Speaking Goddess, AmondaRose Igoe, joins the SuperPower Up! podcast to share her super powers helping others find their story and share it. Listen in as she talks about the power of finding your voice and using it to create a prosperous and joy-filled life.

This woman is a speaking goddess.

Hello! This is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and I am so excited to be here today with AmondaRose Igoe. This woman is a speaking goddess. She is amazing at helping her clients on the entrepreneurial sector or the private sector work on their stories. You know, really figure out how to share what is the essence of who they are through their stories and then she magically helps them craft their content around that. She’s had successes all over the world and I am just so tickled that she was able to take some time out of her schedule to share with us today. So, welcome AmondaRose! Thank you!

Oh! Thank you so much for having me. I am absolutely excited!

Yeah! Me too. I’m so excited we get the chance to reconnect. That’s why I love doing these interviews. There’s so many amazing people in the world and I could just share them with all of our listeners and members. So, a pretty cool gig I’ve got going on over here. So, the question we always ask people right off the bat is what are your super powers?

Well, if you had asked me that I’m going to say 11 years ago, I couldn’t tell you. I had no clue and life always takes us in journeys that we’d never expected. So, I never thought that I would ever be in the industry of public speaking which includes helping people speak as well and through the process of discovering that that was part of what I was here to do. I realized that I had two things that I absolutely loved which was helping people craft their content and helping people share their stories. So, why…how does that tap into my super powers? Because when I’m helping people share their stories, I can really connect emotionally to what they’re experiencing.

So it helps me to write their content and then when it comes to actually crafting their whole entire talk, I can really intuitively get into the mind of their audience. So, what does their audience need to hear? What does their audience need to feel from them? What does their audience need to experience? And like people talk about like a download. It’s like a download when I’m in those experiences. I’ll say to a client, “Just hang on a minute.” And I’ll start writing something and I hear them go, “Uh, wow! How do you do that?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” This is what I get and this what I write.

That’s awesome!

So that is really where my intuitive gifts come in. Yes. So, it’s playing for me which is as fun.

Oh yeah of course and what a gift for our clients because we all have so much of value inside of us. And you know it’s like what I tell people all the time like you’re battling all of your different pieces in your what I call your blooper reel and all this other stuff is just sometimes it’s difficult to see your own genius and greatness for yourself. So, what an awesome gift that you give people! So, you do a lot of speaking also, right? Not just helping your clients do the speaking but you do that as well?

Yes. Ugh-hmm.

Very cool! What are your favorite topics to talk on?

Well it’s all around speaking. So, if I was to break it into kind of three categories: It has a personal development side to it. It has a spiritual side to it and it has a monetary side to it.

Beautiful.

I remember two years back sitting with my husband at a restaurant and I said, “You know there has to be a way for me to be able to bring the spiritual and the personal development side into what I do.” Next thing I turn around and it’s there because it’s part of me. So there’s always those aspects in my talk. People don’t see it. They won’t go, “Oh, that’s spiritual. Oh, that’s personal development.” They won’t intellectually know that but they’ll experience that.

Absolutely.

So it’s kind of like taking things that are everyday experiences and bringing that side of me. For example, even in my own signature talk you know, I’ll say something, “You know, we all have stuff that happens. It’s like that fate steps in our life and puts us in a direction that we never saw coming.” Well, that would be a spiritual side.

I like what you’re saying. It’s so funny because it’s you know our mind is on a thousand places. It’s so typical of a lot of people that we attract to the show because in my language what you’re really talking about that integration piece. And so it is the process that we are extremely multi-faceted and most of us really want the experience of being able to bring all of that together and so it’s beautiful how you know you’ve found that when you ask the question, the answer is so simple like in essence, it’s like you be you. You know, you show up as you and all of those pieces are addressed. You know all of that just naturally flows together but our programming and our training as a society is pretty counter-intuitive to that.

Yeah and then people that work with mostly business owners and entrepreneurs. I will sometimes get people that do work for somebody else that have to present. When they’re given a presentation that they need to deliver they are so uncomfortable with it. They’re more nervous. They are…less than…they’re not themselves. It feels foreign to them because somebody else created presentations and here you do this marketing team put together. There’s no them in it. So we try…I try to find a way to incorporate them into that talk so that they can feel like themselves. I had a woman she was you know. Not everybody I work with is scared to death of speaking even though it’s a big thing but she was scared to death of speaking and the minute we got her into her presentation. She said, “I can’t believe it was night and day. I felt like myself.”

