The Manifestation Expert Who Teaches Mothers How to Transform Their Lives — Even With No Time.

0:07Welcome to Motherkind, it is me your host Zoe Blaski. We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition women's supplements. It's January. So we are being bombarded with goal setting, resolutions, new year, new you. And I don't know about you, but I love a bit of goal setting in January, but I am done with the generic advice that doesn't speak to our lived reality as mothers. We are time poor and responsibility high. So how do we begin to set goals and think about changes that we want to make. This episode, I have brought in, yes, an expert on manifesting and goal setting, but also an expert in helping us mothers when we have little time, when we're in different seasons of motherhood.

0:54Think about what goals we want to set and how we are going to make that happen. Francesca Amber is a mum of three and a best-selling author, a Sunday Times best-selling author of Manifest Like a Mother. And in this episode, you are going to learn why before you even think about setting any goals, you need to think about what season of motherhood you are in. No one else is going to talk to you about that this January. None of the generic advice is going to talk about that. We start there. What is the season of motherhood that you are in and how can you set goals accordingly? The second thing you're going to learn from this episode is how to identify the one goal, the one thing you can change that is actually going to impact everything else in your life.

1:36So when we are time poor, we don't have time to give endless hours to achieving these new goals. We have to know what is the one thing. And Francesca tells us exactly how to identify that. We also talk about how to plan the year and achieving your goals that works for your family, not against it. And if you've never been able to actually make some of those goals and things that you want to make happen, Francesca tells us exactly what you need to do differently this year to make it happen. There is a little bit of swearing on this episode and a bit of a trigger warning. Francesca does mention abortion.

2:12So please be mindful of that before you press play. And please do subscribe. It helps me to grow the show. It helps me to get bigger and better guests by you subscribing. And please do share it. Share it with another mum that you want to hear this specific advice that fits us as mothers in this season of life that we are in. here's the episode. I hope you love it.

2:38I'd like to take this moment to thank our headline sponsor, Wild Nutrition, who are offering MotherKind listeners 50 % off for the first three months. When I was pregnant with my first 10 years ago, I asked a few nutritionist friends, what's the best pregnancy supplement? And they all said the same thing, Wild Nutrition. So I listened and these incredible supplements have kept me feeling great through two pregnancies, starting this podcast, writing a book, a relocation and everything in between for the last decade. So it's magical to me that I now get to tell you about this incredible woman founded brand every week.

3:15So the food grown pregnancy and new mother multi is expertly formulated to support you from conception right through to postpartum and beyond. And food grown magnesium is backed by a gold standard scientific study that shows it has the potential to help you sleep an extra 42 minutes a night and increase sleep quality by 32%. Yes, please. I know how much of a difference Wild Nutrition has made in my motherhood journey, and we want you to experience it too. That's why they're giving MotherKind listeners an exclusive 50 % off for three months and a free personal consultation with a nutritional therapist.

3:51Just go to wildnutrition.com forward slash motherkind to get started. That's wildnutrition.com forward slash mother kind so you can feel a difference yourselves start 2026 rooted in wellness t's and c's apply francesca i'm so excited january vibes for someone who has just pressed play on this episode and they might be a bit of a manifesting skeptic what would you want to say to them right at the start well although a lot of manifesting is an art and it's something that we can't always explain how it manifests into our reality. There's also so much science. So if you are someone that needs to see the science, there are things like the reticular activating system is the one I always go to.

4:38It's always the one that everyone can relate to. So if you are thinking, oh, I want to buy a Range Rover next year, all of a sudden you will see Range Rovers everywhere, everywhere you go. It will seem like they suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but they were always there. It's just now your brain is filtering out the information that's important to the narrative of your life. So imagine if you switch that from trying to buy a Range Rover to actually be like, I am a wealthy woman, I'm a successful woman, good people come my way, whatever it might be, it will all start to appear in your timeline of your life.

5:12And that is a real scientific thing that people can measure. But also you've got nothing to lose. What have you got to lose? Give it a try. That's it. Try it and see, right? Yeah. So obviously manifesting having a bit of a moment. So how do you define it? And also, what is different about manifesting for mothers? Like, why is your book manifest like a mother? So I, believe it or not, was chased by publishers for about two years to write a manifesting book, like a general manifesting book that was basically my podcast in a book. And I just kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. And I was like all I want to do, and I had the vision so clear, was manifest like a mother.

