Amanda Byram could be the perfect life coach for 2020

The journey from international TV star to wellness guru has been one full of hard work for Amanda Byram but her no-holds-barred way of looking at self-help may make her the perfect life coach for this mad year

Amanda Byram

Speaking to Amanda Byram is the equivalent of waking up and having three cups of coffee and two cans of Red Bull. She is full of energy, positivity, and excitement — and in a way that’s what you would expect from one of Ireland’s most successful TV exports. You don’t go from co-hosting Ireland Am to the Big Breakfast couch and onto The Swan, one of America’s most iconic TV shows without having a powerful work ethic and a zeal for life.

But fronting some of the world’s biggest shows came with a price and for quite a while it took its toll on Amanda. She has worked hard to address some of the issues she faced while living the seemingly perfect celebrity life and has now written a self-help book The Switch that she hopes will be the catalyst for other people to make those changes too.

“This is my first book and I didn’t know how the whole process worked,” Amanda says.

"It was really daunting. I have a brilliant editor and she kept saying to me 'send me what you have, I can help you' and I was like, 'no, no it’s fine'. I needed to get it right in my own head, to figure out what I was trying to say. I wanted to make sure that I was being completely honest about everything. I’ve done a lot of interviews and I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve. But I suppose over the years I’ve become slightly wary and a bit guarded because sometimes untruths can be written about you. With the book, I would write a chapter and read it back and realise that there was more that I could say, that I could be more honest.

"I knew no one could twist my words if I was writing it myself. I was doing the book to help people and that if I couldn’t be 100% honest about absolutely everything, then I wasn’t going to help anyone.”

Amanda Byram

It’s that honesty that sets Amanda’s book apart from many you may have read in the past. Before she dishes out any advice, she lets you know that she has been through it all herself. She talks about how a throwaway comment by a friend when she was 15 lead to decades of body image problems that eventually saw her spend almost three years on the phase of the Atkins diet that is supposed to last two weeks. How the most critical voice in her life was her own and how her drive for personal perfectionism meant that she was training as hard as a professional athlete. Alongside the stories of personal experiences come explanations of how Amanda managed to quiet the critical voices and make changes in her life. And it all comes with humour and straightness that you might not expect in a wellness book.

In the chapter about alcohol, she talks about the eye-rolling reaction she often gets when she talks about the effects of alcohol on both body and mind. “When I eventually hear The Groan and get reminded (quite sharply) that ‘life is too short to give up booze for even just one week!’ my immediate reaction is: ‘Some of you have pushed a 10lb screaming baby out of your vagina so I am pretty sure abstaining for a few days would be easy in comparison!’

“There's just no point in pussyfooting around,” she laughs when I tell her I like the plain-speaking that is a key part of the book.

“Obviously I would never want to lecture anyone on anything, I just want to speak to people the way I would want to be spoken to. And people aren't stupid. They know when you sugar-coat something and you know, it would have been really easy to write a self-help book that says take some deep breaths, everything's going to be fine. But it's not as easy as that.

"Sometimes you actually have to go and do the hard work and that’s something I don't shy away from in the book. I say it from the very first page. 

I'm not promising you that this book will bring you happiness at the end of it. You have to do your work. I mean, the clue is in the title, it’s self-help so you've got to help yourself. 

"I’m not in your life. I'm not in your day-to-day. I'm not there when your alarm goes off in the morning. It’s up to you.”

There are subjects in The Switch that will appeal to different women at different stages in their lives from the curse of perfectionism in social media, to body dysmorphia, to goal setting and getting, to the menopause and one which will be particularly difficult for a lot of Irish women — the art of taking a compliment!

There is, she says, a way to do it without worrying that you sound big-headed and vain: “Now, when someone says something nice, I stop, smile and say … ‘Ah, thank you, that’s such a nice thing to say, I really appreciate that'. You are not saying, ‘Yes, I agree, look at me, everyone, I am the dog’s bollox,’ (although, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with that at all because you ARE the dog’s bollox). You are simply accepting the fact that they have paid you a beautiful compliment and you are thanking them for taking the time to do so.”

Amanda Byram

Writing the book was cathartic for Amanda who started it last summer and worked on it right up until she submitted it at Christmas when she and husband of four years, Julian Okines, took a month off and went to Australia when she “didn't even think about it and look at it and breathe it and just start letting it go completely".

Final edits for the book coincided with the start of lockdown in London. It should have been the perfect time to put her head down and get the final stage of the book completed but the universe had other plans for her and she had a bad accident that left her with a broken wrist and a new one-handed typing method.

“We took lockdown really seriously; we went nowhere and did nothing and then when they said that we were allowed to go out for an hour a day to exercise we thought 'great let’s go for a bike ride'. We were coming across Hammersmith Bridge pretty slowly but there was a woman jogging and she stepped out close to me and I thought 'whoa that’s closer than two metres, I need to get out of her way' but I braked too suddenly and went over the handlebars, came right down on my left hand and the bike flipped over on me. 

"I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t want to go to A&E and be the terrible person who burdened the NHS during a pandemic. But the next day I heard a news story saying that nobody was going to the emergency rooms for the same reason and they were actually empty so I went in. I did feel really sorry for myself at the beginning but then I thought people are dying, families are being really badly affected, if this is all I have to worry about I’m fine. 

It actually made me feel really grateful for everything I have and gave me a whole new perspective on what’s been going on.

Gratitude is a theme that runs through our chat. She is especially grateful that she got to see her parents in February just before the world was turned on its head. They had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and she and Julian had taken them on a trip to see the Northern Lights in Iceland. They said goodbye in the airport, one couple flying to Dublin and one back to London both aware of the new virus but completely unprepared for what was to come. She’s making plans to hopefully come home at Christmas. 

“If quarantine is still in place, I'll have to get home for two weeks to a hotel and then we'll get to see them. It is what it is. I can take that time at Christmas and, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that long really. I have to see my parents and my family.”

The Switch is about to be released into the wild and already has ringing endorsements from Fearne Cotton and Russell Brand — both self-help and wellness gurus themselves.

Amanda, historically a serial planner, is trying to appreciate each moment and each step of the process for what it is but she would like to write some more books and perhaps record a podcast version of The Switch.

And if the podcast is anything like this interview where 45 minutes of talking to Amanda left this exhausted, cynical journalist feeling more productive and positive than on any day since last March it’s bound to be a #1 in the charts. Both Amanda and The Switch are a dose of straight taking positivity that we probably all could use right now.