Idaho County January Feature
Inner Alignment Wellness with Amy Fox-Sickles
Story by Dana Greig
Welcome to 2025! Are you planning to have your best year yet, with your new year’s resolutions already in hand? Consider the idea that to have a better year than you’ve ever had, you might need to do something you’ve never tried.
Life Coach Amy Fox-Sickels has a perspective on the new year that might be just what you need. She feels new year’s resolutions concentrate on where we failed in the past, starting us off on the wrong foot.
“We feel we are at a deficit,” she explains, “but we’re not. We’re doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. We don’t give ourselves credit for the good things we do.”
Instead of a list of resolutions, she suggests we ask ourselves: What did I do well this year? What did I do to take care of myself? What’s one thing I learned?
“Hold on to that, move forward with it, and build upon it,” she emphasizes. “Don’t resolve to lose or stop anything. Give yourself the opportunity to be thankful for what you did learn and understand how to use it moving forward, building off the good you did in the previous year.
Though that may seem broad, it can be helpful to start that way and dive into more details as you go. This is one of the many things Amy helps clients do through her coaching business Inner Alignment Wellness.
A handful of other ways she helps her clients (though it’s not an all-encompassing list) include:
- Helping people explore their spiritual and energetic selves.
- Guiding people to find the connection between who they are and their belief foundation.
- Teaching people tools to navigate their emotions in a caring, constructive way.
- Leading people to find silver linings in life and positive aspects of their perceived flaws.
- Training people how to set boundaries and have the tools to be able to keep them.
“Helping people is my passion, it’s what I want to do, and it’s when I feel most fulfilled,” says Amy.
“I don’t have the answers,” smiled Amy. “What I do have is the ability to help someone find their answers. I lead people into a space where you get to face pieces of yourself that you ignore, view as bad, or are afraid to look at. I help lead you through those hard spaces to learn about yourself and find your own answers.”
Connecting people to their inner self and foundational beliefs allows Amy to empower her clients to know they are safe and loved. She does this by first filtering out the intrusive thoughts that surface immediately. These thoughts are what keep people stuck living in fear, anxiety, and negativity.
“Mindfulness and meditation are not crazy concepts,” explains Amy. “They are simply taking the time to sit in our thoughts. It can be a scary, uncomfortable experience because we’re allowing ourselves to focus on what scares us and it’s easy to think those thoughts are all true even if they’re not.
Is a life coach something you need to try, to have a better year than you ever had before? Who exactly is coaching for?
“It’s for anyone who is ready to make an investment in themselves,” explains Amy. “This is not easy work. It’s hard to confront yourself. It’s hard to allow someone to come into your head space and change the way you think. I want you to realize you are powerful, and the things you fear that are holding you back and creating resistance aren’t necessary.”
A fact Amy learned through her extensive credentialing is people stop developing emotionally at the age they stop receiving emotional support. So how do you continue to develop past that stage? With guidance, finding where that point in your life is, giving it validity, and choosing to start growing again.
“You get stuck in places you feel low because it’s all very heavy, and you’re held there by the weight of those things pulling you down,” explained Amy. “To break free of that is very hard, it’s a fight. Doing the work to break free is hard, but it’s worth it.”
The only thing we can control in life is the way we personally respond to it. Yet, many of us don’t feel in control of that, either. This is why working on yourself can be the best thing you ever do not only for yourself, but for the people you love.
“No one gets out of life unscathed, we all have trauma,” says Amy. “If you learn the tools to be in alignment with yourself, you can become emotionally intelligent and tuned into what is happening in and around you. Then you can respond instead of reacting, to control the only thing you can: yourself.”
Amy Fox-Sickles is an entrepreneur who, along with her coaching business, has a massage practice in Grangeville. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, is certified in Emotion Focused Therapy, Energy Coaching and Chakra Healing, is an Assertive Communication Specialist, and an Emotional Intelligence Specialist.
She can be contacted at:
Phone: 208-507-WELL
Email: Inneralignmentwellness@gmail.com
Website: inneralignmentwellness.com
Facebook: Inner Alignment Wellness