Healing Business from the Inside Out: Energy, Trauma, and Authentic Leadership, with Katie Sutton
Have you noticed how the unhealed energy you carry, your need to be seen, your fear of visibility, your hunger for validation, seems to show up in every business decision you make? And could it be that balancing your masculine and feminine energy is the most practical leadership tool you are not using?
In this episode of the Spirituality in Leadership podcast, Andrew Cohn welcomes Katie Sutton, an intuitive channel, energy medicine healer, and founder of the Zen Within Academy. Based in Charlotte, NC, Katie works at the intersection of personal healing and business leadership, helping entrepreneurs and corporate leaders understand how their energy fields and the unhealed patterns within them directly shape the health and success of their organizations.
Katie shares her own story of rising quickly through the corporate ranks only to crash into burnout and chronic illness. That experience led her to three and a half years of intensive training in energy healing, where she discovered that the same patterns of overwork, people-pleasing, and seeking validation that fueled her corporate success were also making her sick and that they didn’t disappear when she left.
The conversation explores a radical but deeply practical idea: a business is a living, breathing entity, and its energy field is a reflection of the founder’s or leader’s inner world. Katie explains how trauma, limiting beliefs, and even ancestral patterns show up as blockages in both personal and business energy fields, affecting everything from revenue to team dynamics to the ability to be seen.
She also offers a nuanced perspective on corporate culture, rejecting blanket labels of “toxic” in favor of a more dynamic view: systems take what you give them, and the real work is learning to set boundaries, heal your own wounds, and lead with a balanced blend of masculine (doing, containing) and feminine (intuiting, feeling) energy.
This episode is for any leader who has ever felt that something beneath the surface is holding them back and who is ready to look at that something with curiosity, courage, and practical tools for change.
Tune in to discover how your inner world is shaping your leadership and what you can do to shift it.
Key Takeaways
Your business carries your energy: It reflects your inner state, including unhealed trauma, limiting beliefs, and inherited patterns.
Childhood wounds show up at work: Experiences around visibility, safety, or validation affect growth, confidence, and how you handle opportunities.
Energy healing is practical, not just “woo-woo”: If everything is energy, managing yours improves clarity, reduces reactivity, and supports calm leadership.
Masculine and feminine energy are both essential: Strong leadership balances action and structure with intuition, emotion, and flow.
Men can develop intuition too: Many already rely on instinct, but discomfort with emotions can limit deeper awareness.
The corporate system isn’t inherently evil—it’s a mirror: Workplaces reflect boundaries. Systems take what you allow, making self-awareness key.
Younger generations are changing the game: They prioritize work-life balance, pushing organizations to adapt or risk losing talent.
In This Episode:
[00:00] How childhood experiences impact leadership and visibility
[01:48] Introduction to Katie Sutton and her work
[03:50] From corporate burnout to energy healing
[07:15] What it means to “heal” a business
[10:15] How personal patterns affect business growth
[16:40] Learning to work with energy and intuition
[18:48] Why this work is practical, not abstract
[20:03] Is corporate culture inherently toxic?
[26:34] Masculine vs. feminine energy in leadership
[29:03] Why men often resist emotional awareness
[30:37] Emotional intelligence and leadership presence
[32:40] Trust, safety, and intuitive leadership
[34:54] Where to learn more: resources and Katie’s work
Resources and Links
Spirituality in Leadership Podcast
Katie Sutton
Website: https://zenwithinacademy.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiesutton/
Courses: Energy hygiene, relationship healing, business energy
Andrew Cohn
Music:
Listen to the Podcast here
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Transcript
Katie Sutton: Oftentimes, what I see is the things that happen to them in their childhood about being seen and things that impacted their nervous system are actually affecting what's happening in their business and their ability to be seen in that way.
Andrew Cohn: Is there something about it that necessarily either invites certain types of toxicity or different types of energy fields? What's your observation? I'm not here to condemn the corporate space. I love my corporate clients and that's primarily where I work. But what's your observation about that? Because you've been through some swamps in there.
