One of the mindsets in the United States has been the importance of having a college degree. It’s almost as if, and I’m going to oversimplify but, if you have a college degree then you’re smart. If you don’t have a college degree, well then you’re not as smart. It is such a strong label and misunderstanding. It’s not the truth and a gross generalization, but we still get caught in that paradigm.
Amy: We are still caught in it. Although I have to say, I think that boundary or border is changing. For example, Danielle LaPorte, our current rockstar on social media, doesn’t have a degree, and doesn’t care.
Cherry: As you’re pointing out, there’s a shift in thinking, and hopefully some of the corporations will get caught in that shift and not absolutely require that you have a college degree before you can get such and such entry level job or be promoted.
Amy: I think they will. If they don’t, there’s so much opportunity now to be self-made. For example with my book. I’m a magazine editor with lots of contacts in the new age field. I also was a leader in the 80′s. Lots of contacts. I know lots of people and still could not get my book published in the form that I wanted it to be, so I self published it. I couldn’t have done that, even five years ago.
I didn’t wait for someone to approve of me and give me an advance. I went ahead and invested in it myself. And I think that’s one of the things that I would tell your readers, that’s been the most important in my own development is to make your own success.
If you want to publish a book now, you can. If you want to have your own radio show know you can, that’s one of the ways I learned how to talk about my work. I did two years as a radio show-host with a friend. We just talked about things we were interested in and this emerged as something I was interested in.
Cherry: You put yourself out there.
Amy: The other thing I would say that I had overlooked when I was younger is: teach what you need to learn. Teach what you’re curious about and then you have to show up to teach it so you’re going to have to do the research and learn enough so that you can teach it.
Cherry: Yes. Been there, done that.
Amy: I think that’s what all the really good teachers do. If you want to be a good teacher and a known teacher you’re going to be at the leading edge of something new. And that new is forming right in front of your feet. It’s not there ’til you get there and it doesn’t exist until you name it into being.
People struggling with confidence worry that people won’t like them or won’t approve of what they’re doing. You have to find a language for yourself, almost an archetype, that you can crawl into that feels safe.
And for me, I labelled myself a story alchemist, and I wasn’t sure what that was, but I knew I liked writing stories and I knew I liked magic. And out of that, all my work has come.
Cherry: That was beautifully said. It’s interesting how labels work for you and against you. For instance we talked about the labeling with a college degree and how that can be both good, bad and everything in-between.
But when you labeled yourself a story alchemist, and just started to think of yourself that way, that’s what you became in more and more areas. I want to reinforce that you didn’t wait for someone else to approve of you. You invested in yourself literally and figuratively. Investing in yourself and not waiting for someone else’s approval, be it a book, a blog, or some other activity you want to do, is of paramount importance for all of us.
Amy: I love that you zeroed in on labels. I think one of the things we do in terms of negative self-talk is label ourselves, for example as not confident enough or not ready, but it may not be that. For example, I talked about sensitivity. If you look at what you call a lack of confidence, not you personally but someone, and say “Is it that I lack confidence in this situation or is it that I’m sensitive to this particular room or this particular stimulation that’s coming at me? Is this person really more powerful than me or are they actually really aggressive?
Cherry: I like that idea of reflection and potential re-framing.
Amy: Your sensitivity is not a flaw in you, it’s one of the greatest gifts that you have. And I think that we label ourselves, or the quiet ones among us do, right? We label ourselves us wrong in some way, because the loud shiny people are out there taking up all the air in the room, when we’re over here on the couch helping someone transform their life, because we’re listening to their story. Perhaps we made someone a pot of soup when they were sick and it made all the difference in the world. Gentle people, who may question their confidence, are very important and have a lot to offer and I think that if we re-label ourselves, it would be very helpful to the world as well as to us individually.
More I think about it, I actually think if we can get away from the labels of good and bad we’d all be better off. Because sensitive is just sensitive. It’s blonde hair. It’s brown hair. It’s just sensitive. It doesn’t carry with it something good or bad, and yet we start to look at it that way.
One of my favorite stories is about an author that I admire who got her first book deal by banging down the door of the agent that she wanted to work with. I’m never going be able to do that, and that’s not who I am, but I’ll be able to have a quiet cup of tea with a book agent. And it’ll end up to be the same conversation, no matter how I got in the door.
Cherry: It will be the same conversation. We all have to approach our lives in the way that works for us. Thanks so much Amy for having our interview end on such an important and lovely note.
You can find Amy on Twitter @amyoscar and Cherry @cherrywoodburn.
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