Pivoting from interior design to authoring, coaching and motivational speaking, Amanda Greaves is helping others redesign their futures with intention and authenticity.
Meet Amanda Greaves, the designer turned author, coach and motivational speaker, helping others redesign their futures.
Amanda Greaves has been a designer for two decades, shaping spaces and creating interior environments that reflect her clients’ dreams. Her passion for design started to wane under the weight of shifting industry demands and unrealistic client expectations, and toward the end of 2022, she made a bold pivot. Facing personal and professional upheavals, Greaves decided to do something other than interior design as she stepped away from the career that had once defined her and embraced her longtime dream of writing a book and coaching others through life’s transitions. Now, as an empowerment coach, motivational speaker and author of The Chameleon Diaries: Designing a Life Worth Changing For, Greaves is shaping lives the way she once shaped spaces—with intention and authenticity.
Greaves’ “aha moment” didn’t come in a single, dramatic flash—it was the result of multiple realizations, each one chipping away at her previous life. What she found within the fragments of realizations was a career she liked but no longer loved and a personal relationship that was going nowhere. “I wasn’t fulfilled,” she reflects. “I had become a hollow shell of the person I once was.” That winter, deciding it was time for a seismic shift, she cut ties with a key property development client and the toxic relationship. What followed was a period of intense self-reflection and personal growth. “I started uncovering the vulnerable aspects of myself that I had been hiding from for over 30 years,” she says. “Now, I want to use those self-discovery experiences to help others do the same.”
Through motivational speaking and empowerment coaching, Greaves guides clients through major life transitions.
Greaves’ new career as an empowerment coach is deeply influenced by her design background. “First, we have to define the scope of what we aim to achieve, make a plan and then dig in,” she explains. “You can’t build a new house on a rocky or crumbling foundation. We have to figure out what’s been holding you back, clear the field and then start building a solid and intentional life.” She helps her clients, often women in their 40s and 50s, assess their lives and understand the narratives of their own stories by sharing some of hers. This connection of similarities helps to identify her clients’ limiting beliefs, habits and values. Then, she guides them through their own major life transitions with curated speeches, online courses and personalized coaching. Step by step, Greaves digs into radical honesty with all of her clients so they can learn how to design a future in which they can genuinely thrive.
Her memoir, The Chameleon Diaries, reflects her journey from people-pleaser to empowered leader. It’s part memoir, part guide to self-discovery, complete with journal prompts and exercises to help readers reflect on their own lives. “It’s a book for anyone who’s ever felt like they’ve been shape-shifting to fit someone else’s expectations or have ever felt like they weren’t enough, even for themselves,” Greaves explains. The book isn’t just about her story—it’s about helping others find theirs.
Greaves wrote her memoir and guide to self-discovery, The Chameleon Diaries: Designing a Life Worth Changing For, which opened her up to her opportunity for intense self-reflection and personal growth, guiding her toward her career change to be an empowerment coach and speaker.
Drawing from her own narrative of resilience, reinvention and the power of intentional design, Amanda Greaves shares her proven strategies for self-discovery in the following step-by-step guide.
Five Steps to Redesign Your Life:
1. Define Your Scope: Is this a minor change in style, a total gut job renovation or a brand-new build from scratch?
The first step is to take a holistic look at your life and assess where you’re thriving and where you’re barely surviving. Using a “life-wheel” assessment, Greaves encourages you to identify the parts of your story that are worth hanging onto and the ones that are undermining your success that need revision, renovation or, in some cases, complete removal and replacement.
2. Programming: Understanding Your Values and Gathering Your Precedent Studies
Next, the journey to understanding your values will help to uncover what truly drives you. Are the values you’re living by your own, or have they been inherited from others? Are these values keeping you on track for the future you want, or are they derailing an overdue past you are currently living? Understanding where your values come from and how to redirect them as necessary will help guide your decision-making and ensure you’re building a life that is aligned with your authentic self.
3. Clarify Your Blueprint: Identify What You Want—and What You Don’t
Getting crystal clear on what brings you joy and fulfillment is one of the most important factors in designing an intentional life. What are the passions and activities you can’t live without? Equally important, figure out what drains you or causes dissatisfaction. By knowing the blueprint of your decision-making process and what is important to you, you can start eliminating what you don’t want or need in your life while focusing on your true desires and attracting what will truly serve you in the long term.
4. Design & Develop: The Building Process
Once you have cleared your “field of dreams,” confirmed your plans and are pouring your foundation, Greaves will guide you through the building blocks of intentional creation by framing the structure and strategy of your newly designed life: staying focused, gaining courage, taking control and empowering you with authentic confidence and a fulfilling purpose.
5. Detailing the Finishes: Taking Action with Purpose and Precision
Finally, any great idea is just an idea, but ideas become a reality when followed up with intentional and strategic action. Digging into the details of your life on a granular level and following through on the new blueprint of your life will dramatically affect the outcome of your daily routine and your long-term goals. Every decision needs to be intentional and made with purpose—even the small decisions—and by committing to yourself and your personal growth, you will learn to ask better questions and, therefore, end up with better answers, inspiring you to automatically take action and naturally leading you toward the precise fulfillment you are striving for.
Learn more about Amanda Greaves: amandagreaves.com
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