Katie Sutton: And in the corporations, some of them that are going to be really successful are going to be the ones that listen to that and they change the way they operate and they change the way they treat people and how they work with people in terms of their work life balance in a way that is actually sustainable and not just a program that they put out at the top of the house.
Andrew Cohn: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn. Spirituality in Leadership is a platform for conversations with leaders at all levels about bringing our spiritual dimensions to our leadership, our teams, our workplaces, and all areas of our lives in order to achieve greater success and fulfillment and build and sustain healthier organizations. If you'd like to connect with me to talk further about these topics and or about individual, individual or team coaching, leadership workshops or team alignment, please go to my website lighthouseteams.com. Enjoy the podcast.
Welcome back to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm really pleased to speak in this episode with Katie Sutton. Katie is an author, an Intuitive channel. She's an energy medicine healer. She's based in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. Her organization is called the Zen Within Academy and Katie works with energetic fields, helping people and helping businesses and leadership teams. She talks about her experience coming out of the corporate world, being burnt out, realizing that she needed to do some healing work which she pursued on the side of her work and it was so helpful to her and she recognized the need to bring this back to people in the corporate space, which is the work that she does. The conversation was really interesting. She talked about her background, her differences of perceptions in leadership. Some of the conversation had to do with gender and masculine and feminine energy in leadership and in balancing and in healing, which as some of you listen to this podcast regularly know, is an important part of my work in supporting men and just a very, very practical, very much about how things can be different from this perspective of leadership in the corporate space even, and with that even coming from sort of an alternative framework for healing, how practical this is in the corporate space. Really, really interesting conversation. I look forward to learning more about her work, honestly, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so happy to have with me today Katie Sutton. And Katie's background is a very interesting one, and I'm fascinated by the work that she does and look forward to. Katie, you're sharing with us about your journey and how you found yourself doing this work and why it matters to you. But most importantly, welcome to the podcast.
Katie Sutton: Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. Thank you. So I like to often start with this question of what interests you about this topic and looking at the work that you do and talking like we did before this conversation, I have a sense of some real alignment with your path and what we often talk about in this podcast. But tell me what, like how you got here with me.
Katie Sutton: Well, I definitely feel like the work that I do lends itself to supporting leaders of all different types. And, you know, I came from the corporate space and worked under male and female leaders that helped to shape me to be the business owner that I am today, even in the spirituality that I lend with now and. Or that I lead with now and. And I feel that it's important that we start having this conversation of how do we blend the energy of leadership and spirituality together out in the real world, because I really feel strongly that that's how we change the systems and structures that exist here. And a lot of the work that I do is about empowering individuals to lead within their lives so that if they are running a business or are part of a business, that they are leading from a place of deep, authentic expression within themselves. And that's my most important goal in my work every day with individuals. And for the last, I'd say, five or six years, my work, I have been doing specific business healings with business owners. And what I find is there's a parallel between what's happening with them internally, their spiritual connection, their connection to themselves, and the health of their business. And I think, you know, I grew up separating those two things, seeing my spiritual side as something that I explored kind of personally, and then seeing business as this thing over here. And then when I got into the path of trying to heal my body from burnout and exhaustion and the different kind of chronic health issues that I was having when I was in the corporate space, I realized that I couldn't separate those two things anymore. That actually my spiritual connection and the things that I believe in and the things that make me feel fulfilled in my personal life needed to also be my business and my passion in the world. And so this marriage of passion and being able to be a leader in my business is what kind of brings me to your podcast. Because it just feels like kind of what I'm all about when I'm supporting business owners and those in leadership out in the world.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. Thank you. Well, I do think you're in the right place. I'm not sure that the time we have today will be enough to talk about, I think everything you have to contribute. But we'll do. We'll see what we can do. But you've touched on a number of things. First of all, when you said healing businesses, which was interesting. And so I wonder, I'd love to hear about the distinction you may make or not make between healing individuals who are leading businesses and healing businesses. If a business is a living entity, that can be healed. If a business can be sick, to use a broad term. And then what's the remedy, if you will or I suppose it depends. And that really opens up an interesting conversation. But also, I mean, certainly then you also talked about your own healing journey, burnout. Perhaps that's what led you to this work and now you're giving back to people in all parts of society, including leaders in business. There's a lot to talk about here. Would you rather. Let me tee this up for you. Would you rather talk about kind of what you do now and then go backwards, or would you rather talk about the past and telling the story about leading up to what you do now?
