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The One Strong Mother Podcast
Pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of coffee (or reheat it for the third time—we get it), and join me for candid conversations about the messy, meaningful intersection of motherhood and personal growth.
This isn’t just a podcast about planners and productivity—though we love a good system around here. It’s about what it really looks like to pursue your goals while raising a family, managing chaos, and trying to stay grounded in the process.
Each week, I’ll share stories from my own life, behind-the-scenes lessons from building the One Strong Mother brand, and practical tools to help you stay organized, get intentional, and move forward—even when it feels like you're doing it all with a baby on your hip and laundry on the couch.
Whether you're in the thick of diapers or driving teens to practice, there's space for you here. Let’s figure it out together, one strong mother at a time.
The One Strong Mother Podcast
Curiosity Over Certainty: Build Health And Business On Your Terms
What if the “right way” isn’t a single path, but the path that fits your body, your bandwidth, and your season of life? Ashley opens up about creative dips, menstrual cycle rhythms, and why grace is a strategy, not a soft option. From health trends like intermittent fasting to the nuts and bolts of building a software company, we connect the dots between sustainable habits and sustainable growth—without the shame, hustle theater, or one-size-fits-all rules.
You’ll hear how to run clean experiments in your health: choose one lever, track objective and subjective data, and evaluate results without ego. We explore why many methods “work” for weight loss but feel wildly different in real life because hormones, sleep, genetics, and stress change the experience. We dive into cold plunging as a case study—how timing can make or break sleep—and translate those lessons to business, where the order of operations matters. Build systems first, then consider paid ads. When a sprint is necessary, define it, protect sleep, and verify that the discomfort feels purposeful rather than corrosive.
This is a guide to making decisions you can live with tomorrow. You’ll leave with a simple process to test ideas, respect your cycle, sequence priorities, and spot the difference between growth-producing discomfort and peace-stealing unease. Whether you’re tuning your nutrition, refining your training, or scaling a product, the goal is the same: curiosity over certainty, progress over perfection, and results that don’t cost your well-being.
If the message lands, help us grow organically—subscribe, share the show with a friend, and drop a quick review telling us the one change you’ll test this week. Your support means more thoughtful conversations and more tools for strong, resilient mothers everywhere.
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💪 For your health + energy:
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➡️ themarracollective.com
Hey there. Welcome to the OneStrong Mother podcast, the space where empowering and inspiring loves unite to embrace strength, balance, and well-being amidst the beautiful chaos of motherhood. I'm your host, Ashley, a military spouse in Mama Five, blocking this incredible path beside you. In each episode, I'll bring you handed conversations with expert insights and heartfelt stories that touch on every facet of modern motherhood. Whether you're thinking in a listen during a quick coffee break or favoring those rare moments of life, together we'll tackle the hurdles, boost each other up, and cement our place as the strong, resilient women we are designed to be. Thanks for tuning in and let's dive into today's episode, shall we? Hello and welcome to another episode of the One Strong Weather Podcast. I, you're gonna have to bear with me today because I am just having like this weird, I don't even know. I don't even want to call it a brain fart because it's not just one moment of a brain fart. It is this like I have things on my mind, I have things that I need to get done, but creatively my brain is just not wanting to function. But it's just one of those days, and um I am okay with that. I also am gonna push through that and I'm still gonna get my things done. So, you know, you're just you're long for the ride with me as I just I don't even know. My creative energy is not here. And you know what's interesting, and this isn't even actually what I'm gonna talk about, but fun, fun side quest because welcome to ADHD Ashley, where we think about other things whenever we should be talking about the actual main purpose. Um, fun side quest is did you realize as a woman that your creativity and just your brain activity in general goes along with your cycle? And so if you find yourself struggling at certain points in the month where, like maybe last week, man, your creative brain or your organized brain, you were on it. You were like rapid fire, you were unstoppable, you were probably ovulating. Um, but no, for real, like your creativity and your energy levels, and I mean we all know our energy levels, but your brain chemistry changes throughout your cycle as well. And so if you ever find yourself where you're maybe just not as organized or your thoughts kind of leave you and you're not you don't feel as sharp, or days like today where my creativity has just tanked. It was a blessing that I didn't know that I needed to understand. And when I learned that your brain chemistry does physically change throughout your cycle, it was almost this like breath of fresh air because I would find myself like, gosh dang, what is wrong with me today? Uh nothing, it's called biology and it's just how your body operates. And so