5:52Because I host the UK's largest self-development book club. And I've read, I think it's 60 self-development books in the last five years, which is a lot. And not one of them ever mentioned being a mother. And so many of these books were incredible. But for example, like The Miracle Morning, it's like, you got to wake up. That man does not look after his children. He does not look after his children. Like wake up, meditate, journal, exercise, look at the sunrise. Who's got time to do that? Don't forget the cold plunge. The cold plunge, like absolutely not. Like I often get woken up with like a slap to the face or someone's wet the bed.

6:30And so although these books were incredible, I often found that as a mother, and I'm like an extremist mother because I'm like a single mother, three children, twins. Like it's savage out here in the streets for me. It just wasn't possible. And I'd often find that before I'd even got out of bed, I'd failed. Like I'd failed at these practices. If you have to write a gratitude list in the morning, I'd failed. If you have to meditate in the morning, I'd failed. And so I was really adamant that I wanted to create something that even the most time poor, energy poor woman could follow. Yeah, I'm so and I'm so glad that you did because I have the same with my works, constant pushback.

7:11Why is it different from others? Why is it different from others? And I'm like, if you're asking that question, you don't understand the lived experience of the majority of mothers in this country and certainly and certainly wider. So tell me about how you came to manifesting. Tell me a little bit about your story. You mentioned twins. You mentioned single motherhood. Let's let's get into it. So I discovered the law of attraction, as any person did back in the noughties, the book, The Secret. And I just took it too far. Just took it too far. I read it and I was like, this is going to change my life.

7:44And I started to manifest very, very specific things. So one that most people know about is my ex-husband. I literally went on a dating website and had one result. Do you remember back in the day before you swiped, you would like put in what you wanted? Were you not dating back? So basically you'd put in what you wanted and you'd have probably like 3 ,000 men come up, like 2 ,000, 3 ,000 and you'd be able to go through. I had one result and it was a six foot nine man standing in front of a yacht. And I was like, hello, that's my husband. Like I knew it was my husband as soon as I saw it. Messaged him, never replied, never heard anything from him.

8:19So I cut out the picture, put it on a vision board in my wardrobe. And two and a half years later, my friend's walking down the street. No friend has ever done this for me before, has not done it since. Went up to him, said, my friend's got a height fetish. Would you like to go on a date with her? And we go on a blind date. It's him. It's the same man. And we get married six months later. And your friend had no idea. She had no idea. Do you think I'll let anyone see that vision board? Hell no. No one saw that. That was for my own private eye. Thank you. But yeah, I saw we had a little exchange before our first day and we followed each other on Facebook and it was the same picture I'd had in my wardrobe for two and a half years.

8:56And I told everyone in my office, guess what? I'm meeting my husband tonight. He doesn't know it yet, but he's my husband. And sure enough, yeah, we got engaged six months later. so I started to manifest very very specific things the gender of my twins my ex-husband and I started to share it on YouTube purely because I'd found this thing that gave me so much power over my own life and gave me so much excitement and I would basically go to like the smoking area of a club and be like guys you've got to like try this thing law of attraction and people of course are like okay whatever so I found this audience of people who genuinely wanted to hear it and then in the pandemic it just turned into a podcast and it just blew up from there.

9:41And what was it do you think about you because everyone's pretty much read The Secret or watched the documentary and it's kind of like oh yeah cool like that's fun what was it or where were you in that at your point in your life when you were like I'm really going to embrace it what were you looking for do you think or what what did you think you were you were desperate to get from it that you didn't have I think I was looking for a life that I chose and looking back now I realize that I didn't choose a lot of my life and I know that sounds crazy but just as you go through life on like autopilot I feel like so many of us feel like life is happening to us and all of my friends where I grew up you went to London and you worked in an office like as a secretary or a PA or whatever.

