Renew Breakup Bootcamp is a bit of a business fairy tale. Founder Amy Chan found herself heartbroken, jobless, newly single, and couchsurfing. Yet within its first two years of trading, her business landed a book deal and a movie offer. But despite the seemingly perfect backstory, Amy isn’t a fan of fairy tales. Here, she shares her story.

“I am the heroine of my love story”, she told the Head of AllBright Australia, Georgie Abay. And she knows what it takes to get to the happily ever after. “I really paid my dues”, she explains. “I wrote for free, I've spoken for free. I really did that to build up my skillset, my credibility, all those things. Now, I'm finally in a position, 12 years later, to be able to say, ‘Actually, nope, not going to do that for free. This is how much my time costs. What's the value exchange?’ That feels really good too.”

Even now, as Renew Breakup Bootcamp pivots to the digital space, Amy is happy to get her hands dirty. With a background in Marketing and PR, she’s well placed to understand the importance of press coverage, and simple persistence. “To this day”, she says, “I'm cold pitching. I'm so used to being ignored. I just reached out to someone for the third time yesterday...I have no shame, no pride.”

Safe to say, it’s working out. Despite the challenges of Covid travel restrictions, her bootcamps are going from strength to strength. In this chat she tells us why perfectionism is just another form of procrastination, and how she gets ahead of it. She explains why she holds places on every retreat for PR purposes, and why she never spends money on advertising, relying on her clients as ambassadors and word of mouth as her currency. And, we talk about Bridgerton and Sex and the City, the ways they reinforce bad relationship patterns, and why there’s no such thing as ‘The One’. You might want to pour yourself a wine for this one, because it’s just like catching up with a girlfriend. Let’s meet the queen of breakups...

I've read that you start off every day with a meditation. Where do you meditate and what role does it play in your life?

Before I go to sleep, I turn off my phone, so it's on airplane. There's no wifi. That way, by the time I get up, I'm not tempted to look at the messages. I really believe in creating systems to set yourself up for success. The minute I wake up, either in my bed or right by the window, I'll sit up and I'll just put on my timer. Sometimes I'll do 20 minutes, recently I've been doing 10 minutes. I used to do an hour, which was when I was really in tip-top shape. That's how I like to start off my morning. Granted, I don't do this every day. There are days where I'm like, "I know I should meditate, but you know what? I'm just going to check my messages anyway." That's actually a decision that I make. That's not rooted in self-love. It's rooted more in like self-hatred, because I know what will happen. I'll get stressed out, and then that will kind of set precedent for the day, but I still make those mistakes.

When are your creativity levels at their best and how do you make the most of this time?

I know that my mornings, I am the most creative, and those are my sacred times, so I try to book all my meetings, all my interviews after 1:00 p.m. The morning is my time. On a great day, I will go to either a cafe - right now it's a bit more limited - but I'll do something that feeds my soul. That will typically look like I'm writing, I'm reading. I'm always reading about science, and the brain, and psychology. Then I'll try to save any of those tasks, like working on the website, doing emails, things like that until later on, and then definitely meetings in the afternoon.

You have two journals, so can you tell us about them? I'd love to know what did you write in one of them a year ago today?

Oh, I wish I'd brought it. A year ago, this would be February of last year. I know exactly where I was. I was in California. I was celebrating my girlfriend's birthday and about to have a Breakup Bootcamp that we were hosting in California. Little did I know that that would be the last in-person retreat I would be having, because of the pandemic. Around this time, I was also celebrating my birthday, because my birthday's on the 17th. I was just feeling super grateful for where I was. At that point, I was in my fourth year of business. I launched my business in February of 2016, and I was in a really loving relationship, and I was, well, probably six months in. The future was bright and then less than two weeks later, pandemic.

Why is journaling so important to you?

Journaling is important for many different reasons. I have a few different journals. There's one journal, it's one line a day. I don't do this every single day, but a lot of the times I will actually write down a line or two of what I've been doing for that day, and it goes all the way back for five years. I know exactly what I was doing. If I was feeling something, if it was a really hard day, or something amazing happened, it's in here. That's pretty interesting. That's one thing that I do just so that I can track my evolution and my growth. 