It’s amazing how when you have that personal component to it and when some people can relate to what they’re talking about. It is very natural for us to share that information. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s funny because you talk about if I’d ask you that question 11 years ago like you know when I was working in government doing this kind of stuff. Like I said you know nothing with me. That’s why I had to leave, you know because it was like my name wasn’t me you know which is a bizarre place to find myself as you start going through personal or spiritual growth. But that plays out in so many different ways in people’s lives. What’s one of your favorite client success stories?

One of my favorite client success stories is actually I work with somebody that was living in Switzerland at the time. She’s from the U.K. She lives here now. She’s out in Arizona, Vanessa Shaw. She’d never presented before. So we worked on her signature talk. She delivered it to a group of 80 people. She had 60 people waiting to talk with her afterwards which was phenomenal. Her first time and now she is speaking all over the country and it’s her number one marketing tool. She’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars from speaking.

Very cool.

She has never given a presentation before. It fills my heart with joy to see my clients really have such a level of success.

Absolutely.

She put the effort in. You know, I gave her the tools and then it was for her to do the work and she did it.

Wow that’s beautiful. Is it easier for you to work with people who have absolutely no experience so, they don’t have like bad training or you know, does that ever get in the way?

Well, I think what gets in my way sometimes is people that and I think this organization is great but it gives business owners and entrepreneurs a false sense which is Toastmasters.

Yes.

Because Toastmasters is great with body language, voice, those things but they do not teach you how to promote your business through speaking. So, they don’t know how to close. They know how to deliver a presentation but they don’t understand how to put a talk together from the moment they open their mouth to the end part that gets people saying, “I need to know more or I need to purchase your program.” So they go out and start thinking, “OK. Well, I can grow my business. I’m a great speaker. I get you know all these red ribbons from Toastmasters. Maybe I have won a few contests.” But there’s a big difference from Toastmasters from working with someone like myself.

I can absolutely see the value in that. I see and what I feel from you is so powerful because on the other opposite end of things we do have some programs and training or speaking programs that teach people how to sell as opposed to move people into action. And you know, we’ve all had experiences with that. And so what you really do is really give people permission to operate intuitively and do what comes naturally to them in a way that is authentic and so people can connect. Is that a good way to describe that?

It would definitely be a big part of it. So even when I’m writing, I’ll write for some of the clients. I’ll write their entire talk with them so they can see the flow of it. But I never want them to be stuck on having to say it exactly the same way. So for example, if they’re in the middle of their talk and this will happen to me. You know I’m feeling like I need to share something with you, so they can still take a little detour if they’re intuitive guidance is telling them that their audience needs to know this.

Nice. 

So they can take that detour but they always go back to where they were, you know. So it’s really understanding the flow of things rather than having to say everything exactly the same way.

Very cool.

And each time it must look like this. Yeah.

Oh, that’s awesome! I really like that. So how did you get like I know you were talking about when you sat down with your husband and you know I know like I can combine this personal development and spiritual stuff together. What was it that inspired you to actually follow that path because you are out there changing the world? How did you get going on that?

Well because before I started my business over 11 years ago, I was a social worker. So when I actually, I’ll just give you a little background. So, I had no speaking experience, none whatsoever. So, in 1999, I took a job with a nonprofit organization and they didn’t tell me that I’d have to speak in front of hundreds of people. I had no experience whatsoever.

Oh, wow.

I never attended a big class in college, nothing.

Surprise!

I felt like something was missing.

What?! So I start to learn about as much as I could about the art of speaking but also I went to personal development seminars. I’d never done anything like that. My husband and I did a lot of that. And so I started to see that there were more possibilities in my life and what was possible. So when I actually ventured out in my business after leaving that job after 5 years I knew that I was here to teach people speaking and I knew that I was meant to speak. I knew I had you know those two things but I just didn’t know what it would look like. So as I started to venture out, you know, I felt like something was missing. Like I got all the public speaking stuff but it’s not all of me. And I felt like there was a big gap there. So I eventually realized that the big gap was I wasn’t bringing all of me. You know, so I was feeling inauthentic. I do a two-day event and I’d walk away going, “Something’s not right.” Cause I wasn’t bringing me.

