Jamie Milam is an Alignment Coach & Speaker, helping female entrepreneurs break free from pressure and experience peace through a powerful strategy of self-awareness.
On her own at the age of 15 and after overcoming drug addiction when she learned she’d become a mother at 19 to now successfully running 3 businesses, Jamie is no stranger to pressure. She’s on a mission to share her strategy so you can live a life of peaceful alignment too.
Mark Struczewski
Jamie, you started on your own at age 15. I don’t even think I was cutting lawn the neighbor’s lawns at age 15. And I was living at home with Mom and Dad. You were out on your own at age 15.
Jamie Milam
Yeah, and I have a 17-year-old now. And sometimes I look at him and think to myself that he could not do it.
Mark
You also overcame drug addiction. As you were starting out in life, you were behind the proverbial eight ball.
Jamie
When you don’t have any real boundaries in your world, that’s what happens. You start running with the wrong crowd and make the wrong choices. But when I discovered I would be a mother, I immediately felt I had to change my life. There was no other choice for me, and that was the epitome of what turned my life around. My son probably saved my life because there’s no telling where I would be today if I hadn’t found out that I was going to bring this human into the world.
Mark
As an alignment coach, you deal with a lot of women entrepreneurs. And with your wealth of experience, you’re helping people handle the pressure of living a successful life.
Jamie
I lost everything. After finding out that I was pregnant, all I had was a single Rubbermaid storage tote that I picked up at Goodwill so where I could put some baby clothes in. I began collecting things for my son. I rebuilt my life from there. I was starting from a below-baseline level in a negative space, so I had to rebuild in a way. I put that pressure on myself to provide a better life for him and me, and it just kept snowballing.
In the beginning years, it took a lot longer. But when you’re starting with nothing, you choose places that are better than nothing but nowhere near what I would live in today.
Each day was a slight improvement. And that was the thing: continual momentum.
And eventually, it was the strategy and the structure that helped me achieve what I did. I would put a goal in place and reverse engineer it. When you’re a single mom, working two jobs, and going back to college, that’s a lot to juggle. You have to be strategic to manage all of that.
There’s pressure and overwhelm with this as well. Over the last three to four years, I’ve learned that there are times that I may have been addicted to the progress, addicted to my work, or used my work as a distraction. And I started to realize I’ve got to take a new look at if I am doing this to create alignment in my personal space. Building a business and having financial success is great, but systems and structure certainly got me there. But doing it in a place of peace with a whole lot less pressure means checking in with myself and making sure that those strategies and systems are working for me in a way that also allows me to integrate balance into my life so that I don’t hit my burnout stage because I was so close to that.
Mark
I love systems because too many people are trying to do too many things on their own. Today, you can automate and create systems in many ways, or my favorite thing to do is eliminate things you don’t need to do. What systems did you implement to ensure you’re getting things done?
Jamie
In the beginning, it started with visualizing. What is the life I want for him, and how do I envision getting to that? And some of that visioning is a vision board. It’s a mindset system that tells me what I want to be, do, or have. And then I’m mentally taking these steps to get to that.
Mark
There’s been research done that says that people who write their goals down every day, in their own handwriting, have a far more likelihood of achieving them than people who think about, well, I’d like to have a Jeep Cherokee, or I’d like to have this nice house, or I’d like to have the mate of my dreams. When you write your goals down, you create a connection between your writing your goals down and your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then goes, Oh, Jamie wants this. Let’s figure out how to do it.”
Jamie
What you’re talking about is a form of journaling. And it has been of my world for many years. You’re becoming more self-aware of your authentic inner core desires, needs, and vision. You’re tuning out the noise of what everybody else might have. It’s not what your spouse or your kids want. That’s not what we’re looking at. It’s what you want. What are your goals?
Mark
We’re not talking about wishing or hoping. When you create your goals or vision boards, get very specific. If you want to make $1.87 million a year, then you write that exact amount in your goals. Don’t say, “It’d be nice,” or “Maybe I’ll get lucky,” or “I hope.” These are words that are not going to empower you toward your goals.
Jamie
Hope is not a strategy. But when you see something that you want, and if you’re going to be specific about a business idea, or a level of income, or a car or a trip, buying a house, whatever it might be, if it is something that you want to be, do or have, for you to achieve that, you have to take the actions of that person who’s going to be, do or have that thing.
The system I put into place to achieve that is reverse engineering. When you are a single mom, working two jobs and going to college full-time, this is something that I had to do. I said, Here are my work hours. Here is my school schedule. Where am I going to be able to drop my son at daycare? Who’s going to be able to pick him up? Can I coordinate my lunch hour to go to the campus and have a class during that timeframe? Looking at all these pieces and then reverse engineering, that has been something that I have continuously done.