Hey, I'm Kathryn!

Picture this: I'm newly married. I have a newborn baby. I'm learning how to be a stepmom. I'm working three jobs. I'm trying to build a healthy marriage while navigating a very high-conflict relationship with another adult outside our marriage who had an impressive talent for periodically kicking open the metaphorical door at the worst times and throwing a live grenade into the living room. And through all of that I'm trying very, very hard to be a good wife, good mom, good stepmom, good Christian, good employee, good human, good everything.

It was going great.

Narrator: It was, in fact, not going great.

Eventually, I hit the wall. I was burned out. Exhausted. Sick. Angry. I felt like nothing good ever happened to us. Every time we started getting our feet underneath us, something else went wrong. I felt like everybody was against us. There were days I was pretty sure God Himself didn't particularly like us. And eventually I reached that very special level of emotional exhaustion where my most reasonable life plan seemed to be: Run into the woods and never return. That's it. No forwarding address. Perhaps befriend a raccoon. Become a local swamp hag, maybe.

Unfortunately, I had children and responsibilities and apparently you're not supposed to solve burnout by becoming a cryptid. So I had to figure something else out. And that's where things started changing.

Not because everybody around me suddenly became reasonable. They didn't.

Not because the difficult relationships disappeared. They didn't.

Not because God dropped a color-coded five-year plan out of the sky. Would've been handy, but He didn't.

Things changed because I started changing the part I actually had control over: me.

I started learning that I could love someone without managing their emotions. I could care about a situation without making it my responsibility to fix. I could say no. I could set boundaries with myself & others. I could stop arguing my case to people who had already decided they wanted to believe the worst. I could be angry without letting anger drive the car. I could acknowledge that something genuinely sucked without allowing it to become the entire story of my life. 

And perhaps most importantly, I learned something that now shows up in my coaching all the time: Not everything is yours to carry.

Sometimes you are responsible for 100% of a problem. Sometimes you share responsibility. And sometimes your responsibility is about 5%—and you've been exhausting yourself trying to control the other 95%.

Learning to tell the difference? That changed my life.

I journaled about all the sucky things in my life and how to navigate them, and in 2025 I finally put all that tea into a book, because apparently I cope best with major life lessons by publishing them...

My book, Suck It Up, Cupcake came out of the really rough seasons of my life—the messy parts, the things I learned the hard way, and the uncomfortable realization that sometimes the thing standing between us and a better life isn't just everything everybody else is doing. Often, it's us.

My story isn't about pretending painful things don't hurt. It isn't "quit whining, rub some dirt on it, and get over it." 

It's about what happens when we finally ask: "Okay. This situation may not be fair. I may not have caused it. I may not be able to change the other people involved... but what CAN I do from here?"

That's the question that helped me find my way out.

So... how did THAT turn into life coaching?

Once I started learning these things, I became fascinated with them: Boundaries. Relationships. Personal responsibility. Behavior patterns. 

Eventually, fascination became education and training.

I took classes provided by Oklahoma State University and became a Certified Professional Life Coach through the International Association of Professional Recovery Coaches (IAPRC) and learned professional coaching methods for behavior change, goal setting, accountability, communication, and creating sustainable change.

So no—I didn't wake up one Sunday on top of a mountain, write a book, and declare myself a life coach because I've been through some crap.

My life experience is why I care about this work. My professional training is what taught me how to do it well.

And the years I've spent working with actual human beings have taught me that no two piles of mental spaghetti look exactly alike.

These days, I specialize in the messy human stuff.

I especially love working with overwhelmed adults who are dealing with:

• Complicated family relationships

• Boundaries and people-pleasing

• Burnout and mental overload

• Difficult personalities

• Major decisions and life transitions

• Feeling responsible for everybody and everything

• Knowing something needs to change but having absolutely no idea where to start

• Having 47 thoughts at once and needing somebody to help sort them into piles

Sometimes we work on goals. Sometimes we work on habits. Sometimes we spend an hour discovering that the problem you've been desperately trying to solve is, in fact, not your problem to solve.

Those are fun days.

I'm not here to fix you. I'm not your therapist. I'm not your mommy. And I'm definitely not your drill sergeant. I'm also not going to pretend I've ascended to some higher plane of existence where I never get overwhelmed, overthink something, lose my patience, or make questionable decisions. I am still a human. I would rather be a magical dragon, but I have checked and apparently being human is permanent...

What I will do is listen carefully. I'll ask questions. I'll help you notice patterns. I'll challenge you when you're taking responsibility for things that aren't yours—and when you're avoiding responsibility for things that are. I'll help you figure out what you actually want, what's actually within your control, and what one realistic step forward looks like.

Because here's what I believe: You don't need someone to take over your life. You don't need another person telling you everything you're doing wrong. And you probably don't need seventeen more inspirational Instagram posts telling you to choose joy.

You need space to think. You need to separate what's yours from what isn't. You need practical tools. You need a plan that works in your actual life. And sometimes, you need another human sitting beside you while you figure it out.

That's what coaching can do.

So if you're exhausted, overwhelmed, tangled up in complicated relationships, or standing metaphorically at the edge of the woods wondering whether becoming a cryptid is still an option...

Hi. I've been there. Let's figure out what comes next.