Episode #210: Intro to Our Guest, Amber - Part 1

🎄 Merry Christmas from The Berman Method Podcast! 🎄
In this special holiday-week episode, Jenni Berman, PA, welcomes an inspiring guest for a powerful two-part conversation focused on intentional living, women’s health, and navigating life’s hardest seasons with grace.

Jenni is joined by Amberlynn Richardson—wife, mother, author, life coach, and speaker—whose journey through motherhood, profound loss, and personal transformation led her to create the Seasonal Syncing framework. After transitioning from a successful career in education and public service to full-time motherhood and entrepreneurship, Amber discovered a deeper calling: helping women find peace, purpose, and alignment by honouring the season of life they are in.

In Part One, Amber shares her deeply personal story, including raising a daughter with Down syndrome, navigating medical trauma, grieving the sudden loss of her mother, and confronting the burnout that comes from chronic “striver energy.” Together, Amber and Jenny explore how constant stress, cortisol overload, and societal expectations keep women stuck in fight-or-flight mode—and how this disconnect impacts mental, emotional, and physical health.

Amber introduces the core concepts from her new book, Seasonal Syncing, which uses the metaphor of nature’s seasons to help women understand their current phase of life:

• Fall – Transformation, reflection, and release
• Winter – Rest, sanctuary, and healing
• Spring – Growth, hope, and emergence
• Summer – Joy, celebration, and play

This episode bridges psychology, functional medicine, and mindset work—highlighting how resisting our reality can drain our nervous system, disrupt hormones, and lead to burnout, weight gain, poor sleep, and chronic inflammation. Amber’s framework offers a compassionate alternative: honouring where you are so you can move forward with clarity and peace.

✨ This is Part One of a two-episode series.
Be sure to tune in next week for Part Two, where the conversation goes even deeper.

📚 Seasonal Syncing by Amber Richardson is available now on Amazon. Links and resources can be found in the show notes.

If you—or someone you love—are feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, or stuck in survival mode, this episode is for you. Share it with someone who needs permission to slow down and reconnect.

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Transcript

Holiday Hello And Mission

Speaker 0:00

Merry Christmas, everybody. Just want to do our little quick intro because we've got a great recording coming up here with Amber Richardson. Yes.

Speaker 2 0:12

And Jenny Berman, physician assistant. That's me.

Speaker 0:15

Are you talking about yourself in the third person?

Speaker 2 0:17

I I always do on those podcasts. I always introduce introduce myself as the third person. So yes, just jumping on and saying, Merry Christmas, everybody. It is officially Christmas week, and we are so excited. I know we're excited in our house, as we've talked about before, but wishing you guys all the very best Merry Christmas that you can have.

Speaker 0:37

Oh, I love it. So enjoy this recording, and we will be back next week.

Speaker 2 0:43

But first and foremost, uh with the Berman Method Podcast, if this is your first time with us, we are all about treating problems and not symptoms, really trying to get away from the corporate medicine and actually figuring out what is going on on the inside. Where are these problems coming from, and how can we help others to uh improve their symptoms and their actual problems without handing them more and more prescription medications, without having to have unnecessary surgeries? So we are all about treating problems and not symptoms. Today I am here with a phenomenal guest speaker. I'm so excited to have her on and hope you guys are equally as excited. We are going to have a lot of information for you posted in our show notes. So make sure you pay attention to that. And this is a two-episode podcast. So uh if you are loving today, we are gonna be back for round two next week. So make sure you tune back in for that as well. Today I have Amberlynn Richardson. She is a grateful wife, mother, author, life coach, and speaker. After a fulfilling career as an educator and public servant, she transitioned to her dream role, that of a full-time mother and entrepreneur. Amber is passionate about helping others find peace and purpose through intentional living. She lives with her husband and three children, loves hiking, riding, and deep conversations with the people she loves. And I am just so excited to have her on the Berman Method podcast because we align in so many different areas on helping all individuals, but specifically women through just really stressful time periods and really helping to connect with themselves. As mothers and Amber, you can speak on this. We often just give, give, give, give, focus on everybody else, and we really struggle with the important part of taking care of ourselves so that we can give back to others. So, Amber, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1 2:42

Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful and honored to be here with you and all of your guests. So, yeah.