Katie Sutton: Let's start from now and go backwards. That feels perfect.
Andrew Cohn: Excellent. Okay, so you could start with the book that you've written. You could start with talking about some of the modalities of healing that you work with and 12th dimensional healing and whatever. I don't know what that means. So where would you like to begin?
Katie Sutton: Yeah, I would love to talk about the question you posed around business healings and personal healings. And I use the word healing because that is an acceptable term that people kind of understand. But what I really am is a facilitator or a guide or kind of a bridge between what's happening in someone's life and what's happening in their energy field. And so when I first started out and I was in the corporate space, I had really big jobs. I moved up very quickly every eight months or so and got promoted very quickly and had a lot of responsibility and didn't realize how sensitive I was and what was happening to my body in that process and how I wasn't really managing stress and really probably hadn't managed stress since I started working when I was 16. And so what I often find with people is that I'm working with their energy field and I went into training to understand how to interpret what's happening in their energy body, in their psychic space, basically. And everybody has that space whether they believe in that or not, right? We are all energy. We are vibration. Quantum physics is proving this. This is no longer this kind of woo woo statement that it used to be. And so I bridge that gap. What's happening in their energy field and what's happening in their real life. And I'm very good at identifying patterns and seeing how one thing affects another. And so when I went through my training to kind of help my own body to heal and to figure out what was happening for me, one of the aspects that we learned is how to heal something that exists outside of us, that we've created, right? So a business is something that we've created. We've taken some of our energy and we have worked with the energetics of the universe to create something that exists outside of us. It's a living, breathing entity. As soon as we incorporate that business or even before it becomes this energy that exists outside of us. And just like we have things going on with us personally, inner column of our energy field, we have very similar energies that present when I read somebody's business energy. So basically when somebody sits down to session with me and they're like, hey, I want to work on me and I want to work on my business, I'm like, that's great. They're very intertwined. I do an energetic read of what's happening in their field. So I see blockages, I see different traumas that they've experienced. I hear information from their inner child about things that they might be struggling with, and then I can start to see how that's impacting their business. So a very concrete example is if somebody is trying to grow their reach and maybe expand. Like for you example, if you're trying to expand your podcast out into the world and have more people see it or work with bigger clients, oftentimes what I see is the things that happened to them in their childhood about being seen and things that impacted their nervous system are actually affecting what's happening in their business and their ability to be seen in that way.
Andrew Cohn: If I just stop for a second. So I love the example, but it's so because I was about to ask you for an example. So if you're talking about personal trauma, personal history, obviously that's something that can impact. And I don't generally use the term energetic field, but that makes sense to me and I think I know what that means. So a trauma may be in my energetic field, and by virtue of the presence of that trauma, that's going to impact how I'm interacting with this other living entity, if you will, called my business, not to mention the other living entities that are my partners in that business.
Katie Sutton: Absolutely, absolutely.
Andrew Cohn: Okay.
Katie Sutton: Yeah. Because your ability in that example to be seen by more people is dependent on your comfortability with that overall. Right. Let's say you want to expose your business to more people and you think, well, this is my business, it's not me being seen. Well, I'm sure, you know, everybody that creates a business, there's some part of them that lives inside of that.
Andrew Cohn: So the example that you're giving there about something that could impact an individual's energetic field, say trauma, or maybe that results in someone not wanting to be seen, for example, quite as readily, that's going to impact their participation, availability, and ultimately the business's ability to be seen, if you will, and that individual's relationship or contribution or limitations with respect to the business entity. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I mean the right track.
