Amanda Miller Littlejohn
Amanda Miller Littlejohn writing in a notebook

Journalism & Special Projects 

I believe ideas become more powerful when we bring people together around them.

Explore my writing, interviews, conversations, and gatherings exploring restoration, ambition, creativity, mental health, leadership, and the work of becoming.

The Restoration Writers Festival

Creating spaces for writers to restore, create, and connect

In September 2026, I co-produced and curated the inaugural Restoration Writers Festival, a one-day writing and wellness gathering in Washington, D.C. Supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Howard University School of Education, and The Cherry Blossom (DC) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, the festival brought writers, authors, podcasters, scholars, and creatives together for intimate conversations, writing and craft, and restorative sessions designed to nourish both the writer and the human behind the words.

I closed the event by facilitating a restorative soundbath for all attendees. I also interviewed New York Times bestselling author Alex Elle and award-winning podcast host Demetria L. Lucas on the main stage. The festival grew from my belief that creative work needs restoration, and that some of our most meaningful ideas emerge when we create space to gather in community and rest.

Learn More About the Festival

Featured columns

Forbes Careers Column

Regular columns on leadership, personal brand, and career reinvention.

Read on Forbes

Business Insider Personal Essays

Personal essays on work, identity, and what it means to keep building a life.

Read on Business Insider

My Podcast

Purposescaping: build confidence to reinvent and find purpose — conversations on becoming who you’re meant to be.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

My Substack

The Rest Revolution: weekly essays, frameworks, and the Sanctuary for paid members.

Subscribe on Substack

Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship

The Mental Health Challenges of Midlife High Achievers

Ambitious midlife professionals are achievement-minded, both at work and home. But what happens to their mental health when they routinely set the bar high for parenting, caretaking, and careers while simultaneously setting the bar low for health, self-care, and social bonds? The Carter Center generously supported my search for answers through a yearlong reporting fellowship. For Forbes Careers, I reported on how caregiving burnout, information overload, the calls for solf life self-preservatin, work addiction, longterm unemployment, and parental stress shape the mental health of midlife professionals.

Learn More about The Fellowship

Selected bylines

My BIG ideas

2024–present

The Rest Revolution

Productivity built on depletion is a debt. Rest is not the reward for the work; it's a condition of doing it well.

2017–present

Purposescaping

A career isn't a ladder to climb, it's a landscape to shape — around what you're for, not what's available.

2013–present

Package Your Genius

The expertise you take for granted is the expertise someone else is searching for. Naming it is the whole job.

Read the burnout recovery guide

Essays

Read the essays here.

Watch

An interview on rest, work, and the ideas behind the writing

The newsletter

The Rest Revolution on Substack

Exploring burnout, inheritances, and the choice to move differently in midlife. The Substack picks up where the book and my Carter Center fellowship left off — personal essays, reporting, and the frameworks I use with clients, for readers who aren’t trying to stop achieving, just to stop achieving at the expense of everything else.

Essays

Personal writing on inheritances — what family, school, and era taught us about worth, and the ongoing choice to rewrite that narrative.

Frameworks

Brand strategies, workshops, and tools from fifteen years of Package Your Genius — for the seasons when your energy swings back toward the work.

The Sanctuary

For paid members: a growing library of recorded sound baths and somatic sessions, facilitated through the Auster Sound Method.