Amber’s Turning Point: Motherhood And Loss

Speaker 2 2:50

We are so excited. So, tell us a little bit about you before we jump into why we have you on the podcast and how you are so interrelated to what I do on a daily basis and how helping our um all the help that we give to our listeners. Tell us just a little bit about yourself so we know who you are.

Speaker 1 3:08

Sure. So um my name's Amber, and um I was um born and raised on Marco Island, Florida, so Southwest Florida, and um went to college um at Rollins College, and I studied psychology, I studied Spanish, uh, was kind of trying to figure out where I wanted to go in life and what I wanted to do. I had this idea, this dream that um I wanted to become a life coach and a speaker and a teacher. Um, but at 20, I didn't know what I had to offer and had to go out and live some life. So I lived and worked in DC for a little bit, came back, moved back to Naples, Florida, uh, where I met my husband, and um I ended up uh getting into education. And so I was started off as a teacher, and then um I helped to open a charter high school in my hometown, and then uh kind of stumbled into a leadership role there. So I was assistant principal. And um life was kind of going as it was, and then motherhood came into the play. And um after uh after having my first son, I kind of got into a rhythm of like the working mom life thing, and then I had um our second child, and our second child, our daughter um Reese, she has Down syndrome, and we received a prenatal diagnosis for her along with a congenital heart defect. So that kind of added a layer of um just life that we needed to kind of figure out alongside of that. And so, long story short, the year that she was born was a big year with some big milestones, including her birth and navigating all the appointments um medically and therapeutically for her. And then at five months old, she had open heart surgery. And then a few months after that, um, my mother, who was um helping to primarily take care of her when I was at work, um, she unexpectedly passed away. And it was kind of like those three life events that kind of led to this really big shift in my focus on my own personal health, my own personal journey, which has kind of led me to this point now. So that was kind of the turning point.

Speaker 2 5:24

Right, right. Such an amazing story, too. The fact that you've been able to utilize that and embrace the different uh situations that happen to turn it to something better and turn it into this new passion that you have for yourself when really that could have taken anybody out of the race and just threw their hands up and said, I don't know why I why this is happening. Um, but you really embraced it and said, I'm going to turn this into something that is going to help others get through these very challenging situations that you've been in. And uh if you know, I will say that Reese is doing amazing at this point. She's six now. Yeah, uh seven. She just seven. Oh, and she's doing amazing. And we do have one more son after her, um, who is who and the kids are just great.

Introducing Seasonal Syncing

Speaker 1 6:16

So yes, yeah, no, and thank you for that. And you know, I think I'm grateful that I was able to kind of be grounded enough in my faith and kind of some perspective and what I wanted, and um that I was able to have that mindset and be able to approach it um in that way. And I'm grateful and hopeful that this current journey that I'm on is is able to support other women who find themselves navigating their own hard season.

Speaker 2 6:44

So absolutely, and that's what lead us to led us to today is Amber has officially launched uh uh her first book, um, which is now out. It is available, uh, and we're gonna post the links for that. It is on Amazon uh for everybody to buy. But this book is called Seasonal Syncing, and we are going to syncing. Syncing, yeah. Okay, I was like, wait a second, that didn't flow right. Um seasonal syncing. So we are gonna dive deep into the seasonal synci ng book and just uh learn more from Amber uh regarding the more psychological component of what we're speaking on in this book. And I have the book myself, I've read it, and certainly something that I am working on as an individual. I'm taking all the quizzes that you're sending that come with the book just to really improve myself as a mother of three, also a business owner. Um, my husband owns a business, as you guys all know. Obviously, you're listening to the Berman Method podcast, but I am one of those that will put like myself and sleep on the back burner. The exercise, I will keep up with that. That's my mental capacity. Um, but it's like sleep, I preach on sleep all day, but who needs sleep when you're in this situation? So I'm diving deep into it too. So tell us, Amber, what inspired the creation of uh seasonal syncing framework? Tell me a little bit more about it.