Katie Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. And I look at something that we create, you know, an idea that we birth, right? Because every business starts out as an idea that is an extension of our energy that we're putting out into the world. And then it kind of takes up its own field, if you will, its own energetic field out in the world. And so whatever you created from gets reflected in the entity that is created energetically. So I see energy as objects and pictures and flow, and so I can read the energy of any living thing. Right. In a business, whether you may be aligned with that or not is a living, breathing thing. There's people interacting with it. It takes on a life of its own. And so when we work at an individual level on something that is a block for us, whether that's being seen, opening our heart, believing in ourselves. You know, I work a lot with people on confidence blocks. That has a very quick, almost immediate impact on the energy field of your business. And I have people that will say, gosh, I've been trying to break through this particular barrier in my business for years and years and years and we look at the energy of it and it goes back to something that happened in their childhood, or it might even go back to something that happened to their ancestry. Because we carry the energy of our ancestors within our DNA. And I have, a lot of times worked with business owners who are having some very specific challenges. And when I read the energy of that, there's an ancestor that will often come forward and say, that's the exact thing that I went through. And they're repeating that cycle. Especially if I work with somebody who's lost a business or perhaps had something really terrible and heartbreaking happening in their business landscape, oftentimes I will see that there's an energetic pattern that comes from their ancestors where that loop is repeating itself. And so these things exist. They exist as energies. I can read those energies, and we can work on them as like, little projects, if you will, when we're in session to try to improve the energy so that they have a different outcome when they're out in the world. And then they report back to me and tell me what happens. And I study that, and I study the patterns, and I just keep learning new things as I support people in all different kinds of businesses and leadership positions. And this applies for, you know, doctors in the medical field. It applies. I have lots of lawyers who are clients. Really? Whatever field you're in, whatever leadership and authentic expression that you're trying to do in your work environment, we can impact that with your energy field.
Andrew Cohn: So how does one learn about this? Can anybody develop the ability to be this kind of a bridge? I mean, obviously there's different talent levels of individuals, of course, but is it. How accessible is this type of information? Because it's fascinating, obviously sounds quite relevant, the idea that the business is its own entity. Why? This is a new language for me, honestly. But why should that be different than a relationship that I'm in as a business is its own type of relationship? I bring my trauma, certainly into my relationships. Why should that be different for a business? That's the way I look at it. And I'm just, you know, you talk about lawyers. I'm just a recovering lawyer, you know, trying to impact business the way I do. But sometimes I need to think linearly that way it helps me a little bit better. But tell me how you begin. What are some of the principles of this bridging, if you will? I'm curious.
Katie Sutton: Well, I have some innate gifts that I came in with in this lifetime of being very sensitive. So when I walk into a room and somebody's dealing with something, I feel the impact of that in my body. I'm almost like an energetic tuning fork in that way. Which is why when I was in the corporate space and there was a lot of people very stressed, I got very sick. So I went into training for about three and a half years into an undergrad and graduate program within a psychic institute, to understand what was happening in my energy body. And honestly, the way that I got involved in that school is we were on a trip in Boulder, and I walked in to get a free healing, because we were just down Main street and they had a sign out and I had some back pain. And the lady was able to point that back pain to something that was going in my life. And then my back pain cleared up and I was like, oh, okay. I guess I really–there's something to this and I want to study it. And my parents had exposed me, especially my mom, to all kinds of alternative things when I was a kid. So it was always in my frame of reference. And I had studied things like sacred geometry and energy and just herbal medicine and different things when I was a kid. But it was always just this thing that I was interested in. And all of a sudden I have this experience of healing, and it's like my two worlds kind of collide and I start to realize that I'm in business and in this corporate environment, and it's making me sick, and I don't want to be sick. So I need to learn how to navigate the energy differently. And so I spent three years doing really intense study to just learn how to take care of myself. And as soon as I graduated, it became obvious to me that this is something that other people needed, because people would start coming to me in the corporate space and asking my opinion on things. And at the time, I was teaching yoga, and that was kind of like a door opener where people could talk to me about all kinds of weird things. After that, it's like, oh, you're a yoga teacher. I can ask you things that I wouldn't ask anybody else. And so I just started helping people in conversation. And it became obvious that that was something I wanted to do for work. And so now as I work with individuals, I also have courses that I teach where I help people to understand energetic hygiene. Right. Just the basics of energy flow, the basics of their energy body. I teach people how to heal relationships and businesses and things like that in my training program. So it is absolutely something that you can develop. What I try to do is be the bridge between the two worlds until the person can speak the language themselves. Right. Ultimately, I Teach people how to fish versus doing all the fishing for them. Right. Because I believe that if everybody is a bit more tuned into what's happening in their energy field and their emotional landscape, because those two things kind of go hand in hand, then we can transform as a society much more quickly because it makes us aware of our biases and our projections and our traumas and the things that affect how we show up in the world that create a lot of conflict. Right.
