Meet Katherine Sleadd

Today we’d like to introduce you to Katherine Sleadd.

Katherine, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My healing journey led me to honor the intuitive presence within me. Something I’d suppressed and denied for so long (albeit not very successfully!). While pursuing training, I had people knocking on my virtual door asking to work with me. Things began informally and grew over the past three years to where I am now, with an official practice. I leaped and quit my part-time job as a barista last month!

My work is an outflow of the work I’ve done in my own story. The space I hold for healing presence is made from what I have chosen to honor and know within myself. As someone with the privilege of knowing others in vulnerable places in their stories, I see the commitment to doing our own work and knowing ourselves as one of the greatest gifts we can give not only ourselves but each other.

One of the particular approaches where my story meets my practice is that of creating space for faith and ideological deconstruction. Those recovering from harmful religious backgrounds want to heal, yet the structure of that harm often runs so deep that we keep the same system without realizing it, unconsciously finding replacements to play the same roles in our lives. For us to discover our true selves and the changes we desire, we risk chaos. Healing is a messy place, it disrupts the previous order of things. This is where trauma informed work meets our day to day lives. When we give ourselves a safe place, to tell the truth, we meet the need our healing “mess” has for space and the need regular life has for structure. This creates balance and the freedom for powerful change and transformation to occur.

So much of my story is realizing how much I was afraid to acknowledge the ways harm impacted my life. The assumption is that to know these stories leads to victim mentality or the feeling of powerlessness we’ve fought so hard to overcome. And yet, it wasn’t until I began to let those stories be seen and what I truly felt to be acknowledged that I discovered both transformative healing and that holding brave space in such stories for others was what I was made to give.

Learning to love and reclaim the power of my intuitive presence has brought me where I am today. I am continually in awe of the humans I have the honor of working with. It is one of the greatest joys of my life to hold space with them as they discover their healing.

Has it been a smooth road?
Creating a sustainable way to do healing work is, overall, a challenge. I am deeply aware of the ways my surroundings (and attitude towards them) enhance or inhibit my work. We live in a society that preaches a mindset of “the hustle”, and that kind of pressure is counterintuitive to holding healing space. This work, by nature, is slow.

Initially, I balanced my part time job at a coffee shop with a handful of clients. I have four kids and a partner in school, so time tends to always feel scarce—which I describe as the idea that everything has to run smoothly or be solved efficiently (or the world will fall apart). It’s almost comical how opposite that mindset appears to my work, but it is an honest and ongoing question. Letting go of my part time job served to create more space, and also made me realize that I had been subsidizing the creation of high quality content I offered and thought of as free, with income from my other job.

Another challenge has been the changes in my audience, every time I feel like I know my following it grows. I don’t feel I’ve struggled with the numbers game, as much as I’ve struggled with speaking to more and more people with less connection to who each person is individual. Learning what my followers need as a group is different than engaging them one on one. Growth has unexpectedly changed the relevance of what I need to offer to continue this work sustainably.

Tell us more about the business.
I am a Trauma Informed Life Coach, primarily for those with a history of religious trauma. Though my work does not center around these stories, the awareness of how this harm impacts one’s life in the present, enables my clients to feel seen in ways they might otherwise have to explain. My approach to this work is from an understanding of narrative therapy, which allows me to hold the inevitable stories that come up from the past whenever we seek to engage the present in new way, and the Internal Family Systems Model, a methodology developed by Richard Schwartz that views the self in parts as a way to heal. I work with my clients over a period of three months, through the weekly hour long sessions, towards a specific goal or healed space in their lives. I am most proud of the risk they take to be seen and love watching their journey to discovering their own inner wisdom. Life coaching is a broad term that can describe a variety of work, my process accounts for the trauma that will be uncovered when we decide to pursue our authentic goals. Instead of employing a format or system, I seek to intuitively hold space with curious questions that invite you back to yourself. I believe you hold the wisdom you need and my work is to reflect the self trust that already belongs to you. The rest is magic.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I love that healing work is gaining visibility, and that more people are recognizing that their stories are worth being heard and seen and known. I think that all of us in this work will see a rise in community formation, and I hope for us to do this well with the right boundaries and language necessary as we learn to hold space for each other in larger groups. I think that part of creating these healing spaces will mean that we need to learn how to end well. Our communities shift and change throughout our lives and healing communities will need to learn to do the same. I think I’m most excited about creating spaces where we can be together and end well after doing our work.

Personally, my growth is towards making my work more accessible. I’m currently writing my first book with a goal to have a publisher or self publish within the next year. I have been working on the project for almost a year now and am almost finished with my proposal, and completed the rough draft of the manuscript last week! Regarding audience growth and changing needs, I am in the midst of creating my first course and healing community online. Overall, I am learning that moving slowly is still movement and continually grateful that this is the work I get to do.

Pricing:

• Coaching Session (50 minutes) $75
• Twelve Week Package $825

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.katherinesleadd.com/
• Email: katesleadd@gmail.com
• Instagram: @katesleadd

Image Credit:
Rachel Thurston Photography (headshot image and family photo)

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.