you you kind of learn to find a little bit more grace and you learn how to support yourself in those phases of your cycle differently because you show up for yourself differently through all of your cycle or all of your phases throughout your cycle every month. And so when you know these things all the way down to um your workouts, I'm not saying that you need to change your workouts in accordance to your cycle, because I certainly don't. I stick with the same programming and the same style of training. I just simply understand that this week I might be a little bit stronger or even a little less strong than I was last week, or vice versa, where like my heart rate, I might be able to like handle more conditioning than what I was able to handle last week. You know, it it just varies. And so again, I'm not saying that you need to be one of those crazy people that like only walk during this phase of the cycle. I'm not saying that, but it is nice when you can give yourself a little bit of grace when you understand where you're at in your cycle, and that's kind of where I'm at, where I understand that where I'm at in my cycle, my creativity is going to be at its low peak, and I just don't have it. But the show must go on, so here we are. So so I say all of that to just say bear with me. We do have a topic today, and we are gonna talk about it, but my creativity and my um I've had to hit record like 10 times in a row because I couldn't find the right words that I wanted to even just simply start with, which is so frustrating. I kind of dislike those days because it feels like it takes me 10 times longer. But here we are, and we're just we're gonna get going and we're you know, we're gonna roll with it because that's what we do. That is part of what the whole One Strong Mother movement is about, is is it doesn't mean that we're strong all the time, but it means that we just keep going. We understand where we're at, we find a little bit of grace, we find a little bit of patience, and we pick up the pieces that we can and that we're capable of, and we keep going and we show up in every way that we can, and we let go of the things that we are not capable of showing up at in this moment, okay? So I really do want to talk about something that's been on my mind, and I I mean, I guess you could kind of tie it into what I was just saying. I was listening to a different podcast, and it was all about it was a health podcast. I kind of go, I toggle between business related and like marketing stuff because we do run a software company and we teach other business owners to a ton of marketing and a ton of strategy. So I do split my time between the health stuff and and marketing and strategy and and whatnot. Um this particular podcast episode was all about health related and he was talking, they were talking about fasting, and I love this topic. One, I love the topic of fat, I just love the topic of different health um fads. And I'm not necessarily a big advocate of fasting, but I also knew enough to be able to say to tell clients when I'm working with them of like, why don't you test it out for your body? Because your body is gonna need something different than even my body. And so when you have the power to be able to look back at something and just go at it with a curious mind and test it. And then, you know, maybe 90 days down the road, ask like take notes the whole time, journal the whole process, and then and then look back at it and ask yourself, is this the right system for me? And that kind of led me into deeper thoughts because this can be so true with literally anything that you're doing. It could be true in business, it is true in business. In my businesses, we we're running two different businesses, uh, one on the software side and one on the wellness side. And you know, there's a million ways to lose weight. Um, ultimately, it comes down to being in a calorie deficit, but there's other things, like there's other factors that go into it that you can lose weight in different approaches, right? You can fast, you cannot fast, you can go keto, you can go balanced food, you can go carnivore. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that any one style works better than the other. At the end of the day, they all probably put you into a calorie deficit. If you're losing weight, you're in a calorie deficit. But there's gonna be other implications on your health that they are that are affected differently by these styles. The same is true in business. There is a million ways probably to make a million dollars. Does it make any one of them any more right than the other? Some may be quicker, some may be slower, some might feel more sustainable, some might be like the ultimate sacrifice, like a a 90-day sprint where you're like by the end of it, you're like, holy crap, I'm tired. I sacrificed my sanity, I sacrificed my peace, but I got a million dollars. That's where you have to ask yourself, like, it was it worth it to me? Was it was it something that fits into my life? Do I want to do that again? Do I want to try something different? Is what's the next way to make a million dollars? What's the next way to lose 10 pounds? Because I didn't really like the way that felt. And it's really cool because you can do that. Like you're an adult, you're a whole adult that gets to make these decisions. You do not have to be bound to the chains of any one way to do anything. And I just thought that was really cool. I thought it was something worth reflecting on and something worth talking about. Whether it is between business, life, the way you manage your house, the way you lose weight, the way you're healthy, the way like anything, the way you get in shape, literally anything, how you progress at work, even if you don't