So ultimately, even though I'm the bridge temporarily, I love it when people kind of an experience of their own where we do something in their energy field and this kind of turns on for them, where they start noticing, oh, this thing in my heart from my childhood seems to be impacting how I'm talking to this person in this business deal. When that door opens, there is kind of a realization of a veil being lifted internally for them, and they start being able to notice things themselves, and we start to kind of work through that. But I'm also happy if somebody says, you know, I don't have the ability or the time to really study how to, to be in the energy all the time. Can you just help me, coach me, guide me? And we do that. And then what I naturally see happening is they start to bring their intuitive awareness on very quickly. Right. The moment that I start pointing things out, they start realizing how these patterns work, and they start kind of developing a skillset, even just by coming to session with me, if they never want to go through training at all.
Andrew Cohn: Wonderful. Well, one thing I just. The word that's jumping out for me is that this is just incredibly practical, which I really appreciate. And it's one of the things that I love talking about in these podcast conversations that we're talking about very practical stuff. And for some people, the source of that wisdom or the source of that model, the source of that healing could be different dimensions of things that might be bucketed as spiritual, whatever we want to call that. But there's an incredible practicality to this in terms of helping, if not rescuing people from some of the dynamics of the corporate space. Well, let me ask you a question. I know it means to be controversial, and it's not a leading question, but do you think that the current corporate space is inherently imbalanced, toxic, something like that, obviously, there's pressures, and we all deal with pressures, and we've all sort of been there, We've all had our own experience and interactions, and we all swim in different pools in the corporate space differently. But is there something about it that necessarily either invites certain types of toxicity or different types of energy fields. What's your observation? I'm not here to condemn the corporate space. I love my corporate clients and that's primarily where I work. But what's your observation about that? Because you've been through some swamps in there.
Katie Sutton: Yeah, it's such an interesting question because if you'd asked me this like five or six years ago, I would have said, oh my gosh, it's all so toxic. I'm so glad I got out of it. But having worked through what I healed from in that experience, I'm so grateful for everything that I learned because it's made me a better business owner of my spiritual landscape in my spiritual business as well. So I have a lot of love for and appreciate and see how important it is for us to have these corporations that are moving the needle forward in so many different ways in our society. I see that the things that we are inherently seeing in leadership at the top of the house across the world have trickled down into the corporations. Right. That there is a lot of greed and difficult things that we're dealing with that are paradigms that exist on this planet that we're learning through. Right. I try not to look at something as inherently good or inherently bad. I look at it as dense energy or light energy. Right. And so these difficult themes that we're working through of toxicity and greed and power dynamics are things that have existed on this planet for a long time. And so of course it's going to exist in every system. And by the way, in the spiritual circles, that is not, you know, they're not immune to that.