Right. Yeah. I think that’s fairly common that we really are moving into this awesome new what I’d rarely even call a new era where we want to be present. You know I tell people, gone are the days of like going to work from 8 to 5 and donning your work mat. You know, we’re living these holistic experiences where your life is your work and your work is your life and there’s really no separation. And it is creating a very authentic and integrated personality and persona that a lot of us never knew we had permission to do. You know I feel really strongly about a lot of what you do is you show up and give people permission to be themselves which is huge. We’re always looking for examples that if we go against the grain that we won’t die. You know, that we won’t be cast out that it is safe to explore the essence of who you are and people will embrace that.

I think one of the greatest gifts that I’ve given myself lately is I did a lot of YouTube videos in the past trying to be perfect. Trying and you know I take them 50 million times. You know one short video might take me an hour and a half to create because I was so worried that I might stumble on a word. The thing that I realized is that one that people don’t resonate with is perfection now. Yes. “Do I need to bring my A-game? Yes. But can I also make mistakes and be alright with that? Yes.” So it’s allowed me to embrace the perfectly imperfect moment. “No, you know what? This is a good video. Yes it’s not perfect but I am OK with it.” It was better that I get the video out or do more videos than worry about just one video.

A good enough is good enough philosophy. Yep. Go ahead. I keep stepping on you.

No, that’s OK. It’s just that being in the industry that I am and being I guess my personality a little bit of is I can be that perfectionist, in letting go of that. And that is so freeing to me. To go, “You know what? Yeah! And I’m 52 years old. I’m not 40 anymore so you know things have shifted a little bit and being OK with that because I start to hide myself.

Yup. Of course. Yeah. I see that a lot with highly intelligent, very successful people particularly women. I think that’s just what I attract and that is a big proponent of it because in order to have been successful in the arena that you’re successful and in order to accomplish what you’ve accomplished, there was a degree of that that was part of that culture you know that you couldn’t mess up. You had to always be checking boxes and crossing t’s and dotting the I’s and as we move more and more into our own evolution and consciousness what we find is exactly what you said is that freedom.

And ultimately I think that’s what we’re all seeking. We call it different things you know, we call it super powers but it’s really through developing your super powers that you find freedom because when you are standing in that power you get that you’re untouchable. Nobody can do anything to you.

And so even the idea something as simple as and it is not simple at all that something as simple as doing a video for YouTube channel. It is amazing what our minds will convince us to go into all of that when if you show up fully and your authenticity, people resonate with that. We want real. We want to touch people. We want to connect with them. We want to feel like people stand for something and that they’re willing to be themselves and then we want them to encourage us to do the same thing.

So I love what you’re saying. I love everything about what you’re saying. I think it’s such a powerful thing that you do for people and it’s really needed. The idea is helping people find their voice and having the courage to speak with truth to them, that’s a gift. That’s a real gift that you offer to people so, I honor that in you.

Oh. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Absolutely. You mentioned part of your journey included some you know like self-help seminars and stuff like that. Are there any other techniques or modalities that you studied or that you utilized in what you do now?

Angels. I love Angels. This was I’m going to say 9 years ago or so. I was on my office floor crying because I was struggling so bad in my business. I didn’t know how to get clients. I didn’t know how to attract clients. I prefer that word, attract clients. I didn’t really know any of the marketing side. I’d never been a business owner. You know I always worked for somebody else and I was really struggling and I was on my office floor crying and saying, “I’m just going to go back and get a job. It’s so much easier.” And the next thing I know, somebody says to me, “You need to read this book called, Hiring The Heavens.” “Hiring The Heavens by Jean Slatter” and it’s a little book but it connected me with angels which I had never really had a strong relationship with. I didn’t believe in it and really I just didn’t know. I really hadn’t focused on that. And it just talks about how there’s all these unemployed angels ready and willing to work for you. You could hire an angel to help you find something. You can hire an angel to fix your computer or get you somebody who will fix your computer. You could hire romance angel. You can hire an angel for anything. You can hire a team for your business or any area of your personal life and everything shifted for me. It was like a cosmic experience in my life. Everything changed. One I think which was one of the biggest shift for me is I was trying to do everything on my own and I was horrible at asking for help and it was all you know, “I got to do it. I got to do it. I got to do it.” And then all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like it was just me doing it anymore. And that for me was incredibly powerful like I had an entire support team in every area of my life ready and willing to help me at a moment’s notice. And I just loved that and I really took off with it.