own your own business, how you you're an entrepreneur, meaning you work inside a company and you want to progress in that company. It's the same way. There's probably a million different ways to make it happen. How you choose is up to you, and then you just simply have to make the choice to show up consistently at that one path long enough to see results, and then at the end of that phase, on the health side of things, if you're training, I would call it a training phase, a training cycle, whatever. At the end of that cycle, you're gonna sit and you're gonna reflect, you're gonna look at your notes, you're gonna look at the things that you sacrificed, you're gonna look at the things that you didn't sacrifice, and you're simply gonna ask yourself, was this worth it or was it not? If it's not, ask like dissect the things that made it miserable. Make dissect the the very maybe there's one specific thing that made it not worth it. Maybe there's five different things that made it not worth it. Whatever those things are, sit with those. What can you do? Do you need to make a drastic adjustment? Do you need to just completely scrap that style of progression altogether? Um, let's use an example on the health side of things. There have been times where I've gone to see a certain result, I've gone into a major calorie deficit. And then also paired that with intense, intense training in the gym for like two hours at a time. And and then I was also, that's when I was also working with other people, like training other people, and it was not pretty. Like, I don't get me wrong, I saw the results, but what it did to my body on the inside was not pretty. It didn't feel good. I was tired all the time. I was so run down. It was not worth the results to me. It is not sustainable. If you were to tell me to go live my life like that again, I would crash and burn so hard and so fast. I don't know that there would be, it would take, it would probably potentially take me years to recover from that kind of damage because of what it would do to my hormones. I'm older, I can't sustain that. It was not even a sustainable lifestyle back then either. I just refused to admit and recognize the patterns of what was happening because I liked the aesthetic results that I was getting. Um, but now it's not worth it. The same is true in business. Growing this software company has been incredibly rewarding and I've loved every second of it. However, comma. I will say there have been sprints of very, very late nights, like when something needs to be created, when I was working through building out my first course that is in the software. Um, I stayed, I would stay up very late. I I would give up personal time with my kids, which is so hard because they've never seen me do that. Um just to simply like needing to check tasks off my list. I would have to work, my days revolved 100% around building this software company. And now I'm able, because I've automated it the way I have, I'm able to kind of pull back the reins, but it doesn't change the fact that there are certain sprints. However, I am going to caveat with those. I knew that they were not sustainable, but I also knew in my mind that this is for a very short period of time. It was never intentional for that to be the new boundaries that I had set with running my own software company. Going into it when you know it's for X period of time, it makes it a little bit more realistic. And the sacrifices are not as um impactful in the negative way as they would be if you were trying to like just if you were just like, well, this is the new normal, this is the new life now. Sorry guys, I loved hanging out with you, but so long. It's not like that. And so on the business side, I will say I don't, I, I don't regret those sprints because they were just that, they were a sprint. And then I was able to pull back the reins. The health side back then, it was not a sprint. It was I I was in it for the long haul, but I didn't I didn't want to admit what I was doing to my body. Now you couldn't pay me enough money on the health side to do a sprint, even a sprint, knowing that it was short term, I am not wrecking my hormones at 36 years old because it will take me way longer to recover. Um, business side, a little bit different because I was still at the end of the day, I was still prioritizing sleep. So I was still making sure that I was getting enough sleep for my body to recover for the next day. But the other things like working freaking what felt like 16-hour days, um, which they were 16 to 18 hour days. Um, no, not quite 18 hour days, but I definitely had pulled like 12-hour days, 16-hour days, and then I would just go straight to bed, wake up and do it again the next morning because we would have like big launches, I would have big trainings that I would give to um some medical communities, and knowing that on the back end I better have those systems to be able to back up, like knowing people would be booking with us for for sales calls and demos and all the things. And so the sprints were worth it because they paid off monetarily. Um, but it was just a sprint, and so and then we would always pull back the reins and kind of take some time off and and chill out a little bit and kind of go into autopilot, get through all those sales calls and and whatnot. But um I just I don't know. I thought it was a really cool opportunity to sit and reflect and and give you permission to pick what is right for you. I'm not trying this this doesn't need to be a whole episode of like all the things that Ashley did wrong in the past, but it's I'm sharing my story and my journey so you know, like one, these issues are so common, but two, give yourself the permission to be curious. There's nothing wrong with being