I learned very quickly that when I left the corporate space and I saw this dysfunction here, that it also exists in the spiritual world too. Right. Because as human beings we have all different types of experiences and all different types of backgrounds that we bring to things. But what I will say as a woman in the corporate space who had this history of being a people pleaser and kind of going into these fawn responses where I didn't feel good enough, I can definitely look back and see how that corporation benefited from that wound. Because I moved up so quickly in my corporate career because I worked my butt off, because I didn't feel loved. And I can see, even though, I mean, I had amazing bosses, as corporate careers go, I was incredibly lucky that I had people who saw me and who believed in me and who propped me up and gave me opportunities. And so it was a great experience in confidence building and knowing who I am. But I also see how the part of me that was wounded, that was looking for that validation, worked 10 times as hard as the other employees that they had. And that's why I got promoted and that's why they believed in me. And so that's not a them problem though, right? The system will always take as much as you will give it. And that's why I teach people that it's not about this thing being broken or bad or harmful. You know, yes, there are definitely dynamics in many corporations and many leadership structures that we're seeing come to light that are very harmful that we're going to have to work through. But inherently we're all just trying to move energy and move money and move resources around in these businesses, right? And move knowledge. And when we understand our own internal programming and our own internal wounds, we get to make an empowered decision and we get to set boundaries and we get to say no and we get to find balance. And that's one of the things that I find so interesting about the generation that's coming up in the corporate space now, because I have 20 and 30 somethings in, in the corporate space that I'm supporting. And inherently they have seen what's happened to their parents where they've gotten burnt out in this space and they're setting different boundaries going in and I'm seeing that gap where they're being called lazy or they're being called all these things, but really they're just trying to work in a system that doesn't understand their language. And so I see that these people that are moving into the corporate machines now are actually changing the conversation in the corporations. Some of them that are going to be really successful are going to be the ones that listen to that and they change the way they operate and they change the way they treat people and how they work with people in terms of their work life balance in a way that is actually sustainable and not just a program that they put out at the top of the house. And so I definitely see this landscape as something that is changing inherently because of how people are interacting with it and what people will and will not tolerate. I just had to learn the lesson the hard way as I got out that all of those patterns that I had in the corporate space, they didn't go away when I left. Right? My overworking, my need for validation, I'm still healing all of those wounds even in my business that I run myself. That is in the spiritual lens, right. They don't just disappear. You have to keep working on those wounds because it's just a system that's preying on that or activating that. Right. So that's why I don't really like to call them all toxic or all bad or, you know, put it in that vernacular, because I think everything serves and the experience that I had has shaped me to be the leader that I am today.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. Thank you. Beautiful. Yeah. And like you said, there's just dynamic. These are people, people together, and dynamics happen. And especially if those people have their own situation, circumstances, experiences, either direct experiences, or you said genetic, hand me downs, if you will, those beautiful blessings from our ancestors that we then bring into different things. Again, it could be relationship, a personal relationship or marriage, or it could be a business partnership or something. And having grown up in law firms, I've seen a lot of different things. But no, really, really very interesting. And so you're raising something about generational differences. And also, one of the first things you said in our conversation today was about you worked with many men and women leaders, and it was interesting that you chose to break that out. So I'm curious to know–part of my work, I've led several men's retreats. I work often with men about, about being a man in this Western culture. What does that mean, especially with this generation? It can be tricky for white guys, especially of a certain age. And I have a son of a certain age who I'm still raising, and he's helping to raise me as well. But extended invitation for you to talk about gender and generations. What might you add about this, particularly if, well, if I could steer the conversation about men. Because if men, I think, and tell me if this is true, but in my experience, men are less likely to be receptive to these things. Things. I mean, it's almost like. And I hope this doesn't push anybody's buttons, but I think women are naturally, energetically more attuned because their bodies are more energetically attuned than men's are. I think typically. And some of that is cultural. I think some of that is also our nature. But I'm going to shut up. Tell me about the gender piece, because you raised it. So tell me what's most key about that for you.