10:26That's just what you did. So I just went and did that. I was in a nine to five that I didn't enjoy. And then everyone was getting married around 25, 26. And I was like, OK, I guess that's what we're doing. And I just kind of went along with this life that I didn't really choose. And I think that can be quite overwhelming sometimes when you realise like you're able to manifest whatever you want. When you're sitting in a life that you don't love, that can feel very overwhelming. And so I think I just wanted to choose my own life and have a little bit of control back. And at the time, the law of attraction was very much men saying, you can have a million dollars, you can buy a yacht, you can have a mansion.

11:06And I was like, I just want to find the love of my life. I want a baby even though I've got PCOS. I want to like work for myself and be able to like walk my little chihuahua in the sun during the day and not be trapped in a ice cold office with some old men. I just wanted like quite normal things. The office was so cold. And I think that's why people related to it, because I wasn't talking about manifesting a million pounds or a yacht. It was normal things that everyday girls want. Yeah. And I think a lot of people resonate with that idea. It's so easy, isn't it, to get on this sort of treadmill of this is the way that we do life and we do this and we do this and we do this.

11:42And so tell me about your lockdown experience, because I loved reading about that. in the book because it sounds horrific you had two young twins you were on your own yeah and your your elder child tell us about what that was like and how your kind of practices supported you through that time I feel like crying as soon as I talk about it because it was such a traumatic experience I had even though I was a single mother I had a really good life my daughter and I lived in my flat in London, I just managed to purchase a second home, which has a beauty therapist. Hello, she's a manifester. I was working two days a week as a beauty therapist and I bought a second home.

12:24If that's not manifesting, I don't know what is. And I bought this little house in the country to be near my family and had this beauty salon in London and life was really good. And then as soon as I bought that house, it was the beginning of 2020. I'd been kind of dating someone. I found out I was pregnant and I was like, that's fine. Then I found out it was twins. I was like, that's not fine. I didn't want three children. And then my salon closed down and then my flat, I couldn't Airbnb. Any income stream I had as a single mum that was quite independent was just gone. Within the space of a month, it was just everything was gone.

13:01And you were pregnant. Pregnant with twins, vulnerable, couldn't leave the house, couldn't even go shopping because you're on the vulnerable list. And I've got an autoimmune disease. So we were told, you know, you can't go anywhere. and I was just trapped in this house in this village where I didn't know anyone with a four-year-old who now couldn't go to school and it was awful and I just remember like two, I think people forget how serious that time was. Like I remember two things that always make me think like Jesus what a time to be alive. One was I remember going to Tesco and getting like the big catering size bags of pasta that you could get in the foods of the world.

13:37And I just remember thinking if I run out of money, me and Bohemia can just eat pasta with olive oil. Like that was my thinking was like, we won't starve. Like that was where I was at. And the other time was, I remember on this morning, and I don't know if you remember this, but Philip Schofield had a doctor on and they were basically saying, you may turn up to a hospital and there's no one to see you and you could die like in the car park. They actually said this on this morning. And I remember going to my midwife and saying should I have an abortion like I've seen what happens in zombie apocalypse movies if you're pregnant especially with twins like I don't want to die I don't want to turn up to a hospital and not have anyone's that's what they were sort of projecting that would happen and so those were my two moments that I was like we might starve and I might need an abortion because I could die in childbirth that's where I was at yeah I think it is easy to forget how particularly for You're, you know, you're describing how extreme it was for so many.

14:39And so did you have to give birth on your own? Because at time, you know, partners, birthing partners, whoever was there to support you wasn't wasn't allowed in, were they? So I had to go in on my own. And then luckily, they allowed my sister in. Thank God. And she filmed the whole thing, of course. Thank goodness. But as soon as the babies were born, she had to leave. And so I was just left with numbed from the waist down. couldn't move, breastfeeding two premature babies. They were only 36 weeks and just left, just left overnight. That was it. I didn't have any help. Looking back, I don't know.

15:16I don't know how I physically did that. I don't know how I did it. And it was traumatic from that moment onwards, really. Yeah. I mean, it's impossible, isn't it, to look after three, two newborn twins, premature, so presumably with additional feeding needs, and then a four-year-old. Yeah. On your own. And the thing is, it's not for a day. It's for probably two years before I ever really had any real sort of support and the world started to open up again. What was your mental health like? Did you did you lean on your sort of practices or did all of that go out the window? So by the time the babies were born, the reason I started the podcast was simply to give myself like an out, basically.