I love that.

Life-changer for me.

I love what you’re saying on so many levels. One of the things that I often find coming out of my mouth when I’m in session with clients is that we get to a certain point of our development, our process where we cannot move forward alone. I feel very strongly that we designed it that way that if we like we wanted the experience of learning to trust and learning to rely on other people, learning to ask for help and learning to open up and be vulnerable in situations. And that’s really the biggest premise for the network of evolutionary transformation because the idea was that you know I kept watching these clients come into consciousness and then they would go back to their “real world” and they would drop back down in vibration because nothing in the world that they saw was affirming this new world. And so for you to tap into this idea that you have support. You know that that there were you know angels available to you that you could ask for assistance was huge. And that’s the kind of the model there because you know my own biases is that we don’t want to do it alone. You know, we want to play, like we want to interact with people and have connection and then it gets boring doing it alone. I see a lot of solo-preneurs kind of at their wit’s end because they don’t get to play which is not fun you know and I think that’s where this whole collaborative model concept is really coming out in a big way because it is a lot more fun when we can come together for a particular cause or to accomplish something. So I haven’t heard before somebody saying, “Well, you know, I just talk to the angels like I build my business team and it’s full of lots of angels like it’s perfect. I love it because it really is just an expression of yourself and to me in my opinion that’s what we all serve anyway. So how perfect that it would be in the form of beings from an angelic realm.

I love it and it just blessed my life in ways that just leave me speechless many times.

That’s beautiful. I love it. That’s perfect. So what advice would you offer people who are interested in holding their own superpowers and just aren’t real sure how to get going?

I think that you want to look at and say, “What are my superpowers? You know, what would my friends tell me that I do really really well because I know people will say, “Oh you’re this, AmondaRose and I go I think to myself, “They just say that because they’re my friends.” You know, they see me differently but really pay attention to something that keeps showing up repeatedly and see how you could turn that into a super power. So, for example you know I talk about helping my clients write their content. When I first got out of college I got into social work, working in a group home for adults with cerebral palsy. When I took the job, well, before I took the job I remember the guy interviewing me and him saying, “OK, so how are you creative?” And I said, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” “But everybody does.” I said, “No, I don’t.” Because I had this limited view of what creative look like, you know. It was an artist, a jewelry maker, a songwriter. I never thought of it as somebody with a creative outlet as helping my clients write their content, writing my own speech content as well. That’s my creative outlet. But I was so focused on the “No. I don’t have that.”

I love it.

That I couldn’t see. So, even when somebody is saying to us, “You know I really love how you’re this or you’re always this and maybe go, “Well, maybe I am.” And then how can I turn that into, how can I utilize that skill set in my business? How can I use that in my career? How can I utilize that to serve other people in a bigger way?

I love that and it’s so important that you say that it’s you know we create these relationships with people who mirrors to us our truth. And I think sometimes we do take that for granted and we do that discrediting thing that you’re talking about, we’re like, “No, no, no. They just love us and they want me to feel better about myself” and all that stuff but those mirrors in our lives are a really good way to tap into that. That’s great. That’s great information. Along those lines, we do something in addition to help our listeners and our members cause we have a lot of folks who are playing around with intuitive concepts and they started playing with their super powers or are curious about them but they don’t necessarily see how to use that in their day to day existence. So we have what we call Live in Your Power segment and it can be anything from like we talked about the zen of parking to you know I always use my husband whose example of manifesting toilet papers. It could be anything mundane or some grandiose gesture that change your life forever. Do you have a live- in-your-power story you’d like to share?

Oh. Nothing’s coming to me at the moment. I was thrown off by the toilet paper.

I love it. You know you probably do that in all things.