Katie Sutton: Well, a lot of my work is understanding masculine energy and feminine energy, which is different gender. Okay. Right. So masculine energy, the energetics of masculine frequency, is our active doing energy in our personal landscape that aligns with our thinking mind and our physical body. Okay. Our feminine energy, which we all have. We all have both, right–is our emotional and energetic landscape. Okay, so what you just said is, you know, women are more tuned into their emotions and the energy. It's because that is how feminine energy operates, and we are in a feminine body. So it's the language that we first speak. However, every single successful business owner that I have worked with, I'm talking about business owners that are multimillionaires, that have sold their businesses and gone on to create other businesses. Every single one of them that I have worked with has an inherent level of feminine energy that they're using because they are making intuitive decisions. They have a feeling. They have a level of inspiration. They have. You know, you'll ask them and they'll say, well, I just knew. I just had this gut feeling that this is what I was supposed to do. And when I start talking to them, I'm like, well, that's actually your feminine energy that you're tapping into. That's your energetic and intuitive awareness that you're tapping into in that moment. They just don't have that language for it. They're just doing it because it's the way that they've always made decisions.So with. For men specifically, what I would say is when you come to somebody and you start looking at your energy and how it's running and you start becoming familiar with that, your natural intuitive instincts are going to expand because your energy field is basically reaching out and sensing everything around you. Kind of like Spidey sense, right? And pulling in information. It's pulling in body language and a business negotiation. It's pulling in something that somebody says in their tone of voice. You're sensing all those things, and all of that is moving through your energy field. As you make decisions of if you move forward with something or if you don't. And as you are heightening your awareness of that field, the natural instincts that you have are going to expand. And so my psychic teacher that I used to have, she's like, I'm teaching you all to be psychics. I'm not teaching you all to be energy healers. And, you know, readers that that's. If you want to do that, that's fine. She's like, I'm really teaching you things that make you better at life.
Katie Sutton: And that's how I look at it too. Right. That's why I try to bring this really practical approach to it, because it does make life easier to be tuned into these things. Now, the flip side of that is when you start tuning into these things, you start to realize that maybe some things have been buried, some emotions have been pushed aside, and when they come to the surface, especially if you're in a male body, the conditioning that I see for the male experiences, that you all haven't been told that that that kind of thing is okay. And so oftentimes the reluctance isn't in the intuitive awareness and all these practical things that I'm talking about. It's because with the feminine lens, the. That lens that we're activating, the emotions also get activated. And they don't have a language or a container for working through that. And it can feel really overwhelming. And I see this in, in relationships, too. So when I do, I do partner work, so I do work with couples. And what I'll often find in a male, female dynamic is a female will come to work with me and she'll say, oh, I'm learning about my energy. And I'm realizing I have all these emotions. And she starts having these emotions. And then their masculine partner kind of leaves their body when that happens and freaks out and doesn't know what to do. And so I spend a lot of time working with men on just how to be present with emotion. Because masculine energy is meant to be a container for emotion and energy, a container of the feminine, right? It's an observer, it's a witness. It's, you know, can be a protector if that's needed. But they're not in there fixing, trying to transform their witness.
Andrew Cohn: If they're smart, if they're smart, if they've learned that.
Katie Sutton: Yes, then they're witnessing. And so it's kind of the same thing, you know, when they're in business, right? So if there's something that's happening and, you know, there's something going on in their business landscape, they've got a problem with an employee or whatever. That employee might have a lot of emotions, right? They might have a lot of things that they're projecting out that are coming from their own wounds. So a really good male business leader is a really good container. And it's the same thing for my female business leaders, too. They have to harness this masculine energy to be able to be a container and a witness and to stay in their body and to stay present when this employee comes with them to them with this crisis, or let's say that they're running a big operation and there's a crisis in the factory, right? They have to be able to stay present with that and witness the crisis and then be able to be present enough to come up with solutions. And so when they come to me and they work on their own energy field, that creates that dynamic for them as men or women out in the workspace where they can kind of hold their center and be able to stay calm and cool and collected, while also being empathetic and kind and compassionate, which is that blend of masculine and feminine in leadership and make really good decisions. Every leader that I've ever worked for has been wildly intuitive. In fact, one of the last leaders that I worked for who is ended up leaving the company I was working at and then invited me to come and be a contractor at his new company that he took over. He said, Katie, I want you here. I don't even care if you want to keep working on your other business, and you end up doing that full time eventually. I need you here. Because you helped me to tap into something and my intuition. And I wasn't even working with him in the way that I work with people today. I was just an employee. Right. It was just my job. But there was something where he and I spoke a similar language because he could talk to me about a knowing that he had about something that was going on, and I would be able to tap into my intuition, and then we would come up with a process to navigate that. Right.