16:00Like I knew that I'd used this to change my life before. And it's kind of like any practice. Like people know if they exercise, they're going to feel better. They know that if they, you know, put their phone down and go outside. We all know these things help us, but sometimes you forget. And sometimes you just can't do it for whatever reason. Absolutely. Can't be bothered. Whatever it might be. Too exhausted. My life was so bad at that point that I just thought I'm going to throw everything I've got into this podcast because I want to give myself a focus. I want to change my life. Like I couldn't see how the hell now as a single mother with three young children, my business is closed.

16:37I've got two mortgages. What the hell do I do? I just wanted to give myself something to focus on. I wanted to help other people. And from a slightly selfish point of view, I do get a little bit upset, but I really did not bond with those babies for a good while and keeping busy just distracted me from it. I think for the first year of their life, we always say to new mothers, like, don't isolate yourself. Don't stay on your own. Get out the house. We were told to stay in your house. I remember going for a walk with another twin mum and we met somebody else and we said, oh, quick, we'd better disperse because there's three of us.

17:16And if on the village Facebook group, they see that we're congregating or heaven forbid, to sit on a bench, you could end up getting, that's what we were told, you'd get arrested. And so for a prolonged period of time, I was just in my house. I remember saying to my health visitor, is it normal to feel like these babies aren't mine? I was being kind of threatened sort of legally as well, which made me sort of distance myself from them. And I think the culmination of that stuff just made me feel like I need something to focus on here. And it worked. It did work by focusing on these practices that I know work.

17:51I gradually started to improve my life in all ways. And what I love about the law of attraction is you can take one thing that you think focusing on this one thing will improve everything else in my life. And for me, that was financial independence again. I'd always been financially independent and having my businesses taken away from me. And now every single waking hour is taken up with unpaid work. Motherhood. Getting that financial freedom back improved everything else. I could afford a little bit of childcare. I could afford to start taking them on holiday into experiences. I could afford to leave the house and go out.

18:30Do you know what I mean? It's amazing.

18:38let's talk about that then about setting goals because it's january and i think you know i'm not into the whole new year new you any of that i think we have our old wonderful normal selves but we can think about can't we right what is it that i want to bring into this year and you are quite renowned for doing your kind of goals setting and the process so teach us tell us where does where do we start i love what you were just saying about what is one thing that's going to improve everything else? Is that the first step? So that is the formula that I've built for setting your goals for the year is like a multi-step process.

19:13And I am very passionate about it. But one of the things is, yeah, looking at what season of motherhood are you in right now? And quite often what restricts us is actually our biggest blessing. So one of the practices we do in the goal setting party is to look at all the different areas of your life. I think is really important to set goals for, I set goals for my home. Every year my home has a goal. Is it getting the driveway done so my children can scoot up and down and ride their bikes like it's the 80s without getting kidnapped? Is it, I have like physical goals. So like this year, I want to get my ear pierced three times.

19:50I'm scared of piercings. I've got it done. So I like to set goals for finance, career, friends, travel, all these different things. Now, when I sat down in 2020, 2020, 2021, I looked at all those different areas of my life and I thought, I can't date, I can't socialise, I can't travel, I can't have any fun and adventure, I can't go shopping, I can't do anything to my home. There were so many things that I could not do. And there'll be so many people listening that are thinking, I've just got divorced, I've got to get back on my feet, I'm caring for my elderly parents, I've just had a new baby, my child is school refusing, whatever it might be, we will always have a year where we look and we think, there's so much I can't do because of my current situation.

20:36But what I learned from this is that when all those things are stripped away, you get to hyper focus on one thing, you get to absolutely go all in on the one thing that is going to change your life. So as I was saying, for me at that time, as someone that had always been independent, suddenly having no money, I was like, right, I can't date, I can't travel, I can't see my friends, I can't leave the house, can't do anything. But my God, I'm going to sit in this house and record every minute I can. I'm going to create content and I'm going to build a brand. And I probably did in one year what it would have taken me five to 10 years to do at any other time.