The Four Seasons Framework Explained

Resisting Reality And The Rip Current

Speaker 1 8:16

Yeah, so the book itself is basically an introductory, um, an introduction to this framework that I created and how to integrate that into our lives. And it all kind of started with so as I mentioned, I had my daughter, um, and then I had that kind of crazy year. And then my my mother's death was kind of like that um that point of change that that just kind of shifted everything for me. And so from that point, I had made the decision, and I talk about this more in the book about how I uh in conversations with my husband, we decided that I was gonna step away from my position as an assistant principal so that I could focus on our family, Reese. Um, and so I had transitioned out of that. And so, fast forward, I'm seven months pregnant with my um third child. I'm about a year out of or removed from my position as assistant principal, and um have the world is finally starting to open up from the pandemic, and I have just been carrying this huge amount of guilt about not actually contributing financially to um to our family's income. And so I knew that I was, you know, obviously saving costs by watching, you know, caring for our children and you know, that sort of thing. But at the time, it felt like it wasn't enough. And I just felt this pressure to get things going and kind of considering all the circumstances, I was like, oh my gosh, this might be the time that I can actually pursue this lifelong dream I've had to be a life coach. I now have some life experience and I feel like I have some things that I ways that I can connect with people. And so this opportunity to participate in this mastermind came up, and I was like, all in, I've always been a go-getter. So um I have a goal. I may not be the most um gifted or talented, but I will be the hardest worker out there. So ton of grit, ton of commitment. And I was like, I got this. Um so I joined this mastermind thinking like I'm gonna kickstart this business with a newborn and two other kids and all the things. And um fast forward to six months into it, and I we were on our last coaching call for this group, and I'm completely deflated. Um, I'm on in a group with all of these women who are sharing these business metrics about their growth and things that they had done in this in the six-month time period. And I was sitting there like, what do I have to share? I I had at most worked with pro bono clients. I really didn't have any kind of tangible um growth or or any kind of data to kind of show like this is what I've done or accomplished, nothing tangible. And as I'm sitting there listening to all these other women, I was like, oh my gosh, like the reason that I don't have the success that I imagined I was gonna have is because I've been resisting my reality this entire time. And as soon as I kind of dropped into that and I had been like kind of thinking about this idea of seasons, it was like I'm essentially asking myself to bloom flowers in the middle of winter. And it like I had finally kind of reached a point where my personal capacity where I was no longer able to just kind of force myself through something through sheer grit determination and willpower. It was like I just what I had was just coming from a depleted place. And it was like as soon as I accepted that, it was like I was washed over with this wave of like calm. And I was like, everything all of a sudden kind of made sense. And I was like, if that's my experience, this has got to be I know that this has to be similar for other women. And so then I just kind of went down this rabbit hole of like this metaphor of if our life is in seasons and we look at them in comparison to the natural seasons around us, what could that mean? And then that's led now to this huge project and journey of this book.

Speaker 2 12:22

So absolutely, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about the different areas of the book and the phases that you describe in the book and how it's not just about careers, for instance, you know, which is that was really your aha moment, but it really goes back into a lot of different areas of stress control and cortisol control, which I talk so much about on this podcast and with my clients on a daily basis. And it's not just about your diet, it's not just about uh your career and your ability to grow in your career as a mother. You know, and I say stay-at-home mom, and some people are like, that's not like that's a job. And I 1000% agree it's a job. Even, you know, now that we have some help at home, I look at my nanny sometimes and I'm like, you're a saint. Like sometimes my work is really stressful, but it's a different type, you know, it's just different. Um, so I I'm really excited to get into it. So tell me a little bit. In the book, you actually describe the seasons as metaphors for phases of a woman's life. So um, in kind of what we just talked about, like physically, emotionally, in our roles as mothers or not mothers, some of us don't have children, um, in our careers and our diet, and you know, we all are successful in an area, we all struggle in an area.

