Long before I knew an AHA! could be primed.
I was in my mid-twenties when I experienced my first pivotal AHA!.
For several years, I had been struggling with my career. Then something suddenly became clear: I was trying to shoehorn myself into a career that wasn’t a fit for me.
The AHA! didn’t tell me what career would fit.
I changed direction.
What changed was not the situation. It was how I understood it.
I still didn’t know what career would fit. But once I stopped trying to make the wrong one fit, I was free to look.
At the time, I didn’t think much about how that AHA! had happened. I certainly didn’t wonder whether I could do something to make another one more likely.
As far as I knew, insights like that simply happened.
And although that AHA! changed the direction of my career, it didn’t mean I suddenly understood everything that was getting in my way. I continued to be shaped by assumptions and expectations I couldn’t see.
Today, I would call them hidden mental models.
Almost a decade later, I had earned my Ph.D. and was working as a performance consultant. From the outside, I had accomplished a lot. Inside, I had hit a wall. I found myself asking, Now what?
I took some time off, hoping I would find clarity. I didn’t. Eventually I realized that underneath my uncertainty was a deeper sense of anxiety that I didn’t know how to resolve.
I turned to self-improvement. I read books, took classes, and looked closely at the experiences that had shaped me.
And I worked at it.
One weekend, while my husband and I were painting our basement, I noticed just how hard I worked at it.
Instead of letting my mind wander while I painted, I was monitoring my thoughts—looking for anything that didn’t line up with the self-improvement ideas I had been studying and then trying to bring my thinking back into line.
I saw that my attempts to improve myself had actually made things worse.
So I began throwing out the approaches that weren’t helping and paying attention to the few things that were.
One of them was something I had experienced before: every once in a while, when I was stuck, an insight would come along and I would see the situation differently. And when my understanding changed, what I did could change too.
I went looking for research that might answer the question and couldn’t find a process for generating the kind of life-changing insight I was interested in. So I began reading in related fields, including creativity, innovation, and neuroscience.
At the same time, I experimented on myself.
I paid closer attention when my thoughts, feelings, or actions weren’t what I wanted them to be. Instead of immediately trying to change them, I became curious about what I might be seeing or assuming without realizing it.
I thought about those questions in ordinary moments—buying groceries, waiting for my sons, driving into town.
And the AHA!s began coming more often.
I began using the process with clients.
One of the earliest was Fran Ritzenthaler, who had recently retired as Global Director of Engineering for a U.S. automaker.
Fran first experienced the process as a client. Then he joined me in figuring out how to make it teachable.
Much of what I was doing was still in my head. Together, Fran and I began getting it onto paper. We captured and refined the priming process, used it with clients, developed a workbook, and began training experienced professional coaches to use the process themselves.
Fran became the first certified coach in what would eventually become Amplee and later the first master coach, certifying other coaches.
I had pushed hard for years. I was exhausted, and I had begun to doubt the work.
Was I seeing something that really mattered?
If I was, why didn’t other people see it?
Would anyone listen?
At the time, those felt like reasonable questions.
What I can see now is that underneath them were mental models I didn’t know I had.
I didn’t experience them as mental models.
Eventually I walked away from the work.
I went on with my career. I continued using the process in my own life, and it continued to inform how I coached—even though I wasn’t calling it Amplee or explicitly teaching clients how to prime for an AHA!.
Fran continued coaching with the process and certifying coaches.
We stayed in touch.
In 2025, I was taking a course when memory reconsolidation was mentioned almost as an aside.
My reaction was immediate:
For years, I had watched pivotal AHA!s do something that ordinary understanding often didn’t do. A person could suddenly see an assumption that had been shaping how they understood a situation—and see, at the same time, something from their own experience that didn’t fit with it.
The old understanding could lose its certainty.
Memory reconsolidation gave me a way to understand why.
That discovery didn’t create Amplee. It helped me understand Amplee.
Explore the science behind Amplee →
My commitment to the work returned.
I began revisiting the process through the lens of memory reconsolidation—looking at what we had already learned, where the research could make the process stronger, and what it would take to bring the work to more people.
The earlier process became Amplee.
Fran and I reconnected professionally.
As I took up the work again, the effort to move Amplee forward created both pressure and opportunity to see what was still getting in my way.
Several more limiting mental models surfaced. And as they did, I was able to dissolve them.
My first pivotal AHA! changed the direction of my career before I had any idea that people could prime themselves for insights like it.
Years later, I learned how to make those AHA!s more likely and began teaching other people to do the same.
Mental models I couldn’t see got in the way of the work itself.
Returning to the work years later brought some of those mental models into view.
I don’t think any of us reaches a point where we can see every mental model shaping us. I certainly haven’t.
See how Amplee helps people prime for pivotal AHA!s that can change the mental models shaping how they think, feel, decide, and act.
Explore Amplee training and certification for coaches who want to help clients create change at the level of the mental models shaping their responses.
Begin a conversation about where you feel stuck, what keeps repeating, or what you may be ready to see differently.