And then I have another journal, which is really just thoughts. Where I'm at, what I want to manifest, what I'm going through, and those are deeper dives of what's going on in my life. I find journaling, it's a very cathartic, therapeutic process. I very rarely read my journals. It's more about the process of getting all the stuff that's in my head and kind of getting the junk out. It helps me process, especially if I'm going through something hard, it really helps me process. Then I also do gratitude journaling. I do gratitude every single day as a practice before dinner, where I actually say out loud three things that I'm grateful for. That's my ritual with my partner, but I also will write it in my journal as well.

You've said before that perfection is procrastination in disguise. Can you share your thoughts on how perfectionism holds us back?

I think that sometimes we'll hide behind perfectionism, because it's a way of not putting ourselves out there and it comes from fear. I know that I've done that before, and when I've mentored other people, a lot of the times why someone won't take that next step, launch that blog, do that speaking engagement, whatever it is - it's not because they're actually not ready. It's because they're afraid that if I put myself out there, what does that mean? I'm putting myself out there in a vulnerable way, and I could be judged, I could be labeled. Who knows what will happen, and so we hide behind that, and then we're like, "Oh no, no, no, I'm not ready yet." Here's the thing. For anything that has the potential of a high payoff, it's going to be a risk, and you're never going to be ready for that a hundred percent.

I really love the motto, "Just launch it, just do it. Perfect it later." Even with Renew Breakup Bootcamp, I was not ready. I had the idea for a year, and I kept talking about it, planning it. Then eventually, I finally said, "Okay, I'm going to book it." I was doing it with a partner, and two weeks prior, the partner, who was a psychologist, had to drop out of it. I almost felt relief, like, "Okay, great. I'm just not going to do it." She said, "You're doing it. I'm finding you a replacement psychologist, you're going to do it." And I just did it. It wasn't perfect. The retreat is so different than what it was my very first one, but if I didn't do it, I would constantly just think, "I'm not ready. I'm not ready."

You've said that press coverage grows a business. What's your advice around handling the PR side of a business and how have you navigated it?

My background is marketing and PR, so I know how important it is to have that. Especially when you are new. Whether you're a new company, if you're new as a personal brand, the best way to get people to know about you and to build your credibility is to align yourself with credible sources. This is from the partners that you choose, to the press coverage that you're in. I do believe press is really important, and it depends on the type of company. I've worked a lot with B2C, so business to consumer, and I mean, I have a retreat business, so what I did was I knew my first retreat, I would not be making money and this was really an investment into the brand.

I gave up three spots to the retreat. The whole thing was covered, accommodation, everything, to a few key reporters. From there, I got coverage in Fortune, New York Mag, and Glamor. Once that coverage came out, then there's a ripple effect. Then other media hear about you and then they want coverage, and it just keeps going. I think of it like you have to keep building that fire. Every single time, every retreat, I would always reserve a spot or two, and then constantly, also trying different angles and looking at what's time sensitive. Right now, it's February, I know Valentines Day is a big thing. A lot of people right now are lonely on Valentines, so I'm positioning Renew and what I'm offering as the anti-Valentines thing. The Valentines you can give to yourself.

If you don't have that marketing PR brain, then bringing on someone that can help you, and of course, hiring an agency right off the bat might be challenging, because of retainer fees, but you can bring on a consultant to help you, and then you do more of the execution work. I think it's super important. That's how I built my company. To this day, I don't do paid advertising. That's the next step of my business. It all comes from organic, and people finding me.

By year two, you landed a book deal and a movie offer. How would you describe your mission?

My mission is to help people have healthy relationships. First with themselves, and that will automatically have a ripple effect on their relationships with others. I have focused on breakups and having a breakup boot camp, because really that's a catalyst for people to seek change. Human beings, we're very comfortable with what's familiar, even if what's familiar is not that good. It's like the devil you know versus the devil you don't know, so people stay in these average or subpar relationships for a very long time until something shakes them up.

The same thing happens with jobs. People stay in these jobs, are unhappy until they get fired, and then they're like, "Okay, now I'll redirect my life." I think a breakup is a shakeup sometimes, that you need to redirect your life. That's what makes me super excited. They are ready for change and they're committed to it. My whole life, I thought that my goal, my dream, was to find happily forever after. My love story was about finding my version of a Prince. After my breakups, after healing, after doing the work, I've really realised that this love story is not about anyone else. It's my love story. I am the heroine of my love story, and that's what I hope for other people to know. This love story is the one with themselves, and everything else is a bonus. All the other things fall into place and there's a ripple effect, but if you don't focus on that first and foremost, and you only focus on your relationships, there's going to be an issue there.