curious. If you want to explore intermittent fasting on the health side, go explore it. There's nothing wrong with it. And and don't listen to the naysayers and also maybe don't fall full victim of listening to the people who are like, this is the only way. If if somebody is saying that something is the only way to see X result, probably run away from those people because it's not the only way. Is it the right way for you? I don't know. I can't answer that. As a coach, like I cannot tell you what's gonna be right and what's gonna be wrong. Again, in business and or in health. I cannot tell you. It has to align with your lifestyle and what you're willing to commit to it. So if you are willing to really consistently commit to intermittent fasting, I say go for it, try it. I I mean, I have my opinions about it. I think that it's hard for women who still have a period to function well on intermittent fasting. I think that you're probably gonna be in for a little bit of hormone disruption, but that's not the case for everybody. Genetics play a huge role in your ability to be able to withstand intermittent fasting. It is not something that you should, if it makes you miserable, if you feel like garbage and you're doing it just for the sake of like being in a calorie deficit, then maybe you need to work with someone and and like really find a better way to be in a calorie deficit. So that's where like do it consistently long enough to know how you feel. Look at your notes, look at your journal, and ask yourself at the end of that cycle, was this the right fit for you? Did it fit your lifestyle? Is it sustainable? Did you improve? Did your mood improve? Did your energy levels improve? Or did you struggle? Did you find yourself like over time just kind of consistently becoming tired throughout the day? Um, if so, probably not the right option for you. But you're never gonna know that if you don't get curious about different ways. Another thing that I will say though is only pick one thing at a time. There is no reason on any health journey that you need to be picking three, four, or five things. Your body is gonna be so overloaded with change that it's probably not gonna do any favors. It's gonna do more harm than good. Pick one thing and and work on changing that. And then when you feel like you have that down on a consistent basis, then you can introduce the next thing. As long as that first thing is still producing positive impacts in your health journey, pick keep that, keep implementing it, and then go on and maybe introduce the next thing. You know, this could be if you're gonna do intermittent fasting, great. Implement the intermittent fasting. Definitely, we already know we are prioritizing protein. So I'm gonna assume that you have already gotten down that you are hitting your protein goals on a daily basis, and now you've introduced intermittent fasting. Let's say that you are the genetic person that can handle intermittent fasting, and it just be it's now become a part of your routine and you're doing great, you feel great, your energy levels are great, you're seeing the results that you're after, and now you know you don't even have to think about it, it's just part of who you are. Okay, cool. Let's add the next thing. Maybe it's not even a nutrition thing, maybe it's you want to start cold plunging. Um, great. So you're hitting your protein goals, you are intermittent fasting, and now you start cold plunging. And again, you're gonna do it long enough, consistently enough to see results. I can tell you from personal experience with cold plunging. We have a cold plunge in our master bathroom. I love it. I love to cold plunge. However, what I what did I learn about myself about cold plunging? I am a terrible candidate for cold plunging at night. I get so dead gone cold, it takes my body so long to warm back up that I will shiver so hard throughout the night that I do not sleep. And so it affected my sleep quality. I and genuinely I was losing hours of sleep because I would wake up shivering. No matter how many blankets I had on, no matter how like I would sleep in a hoodie, I would sleep in sweatpants, and then I would have multiple blankets and I just would shiver all night long. So I moved it to the morning time and I do just fine. It's weird because I don't shiver like that during the day. If I'm up and moving my body, I think it I think it has a lot to do with the blood flow. So, so for me, that's I but I had to do it consistently enough to know that it wasn't a fluke thing, that it that, hey, this is an actual problem. I don't like this problem. I'm not going to keep forcing this problem because everybody tells me that I should be cold plunging and that I shouldn't do it at X hour of the day or right after this uh workout, you know. I had to find when it fit in my life, when it made the most sense, and when it worked with my body and not against my body. This can be true to everything, everything that you do on a health journey. Please only implement one at a time. Ask yourself, do you like this? Does it fit your lifestyle? There are and there are phases where even cold plunging, it just doesn't fit my lifestyle. So I will go in phases where we don't cold plunge at all. And you know what? I've just learned to understand, like it's just the phase of life that I'm in. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't mean that I'm a failure, it doesn't mean that I'm a quitter, it just means that it doesn't fit my mental capacity right now. And something that you can learn to say to yourself, instead of saying, I don't have time for that, tell yourself it is not a priority for my life right now. And and sometimes that actually kind of stings a little bit, but it it forces you to look at things and actually answer the question like, is it a priority? And right now, I'll be honest, cold plunging is not actually a priority for me at the moment because I have a lot of other things that are a priority, and so I gave up the time that it took me to do the cold plunging so I could fit the other things in that are a priority, and you know what it is doing for me? While no, I'm not getting the benefit of cold plunging, I am getting the benefit of ending my day with a mental peace, like peace as in like at ease, because I am prioritizing the things that need to be checked off the list, so actually my body is more at rest during the evening and when I go to bed because I knew that I checked off my boxes of what needed to be done versus beating myself up over not being in a phase of cold plunging right now. Uh no, I'm not getting the benefits of cold plunging, but there are a lot of other benefits that come with the mental health and the mental piece of it that I am getting my other priorities taken care of. So this looks the same in business. Um there's a million ways to go about acquiring a new customer, right? Um, if we're looking at paid ads versus organic ads, and this is and I'm gonna talk about this because this is something that is very relevant in my business right now, where we are finally starting to explore the idea of paid ads. Um I have had to sit with for a long time of I want to, I think that we need to, but I don't think that we're ready yet. And I have had to re very carefully choose when to prioritize that as a business owner and not get blinded by the quick the idea of some quick cash. I did not have the systems put in place, I did not have the automations put in place in order to be able to sustain those ads and bringing that traffic in. What am I doing with that traffic? There were so many questions that needed to be answered first and and so many things, and because of those questions, I had to put so many things in order first before I could sustain running ads. It was not sustainable, so therefore, it could not be a priority, the actual ad itself. What had to be a priority first was putting those systems in place in my business so I could sustain that next priority of running ads. So it's it's these examples. I could go on and on and on and on about these examples. There are so many things that can take priority there and it's okay, it's all a phase. What phase of life are you in? What are your goals? What are you working towards? Um it all plays a role in where you choose to invest your energy and and how you invest that energy. And if it just doesn't feel good at the end of the day and you are quite literally physically losing sleep over it, then it's not right, it's not the right protocol for you. Intermittent fasting is just the title of what we're talking about at this point, but this applies across the board. If it drains your energy, if it leaves you feeling uneasy, there is a there is a difference in discomfort because believe me, it was very uncomfortable for the sacrifices that were have that that were made in order to get my business up and run the software business up and running as it is now. There were many, many, many uncomfortable moments. However, it did not leave me feeling uneasy. I knew I was doing what I needed to do in that phase of life, and I was okay with that. And so the mental piece that was there, and it was so weird because I would tell my husband all the time, like, every day is so hard. I am doing things that I just I'm I'm walking in uncharted territories every day. However, I would end the day so proud of myself for doing those hard things and uncomfortable things, and that's when I knew, like, I okay, I am doing this in a sustainable way because at the end of the day, my mind was still at peace. Did I have a hard day at work? Yeah, I did a lot, a lot in a row. I had very hard days at work, but I it still was not leaving me in an uneasy state of mind at the end of the day. So that's that same thing is said to be true about the health side of things. If it is leaving you with unease, it's probably not right. If you are losing sleep, it's probably not right. If you do not have the capacity to get stronger or better, it's probably not right. So really sit with those questions and reevaluate no matter what your goal is, no matter what area of life, it is if it is causing such negative impacts, discomfort and unease are two very different things. So if it's uncomfortable, sure. I think that it is very healthy to be uncomfortable. But if it is affecting your mental health in a way that you are not happy and at peace with the discomfort, it's probably not right. You're probably not ready for it. So you need to back up, take 10 steps backwards, reverse engineer it a little bit, and ask yourself what you need to do first in order to prepare for that next step, if that next step absolutely needs to happen. So I don't know. It just it was a fun reflection and it was something that I I love the topic. I love the idea because it's really cool to know that there's a million ways to do it, and you get to be the one to give yourself permission on which way that is going to be. So there's there's my there's there's Ashley's um coaching tip for the day. I if it resonates with you, please feel free to share the episode. I would actually really love that. Um, we are trying really hard to grow the show organically, uh, and that's gonna come down to you guys commenting and sharing the show with whoever you feel like needs to hear this message. So share the show, talk about it, tell your friends, grab some coffee, go listen to every episode together uh separately, and then talk about it later, whatever. Um until next time, don't forget to be one strong mother.