21:13So I think mothers need to just look at what season they're in and rather than what's being taken away. And Lord knows, it feels like stuff is being taken away from us a lot. actually what is it redirecting us towards instead I love that I had someone on the podcast she's like an amazing prolific entrepreneur and she said women always do their best work when their backs are against the wall yes and I just loved and I thought that is so true yeah but it's hard when you're in the moment isn't it it's hard to think especially when I think what's so impressive about what you did is most people I was gonna say normal people that's not what I mean would have you know got those babies napped, you know, got the twins to nap, got the four-year-old on watching Peppa Pig or something for an hour and just kind of sat there and breathed.

22:01You didn't. You opened your laptop, got your mic. How did you get that energy? Did you feel like you were close to burning out or was the pull of what you were creating kind of fueling you? I'd never felt more energized in my life. I think I always say to people, if ever you're listening to something like this and you look around your life and you think, I hate where I am. I hate this. You are in such a powerful position. I think a lot of people feel like that. Yeah. It's amazing. I'm quite content right now and I'm lazy because I'm just like, oh, I'm quite happy. I'm quite content. I think if you are in a relationship that is toxic, if you're in a job that you hate, if you feel trapped by your financial situation, whatever it might be, if you hate where you are, that will give you the biggest fuel to move.

22:48And I, I'm not ashamed to say I hated where I was, hated it. I couldn't stand it. I hated my new life. I didn't want to be poor. I didn't want to be trapped in a house with three young children. I didn't want to feel this way. And so I've just thought I need to put every fibre of my being into changing my reality. So that's the first step is that we get really clear on whatever season we're in, not kind of getting overwhelmed by the constraints, but thinking, actually how can I make these constraints force me as you say maybe to do something that perhaps I wouldn't have done otherwise what's the second step so let's say someone's listening they're like right I've got it I'm going to focus on let's call it my finances because I think that's a massive one especially right now what's the next step so I like to set goals for each quarter of the year I think that we can quite often be like right I'm going to write a list of 10 resolutions that I'm going to start on the 1st of January and that's what they're all going to happen on the 1st January.

23:45First of January, we're feeling our darkest, most hibernate-y, wintry, like no, that never ever works. And so I think there's a lot of power in looking at the year as a whole and realising that you can set goals for different times of the year. And by spreading things out over the year, when they will fit you best, you're actually going to achieve so much more. So I always love to set a goal in the first quarter of the year, that really horrible wintery dark quarter where no one wants to do anything. I always set a goal that has like a long lead time. So something that is really frustrating, because like you might book an appointment and then it will take six weeks before you even like something like that.

24:28I always love to get going with something like that. So you can start the year feeling like I'm already, I'm already going, I'm already moving on this. A lot of things like travel and things are sort of outgoing. I do for the summer. There's certain types of the year when you start to look at all the different goals you want for the different areas of your life that will naturally position themselves in different times of the year and that's another thing that i think that's different with mothers and parents right compared to this sort of generic advice we get because there's no point in saying in the summer i'm gonna achieve this crazy business no the kids there's no child care typically through the summer it's like and we want to spend i want to spend time with my girls personally when they're yeah when they're off so i love that that you're thinking about think about not only the season that you're in, but also the sort of rhythm of the year and what your childcare setup looks like.

25:16If you're co-parenting, you know, when have you got some time on your own? How could you fit the goal to that? I love that. I think that's so important and it's quite different to the sort of usual advice that you hear, isn't it? It is. You have to, if you're a mum, like you said, if you have to question why it needs to be different for us, you ain't got a clue. You don't know what my life's like. You should see me in the summer holidays. I've like, I haven't washed my hair in a week. I've got like no lashes on. I don't know what day of the week it is. It's a completely different ball game. And so being able to structure it in such a way.

25:47So for me, my summer goals, for example, are to be present, are to have fun, are to travel, are to spend time with my children, make incredible memories. Those are my goals for that part of the year. So I hope because, yeah, I can see like setting them out and I set reminders for myself as well. So I will make a goal in January that I will then have a reminder on my phone come up. I had one come up literally at the beginning of November to be like, right, remember, you want to get this done before the end of the year. A whole 10 months later. It's quite simple, but it's very effective. Yeah, it is.