I read that it took eight proposals, two different agents, and then a book deal. How do you feel when people refer to you as being an overnight success?

I think that people who might have just started following me now, think, "Oh, wow. It seems like everything just happened," but I'm grinding every single day. To this day, I'm cold pitching. I'm so used to being ignored. I just reached out to someone for the third time yesterday, like, "Hey, I'm just following up, did you want to do this partnership?" I have no shame, no pride. I've been at this for a long time, and in the beginning when I was blogging, I didn't know it was going to end up in a book deal. I didn't know that one day I was going to be a breakup expert. I was just doing that, because I was so passionate about it.

When I was blogging, I knew it was helping people, because people would reach out and say, "This really resonated. I feel more understood. I feel like I can identify with what you're going through." If I can help one person feel a little less alone, a little more understood, then that to me is a success and maybe my pain isn't for nothing. Because I went through so much heartbreak. I went through so much suffering when I think about it. I really paid my dues. I wrote for free, I've spoken for free. I really did that to build up my skillset, my credibility, all those things. Now, I'm finally in a position, 12 years later, to be able to say, "Actually, nope, not going to do that for free. This is how much my time costs. What's the value exchange?" That feels really good too.

You went through a breakup, and you found yourself jobless and without a place to call home. When did you first start to see a glimmer of light and hope?

I was in such a dark place. Just to set it up, before that I was living in Vancouver. I had a six-figure job in the luxury hotel business. I was on track. Everything I thought was my dream, I thought I had. Then the first thing happens; I got laid off from the company, and then I had to make the decision that I couldn't afford my own apartment anymore. I moved in with my boyfriend. I took a bunch of my savings and took us to Europe for his birthday. Upon coming home, that relationship fell apart, and I had so much shame I didn't want to go back home to my mom's place. I didn't want her to see me suffer. I didn't know where to live, and my friends let me live in their homes.

I hopped around to seven different places within three months. It was really hard, and I wasn't working, so all these things I used to base my identity on, I now no longer had, so I was like, "Who am I?" There was just so much shame that I was going through. I think that when I started to feel a little bit of light was, in the beginning, I didn't want to see anyone. I wasn't eating, and eventually I started seeing my friends a bit, and I went out for a dinner with my girlfriend one time, and I ran into an old boss of mine and he said, "Hey, what are you up to these days?" I said, "Oh, I went through this breakup. I'm not working." And he said, “I’ve got a contract for you. Give me a call on Monday. Let's do this."

Then I got a contract job, and so I think because I was able to then focus my energy on working, I had something, it was, "Okay, at least I'm working now," and that slowly was one step. Then I was able to then build the next step and then the next step. It was a slow process.

In your book, you explore how to create healthy responses when your inner child is freaking out. Can you take us through some of the ways that we can do this?

When we feel triggered, there's a lot happening, right? We'll feel what's called the primary emotion, which is that instant emotion. It's not something you think about. It's if you are walking and you see a raccoon run, you might freak out and there's fear - that's a primary emotion. We have a secondary emotion, and sometimes this is the emotion we have about the emotion. Say in a breakup, you feel sad, but then you might feel shame that you feel sad, and that was where I was, so there's these emotions adding up. Then there's what I call feeding your emotional monster. The life cycle of an emotion is 90 seconds. That's how long it takes for that primary emotion, for you to feel it, and for it to move out of your body.

Why it stays around longer, for hours, days, years, are the stories we attach to those emotions. Now, that emotion of sadness becomes, "Oh my gosh, I feel so stupid for feeling this way," and then you do what's called thinking traps, cognitive distortions, where you'll add on assumptions and interpretations such as, "This always happens to me. I'm always left. No, one's going to love me. Who's going to want to be with me at this age," whatever those stories are. Then you might do other things to feed this emotional monster. You play sad love songs on repeat, you watch Love Actually, you put yourself in fetal position and your body language is making you feel worse and worse. All these things add up and that emotional charge gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

I think the very first thing is to take stock of what you're feeling, and know that this emotion is going to pass through you. Breathe it out, don't judge it as good or bad. That is resisting the emotion, and it's going to make that emotion stay around a bit longer. And then be aware of the facts versus the fiction. Are you adding stories? Are you caught in a thinking trap? Are you going to all or nothing thinking, and making that story bigger and bigger, and more traumatising?