Striver Energy And Chronic Stress

Speaker 1 13:51

Yeah, yeah. So, so as I kind of dove into this, I was like, okay, so if I'm in a season, what season am I in? And it went into this whole thing. So the idea is that like just because it's autumn right now does not necessarily mean I'm in a fall season of life. So the idea is like we look at our life circumstances and then how does that match what season that we're in? So fall in my book, in my framework, is the season of transformation. And the critical practices for fall are reflection, release, and gratitude. So this idea is that if you can identify your season of life, then here's these three critical practices that are going to be probably most nourishing and supportive to you in that season. And then next we have winter, which is the season of sanctuary. And then that season has the critical practices of intimacy, rest, and security. And then next, you kind of naturally flow into a spring, which is the season of hope with the critical practices of emergence, um, growth, and bloom. And then lastly, we go into summer, which is the season of joy with the critical practices of play, adventure, and celebration. So again, it's kind of like this idea that we we naturally cycle through these seasons in our lives, much as we see in the world around us. And as we see in the world around us, there might be certain areas that like it leans more towards a spring or a summer, or it might lean more towards a winter and a fall. But we all experience these, experience these changes and there's value and beauty in every single one of these seasons. But what I'm finding, the more that I talk to women and the more that I've kind of done this work, is that we get stuck in a season that we think we're supposed to be in because the other season maybe doesn't hold as much value or we don't know how to access it culturally or societally. And so we just kind of like push it to the back burner and we're missing out on all that's available to us there that then would make us even better in the next season. And so that's kind of the idea behind it, right?

Speaker 2 15:56

Right. And sometimes we hold off on, you know, acknowledging that we're shifting into a different place because of those around us, or what should have been, or where should I be, or where what does society where does society expect me to be at rather than just understanding what's occurring because life happens, right? There's these situations that come up where it's time for us to adjust and to kind of move into that next season. Um, but I love thinking about it like that as this the different areas, the different seasons of life. And you're absolutely right. Like we tend to always follow that pattern, right? Like you're not, oh shit, what is happening? I'm falling type, you know, feeling. But then it always as we push through and just embrace it and find different ways to navigate it, then we fall, we move into what you described as um the spring forward and and then at the end the the celebration. So I think it's amazing to think about that. Um tell me a little bit more about responding to certain traumas. I think you talk about it like a rip current almost.

