The Part After the Win

Last week I flew to Kelowna, British Columbia. Gorgeous, sure, but that's not why I went. I went to build real connections with a room full of bad *ss female business leaders at the Pink Skirt Summit, an event envisioned by a dear and inspiring friend of mine, Renée Warren, and co-hosted by another visionary, Anita Guerini.

I loved it.

Incredible people, connections, and takeaways, and I even gave everyone a sneak peek at HLNA, my highly anticipated home model for Pilates. (U.S. Patent Application 19/693,291)

Renée asked me to join an incredible lineup of speakers on Day 2. 

I prepped for weeks, and wasn’t able to keep the speech in my mind. I had to constantly look at the slides to get through it. I attributed it to me being an artist and preferring to speak where my heart leads but this was a big room of incredible boss babes. My internal voice was trying to get my attention and I didn’t listen. I off loaded my confidence to effing AI and kept trying to recite the well structured, perfectly timed speech I had it help me build. 

The morning of the day I was supposed to speak we did an intense breath work session with Samantha Skelly. Even in a room of 500 women that breath work unraveled some deep traumas I am working through but still hold inside. So much so I had to leave the room to vomit. I told you it was intense. This has happened to me during breath work once before and I know it’s a sign that something needs to release. I felt lighter and more grounded. 

About an hour before I was meant to go on stage, I went to my room to meditate and do final prep. I couldn’t stop crying. What?! I’m about to speak to a group of women who inspire me and I’m… crying?? My body isn’t very subtle when it’s giving me feedback. I did my favorite meditation on serving others and immediately just knew what to do. 

I didn't give that speech.

I left my laptop and notes in my room. 

Instead I stood up there and talked about something I've felt underneath every single win I've ever had, and I never really had a name for it until recently.

As many of you know, my career started in entertainment. I spent a decade in it, the last stretch running marketing at Marvel. Movie premieres, all the glitz and grind you’d expect. I loved the work. Underneath it though, there was a friction I couldn't name, this sense that I was doing really cool work , but it wasn't adding anything good into the world, and it got louder every year. ng movies and find being on set deeply boring. I'm glad I trusted the friction over the resume.

I took my first Pilates class in 2006 and started teaching it as a fun side hustle. Less than two years later, in 2008, a time when most people couldn’t even pronounce “Pilates” - I opened my first studio in my hometown of Montrose, California. It filled up fast, so I expanded, the way founders do. By the time my second location opened the next year, I had $217 left. Total.

Having nothing to protect was the first time I felt an inventor’s spark. Pilates equipment hadn’t really changed since Joseph Pilates built it in the 1920s. So I built on top of his genius and mixed in my own, which is where the WundaFormer/Aurum came from, my first patent. I had never engineered, developed, or manufactured anything in my life before that. My son was born the same week the first prototype rolled off the factory floor. That week the scoreboard read one perfect baby, zero prototypes that actually worked.

Here's what I told the room in Kelowna. Even sitting on top of the highlight reel, sold IP and tenth studio and new invention launching, there's a feeling underneath all of it I never had a good name for. It shows up every single time something big goes right, and it doesn't care how good things look on paper. 

So I finally gave it one. I call it the hollow, a quiet, unfinished feeling that shows up right in the middle of something going incredibly well.

For years I thought that meant something was wrong with me, that I needed to fix the feeling or outrun it. I filled it with the next studio, the next patent, the next launch, waiting for the day it would finally close up. It never did. Now I think about it differently. The hollow isn't proof something's missing. It's the shape of what you haven't built yet. Looking back, I can see it clearly. That friction at Marvel was the shape of the work I was actually supposed to be doing. Those two hundred and seventeen dollars turned out to be the shape of the inventor I was about to become. The hard part was never in my way.

It was the way.

Kelowna gave me two days with an impeccable group of women, a stage I overthought more than I needed to, and a good reminder that the highlight reel and the hollow can live in the same season. Getting to your win is part of the win, even the parts still in progress.

If you were in that room, I'd love to hear where your hollow is pointing.

If you weren't, come find me on Instagram and tell me the version of hollow you're building from.

WundaLove,

 Amy