Your incredible retreats can't happen right now, so you pivoted to online. How have you navigated this change from in real life retreats to online, and what have been some of the positive outcomes?

At first, I was really concerned - is a physical retreat going to translate well? It wasn't until the pandemic happened that it just forced me, because again, I had wanted to do online, but I thought, "I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet," and so I had no choice. I thought, "Okay, I have all these people that are signed up for a physical retreat. What am I going to do?" I launched my first virtual retreat, and I was so, so pleasantly thrilled with the outcome.

A lot of people said that even though they wanted to go to the physical retreat, they didn't ever pull the trigger, because it was just too much anxiety being in a group and traveling. They're said, "I'm introverted. This is the only way I would do it, in the comfort of my own home, and I can go in deeper." I realised, "Oh, this is actually reaching people who might not have gone to a physical retreat."

The bonding was still so incredible. The women really bonded and created this community of support. The women were able to get in really deep with the different psychologists and experts that were teaching. It wasn't better or worse, it was just different. I'm now onto my third one. This is going to be something I'll continue hosting even when we are able to gather again, and to have physical retreats. I think that's the way of the future. I'll probably have virtual Breakup Bootcamps and different versions of bootcamps, and then have a couple of in-person retreats as well.

Why do you think that relationships, and so many relationships do fail?

I think there's a combination of people having unrealistic expectations of what love and partnership is, and the chemical react feelings in the beginning; so the butterflies, you feel the chemistry, the passion, it is a chemical reaction, right? When you're in the throes of love, the honeymoon stage, the romance stage, there is dopamine, oxytocin. These things are on overdrive. Research shows that between a year or two years, that's when those chemicals start to minimise, and you go back to your baseline. It's not healthy. It's not possible for you to be in that chemical state of butterflies forever. It's just not. Part of your brain, the amygdala, also shuts down. That's the part that perceives threat, so you can't continue on like that. And you look at when breakups and divorce happens, it's usually around the same time. The year to two year mark, so I don't think that's a coincidence.

When people don't have all those chemicals, that momentum, they might go, "Oh, there's something wrong with my relationship. I'm just going to hop to another one," and then you just deal with the same problems. A lot of the things that we deal with that come up when we're in relationships, the things that we're triggered by; these are not specifically just about our partner, they're often coming from wounds that we've had before we even met this partner. If we have the mentality of "The grass is greener. I'll just keep skipping," those same problems will come up with someone else.

I think there's also a combination of, are we choosing people who are the right fit for us? Sometimes we're so controlled by chemistry that we're choosing partners when we're in the throes of love, when we have our rose tinted glasses on, and there isn't that perfect alchemy of chemistry, compatibility, and timing. You need all of those things, not just chemistry.

What are the biggest dating mistakes that we can make?

I think a big dating mistake is being stuck on having a type, and I've been guilty of this, but people that I've worked with constantly say "No, that's just not my type. I know who I want," and they have this idea in their head, and there's usually a list that comes with it. That list could be a combination of superficial things like their height requirement, or how much money they need to make, but this idea really makes them have tunnel vision for this type of person. What happens is, they might meet someone that checks off these requirements and then they wanted so badly to place this person into their life. They're like, "Oh my God, this is the one, I've been waiting." They ignore the red flags. They'll find the evidence to prove that their belief is true. "This is the one. I'm just going to just see only the positive things," and not see the fact that they live in a different country, a different time zone. They already have three kids, they're not really available. They don't see those things. 

Then the people that might be a really incredible fit, and are right there,  you're say, "No, no, not my type," or "Don't have chemistry." You don't even give a chance to people who could be a right fit for you, and I'm guilty of this. When someone tried to set me up with my now partner, and I said no, I looked at his photo, and I said, "I don't know, not my type." A year later I matched with him on a dating app, and lo and behold, now here we are together.