Health Markers, Cortisol, And Capacity

Speaker 1 17:07

Yeah. So so when I think about like why why are why are we kind of in this spot? Like, why do we why do we struggle to kind of move into these seasons more naturally? And I think so much of that, and at least that was my experience as I kind of shared to you with my story, is there's a resistance to reality. And so, you know, growing up in Florida, as you know, like you learn to swim either before or in a alongside when you learn to walk. Like, so like being around the water is incredibly important and learning safety around the water. And so, as a at a young age, you kind of learn that if you're out in the water and you get caught in a rip current, and for anybody who might be listening who doesn't under doesn't know what a rip current is, so it's when the water will literally the force of the current will pull you from shore out into the depths of the gulf or the ocean. And um, our instinctive natural reaction or response usually to that kind of experience would be to swim to shore, right? To swim against the current. And tragically and unfortunately, that often leads to exhaustion and drowning in many cases. So, what we're taught is that if you find yourself that you were caught in in a rip current, is to stay calm, to allow the water, the current, to pull you until you can position yourself to swim perpendicular to the current out of it. And that's how you get out of a rip current. So I like in thinking about this experience with how we engage with life circumstances. So often there are these experiences that we happen that happen in life and circumstances that feel like a rip current. We don't want it, it's taking us away, it's unexpected. And our initial reaction is to resist it. And so we're we exhaust our time, our energy, our emotional capacity, and we just kind of deplete ourselves in the process of resisting. And so the idea of this is if we can acknowledge that, hey, we're resisting, like let's drop into allowing what is, what is our current season, what is our experience. And then through that, connect with those critical practices, it can position ourselves so that we're ready to move through this season and into the next. And that's kind of how I kind of visualize it. So again, for me in that situation that I was in, I was, I was so, so wanting this experience to where I so wanted to get this business going and all these things. And I I personally was in a winter fall season and I was forcing a spring. I was trying to make it happen. And that doesn't mean that the circumstances themselves, me being pregnant and all those things, those are those were specific to my situation. Somebody else in the same exact circumstances, seven months pregnant, doing all the Things they could have been in a spring and made it happen. And so I think sometimes too, we get in a we get into that compare and despair situation mentality where we're kind of looking at other people. And it's like, if we can kind of just pull ourselves out and be like, I would never look outside and expect my garden to grow when there's snow on the ground. So if I'm in a personal winter, I can't expect that of myself. And I think just being able to, I think for me, leaning into something that felt so unnatural, which was me releasing the reins and allowing, um, but being able to connect it with something that was so undeniably natural, which is the seasons and how how nature around us reacts to the seasons, it was like, oh, that makes sense. And it just allowed for that experience to happen more naturally.

Embracing Your Season And Next Steps

Speaker 2 20:47

Right, absolutely. And it we all experienced that in some way throughout what, you know, just as we grow and hormones change and we're in different phases of our life, we experience that. And using this book as a way to look back and have that resource of, okay, yep, this is what I'm experiencing. So what's the recommendation? What kind of things do I need to be embracing right now to be able to move through this season peacefully? Um, you write about striver energy. So, like the chronic push to do more, achieve more, control everything. And I think that's where we get in these situations where we're not ready to embrace the season we're in and we're just like, I gotta push through, kind of like you were just talking about. Um, but it really relates back to that sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system that I talk so frequently about to my patients and on this podcast is that cortisol response of constantly being in the fight or flight mode. And it's like you can't even see clearly. When we're in that fight or flight response, like your body is fighting. You can't even see clearly as to where we should be going. So having a resource like this, but tell me a little bit more about that striver, striver energy as you call it.

Book Details And Part Two Teaser

Speaker 1 22:03

Yeah, so I think so I think there's a couple things that happen here. I think one thing is just our assignment of stress or like like how we how we perceive stress. And I think that it's kind of um just accepted. I'm accepted. I accept the fact that I'm I'm gonna be stressed, I'm gonna be hustling, I'm gonna think life is chaotic, it's full. It's like, you know, so often like when we greet friends, it's like, hey, how are you doing? It's like your hair's on fire, and you're like, I'm fine, like it's bit, like life is busy, it's chaos, but but I'm all good. How are you doing? And it's like you paint, you, you know, you paint the smile on, it's all good. And like you just, I've had so many conversations with friends that are just they're stressed, but they just accept it as like that's just how life is. Right. And I did too for the longest time. And I also like there are times when to be honest, like if I wasn't stressed, I was like, what's wrong? Like, am I not doing enough? Like I feel like so. You get into this, and I think it's kind of it's societal, unfortunately, conditioning very much for women, especially kind of as we continue to take on more things, whether it's motherhood or caregiving of elderly, you know, parents or um just whatever it might be, or organizations. I know so many friends who maybe they don't have kids, but they are volunteering in all the things. And so it's just we get these accumulation of responsibilities and we're kind of we set ourselves up so environmentally, our like sympathetic fight, fight or freeze response, we are being triggered constantly, and our systems are just being flooded and saturated in cortisol. And the thing is, is stress is a good thing. I know that you talk about this, like, stress is a good thing, it's our survival instinct. But the problem is, is it's not, it was meant to be a short-term burst. Like run away from the saber-tooth tiger, get yourself to safety. It's not meant to be a chronic experience. And what's happened is environmentally, culturally, we've kind of created this situation where it is the norm for us to be in a sympathetic, dominant state. And so our systems are all out of whack. And so it's almost like we go from this survivor energy, which is like a temporary birth, to this striver energy where we are just clawing our way through life and like our bodies, which then impact our our mental and emotional health and our spiritual health, everything is just falling apart. And like for me, it got to a point where my body was literally like screaming at me, like, you need like we need to adjust here. And that's so that's kind of where I kind of looked at things in that perspective.