Actually, I do. It has come to me. I’m still focused on the toilet paper but here’s something that many people don’t know is I was born Sandra Rose and my last name Igoe. And for many many years, I never connected with the name Sandra. I tried Sandy. I tried Saundra. It never felt like me and this was actually before I started my own business. I didn’t have a clue of the direction I was going. I knew I was up to big things but I didn’t even know what it looked like. So I said to a friend, “I don’t like my first name.” And he said, “Change it.” I said, “You can’t change your first name.” He goes, “Yes, you can. My wife changed her name.” The next day, literally the next day, I am reading a daily book by Iyanla Vanzant and it says in this reading right at the top, “Today is your naming ceremony.” This was next day. “Today is your naming ceremony. Today you’ll be known as the beloved of life” and the passage was all about being in love with yourself and in being in love with other people. And so of course I called my friend and said, “Oh my god! What does this mean?” He said, “Well, look up the word beloved under baby name.” So I started to look on the computer and I saw “Amoda” which meant “beloved.” I really don’t like that so much and nothing else connected. So I was still open to the process because now I was like, “I could really change my name.” So I’m out running and I kept hearing, “Amonda, Amonda, Amonda” in my head over and over again. I’m like, “Whoa. OK. So let me look up “Amonda” and there’s no “Amonda” in the baby names at all. It doesn’t exist.

I saw “Amoda” which meant “beloved.”

So then I looked at the closest one. So here’s the Amoda but the next closest was up which was Amanda which means lovable. So you take the two of them together and you get beloved and you get lovable. So then, the next part is I mentioned to my brother who I have no spiritual connection with. We weren’t spiritually connected and my brother has no spiritual relationship at all.

He says to me, he goes, “Well, what are you going to do with your name, your middle name Rose?” and the moment I said, “AmondaRose”, it sunk to my core, to every ounce of my being going, “That is your name” and I go, “Woah!” Two other things I want to share with you is of course I told my mom at some point because my friends started calling me “AmondaRose” and I said, “Mom, I’m going to change my name.” And you would think a mother would have a fit, right? They gave you that name. So my mother says, “Well, if that’s what you want to do, OK. I like Sandra but OK.” I was like,

Wow.

“What?!” So you know the space opened up for me to have no resistance to changing my name. No one resisted except an old friend of mine who still calls me Sandy after all these years. She just won’t get over it but that’s alright. And then the other thing was my last name which is my maiden name. I’m married so I have a hyphenated name but I keep Igoe for business which I got teased as a kid. You know Igor. You know, “I go, you go. We all go for ice cream.” Igoe means “I go where God leads me.” I go where God leads me was something that came to me at one point and that is how I’ve lived my life. When I started to do the personal development stuff, I’ve always put one foot in front of the other and said, “OK, what’s the next step? Where’s the next place that you want me to go? I’ll follow it. You just got to put the steps in front of me.” And that’s what I been doing for the last 11 years.

Well I can think of no better story than that one. That’s very awesome. So, thank you for sharing that with our listeners. That’s great. I have heard a lot of people changing their name lately. It seems to be popping up more and more and I like that idea of you know being able to choose for yourself and so what a great experience that you created. A mother who not only accepted that but encouraged that. That was something that you were driven to. So, I think that’s a great testament.

Yeah. For me, from a branding perspective, there is no one else out there. People hear it. They may not remember how to say it because they’ll say Amanda. But that’s OK because they’ll know that they’ve heard it before. So even you know, I hadn’t started my business or I knew where I was going with this but I just knew it was calling me into something greater. It was kind of like releasing the old past, all the stuff that happened to me as a kid and moving into this super power.

Love it. That’s perfect!

So where can people find more about you? I know our listeners are going to want to look into a little bit more, where can we send them?

Yup. They want to go to amondarose.com. I’ve got lots of free tips and programs on my website they can access. You can also have an opportunity to apply for a Strategy Session with me. Then they need to just fill out some questions. They can contact me about that and I’m more than happy to help them whether they want to share their story or they want to get out there and start speaking to grow their business. They want to speak their way to more self. I’m certainly ready, willing and looking forward to helping them.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much and again I can’t thank you enough for sharing your time with us today and I’m super super glad that we got a chance to connect again and to share space and time. What a delight! Thank you so much for sharing your information with our listeners.

My pleasure, Tonya! It’s just been wonderful. You are a great interviewer, by the way.

Oh thank you. Thank you very much. I love it like I said I got a pretty good gig going on over here. So, thank you again and to all of our listeners, thank you so much! We appreciate your loyalty and until next time. You all take care, ba-bye!