Speaker 2 24:41

And you know, just to connect it in our world a little bit is so many women and men really, but especially women, like we're in such this chronic state of fight or flight that we, like you said, don't even really feel that it's stress, right? We just feel this is a part of normal daily living, and like, yeah, I'm good, everything's fine, like this is normal. But and we may not recognize that our body's crashing out because we're still waking up and we're still accomplishing the task and we're still taking care of our kids and um, you know, responding to our bosses and whatever it is, but we're not sleeping through the night. We need three cups of coffee to get through the day. Our weight keeps creeping up two or three pounds every couple of months or you know, even over a year period, but it's creeping up and we're like, okay, I haven't changed what I'm eating. I'm still exercising every day, and I can't figure out this weight issue. Now my doctor says that my cholesterol is climbing and my blood sugar is climbing, but like I haven't changed what I'm eating, and it all comes back to this stress response.

Speaker 1 25:41

Oh, it's crazy. That's so same. So I'm glad you brought that up. So when I was kind of dealing with my own health stuff, I started, I started seeing a functional um an integrative health practitioner, a functional medicine practitioner, because I was kind of hitting my head against the wall with the conventional route for what I was experiencing in my body. And like if if asked on like a, you know, how stressed do you feel? I didn't, I didn't feel like triggered or stressed. But then I got all this lab work back and there are just like red flags everywhere. And so it's just kind of like we normalize this experience of being like always on, always, always up, always going, that we we've our perception of what is healthy and optimal and what is like, mm, this is probably a skirting on the edge of like unhealthy, dangerous, you know, a you know, a warning sign. Like we kind of just allow it because we don't even our our perception of what what should be what we should be experiencing is so off.

Speaker 2 26:46

Right, right. You and you hit the nail on the head, like you went to somebody who could actually look more internally at what's going on and how this chronic stress is affecting and the the striver energy, as you mentioned, really trying to push away what's actually reality and just work through what's going on. And it's having such a detrimental effect on the inside that now it's time to see, or we actually see these inflammatory markers and our cholesterol climbing because it's a sense of inflammation as opposed to us giving quote unquote bad food and our blood sugar getting out of out of whack, not because we're eating sugar and carbohydrates, but because this stress response is creating that blood sugar instability. So it's so important to dig deeper and figure out like what internally is going on, but it comes back down to we have to accept the season of life and really embrace it and figure out do we need therapy? Do we need psych, you know, more of a psychological component? Do we need more of the right amino acids in our body? And most definitely coming back to the seasonal syncing and utilizing this type of book to guide us through this life. Yeah. Yeah. So, Amber, this has been so great. We're we are going to wrap up for um part one of this amazing podcast talking with Amberlynn Richardson on her book, Seasonal Syncing. This is a book that she has out on Amazon. It is now available to you. We are going to uh link the um the link, the ordering link. We're gonna link it in the show notes so that you guys can go online and buy this seasonal syncing book by Amberlynn Richardson and really embrace it and utilize it as a tool, as a guide to work through these seasons of life that we're going through. We are coming back next week for part two of this podcast. So please, please, please tune in. Um, make sure you share this episode with someone that you may know or think is going through a difficult time, or even if they're not telling you they're going through a difficult time, but you just see that they have so much on their plate, um, this can be really helpful for them. So, Abra, thank you so much, and we uh we'll talk back next week. All right, I look forward to it. Absolutely. Ciao for now.