Andrew Cohn: Well. And what I'm hearing, though, what may perhaps contribute more to that is. And you felt safe enough under his leadership and supervision to share that, and he felt vulnerable enough to ask you these questions and be willing to listen to you.
Katie Sutton: Yeah, I went to work for him specifically, and I remember this to the day, I had been working at a financial services company for six years, and I wasn't really looking to leave, but a recruiter called me, like, hey, we've got this web conferencing company that is looking to hire somebody that wants financial services background. And I did not think I was ready for that job change, But I went to an interview in Atlanta, where the company was headquartered, and he was my last interview. And he looked across the table at me and he said, I surround myself with strong, powerful women and men. His mom had been one of the first female news anchors on CNN. And so he had this appreciation for feminine leadership. And that was honestly why I said yes. Now, the flip side of that is he didn't realize he was doing it, but he was leveraging that feminine power to build his business and his reputation, which was amazing. And he took really good care of us. But looking back, I can see, oh, that wound that I had of needing to be recognized by the masculine played really into that decision. Now I'm really glad that it did because I had very difficult experiences that brought me to my path and very amazing experiences. And, you know, he was a part of a company that didn't really ever get him. He was always a leader, but he was kind of on the outside because he operated very differently. And so that's why he ended up leaving around the same time that I left, because we both realized, oh, this company just doesn't have space for his way of, of creating and his way of leading. And so I'm really grateful for that experience. But yes, he absolutely had the skill set and he had a great mom, honestly, who taught him how to listen to that feminine intuition inside of him and to value that in the workplace and that's why he was so successful.
Andrew Cohn: Wow. There's a lot of wisdom and experience here. So where would people start to learn more about what you do? You said there's some sort of courses. You also work with people one on one. There's your book. Talk about, about how we can learn more.
Katie Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to zenwithinacademy.com, that's my website, that's my social media. All of the things, you know, we have all the different ways of getting to people these days. I have a YouTube channel where I share information about the energy forecast of the month. You can go to my website and under healing sessions, you'll see different selections. There's a business healing session and then there's a private, just personal healing session there. And that's where I normally ask people to start because that kind of gets us into a conversation. And you can say, okay, this is what I want to work on. And I can kind of help direct them. On my course page though, as well. You can go in and do a little quiz and kind of talk about what you're trying to learn. And it'll guide you into all the different courses that I have. But that's a great place to start. I also have a monthly gathering that I do where we work on a specific topic every month. So if you sign up for my newsletter, you get access to that and you kind of know what we're working on each month. And you can kind of come in and out of that if that's something that you want support in. But my main goal with people is to just help them be okay. I had to help them to be well and healthy in their being and really empowered in their being and really enjoy inside themselves so that whatever they're creating, whether it's just them leading in their family, in their church, in their business, wherever they're leading, that they're leading from a place of deep, authentic expression. Because I think that's actually how our world is going to transform. It's going to transform from the bottom to the top, not the top down, as we've kind of already seen. And so every person that I can help be kind of a leader in their own life, I think that's me contributing to the collective transformation that we're going through.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Thank you for that guidance zenwithinacademy.com and everything that will lead you to thank you for sharing your wisdom. I look forward to honestly continuing to speak with you and learn more after we, after we end this podcast. But thank you for your, for your contributions and your work and sharing your experience and your wisdom and frankly, just your commitment to be of service. That's what I'm hearing. The word service is just jumping out for me as you, as you speak. So thank you for that.
Katie Sutton: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having me.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you for listening to Spirituality in Leadership. If you want to access this wealth of knowledge and insight on a regular basis, please subscribe to the show. Join the channel network of leaders who want to do and be better. You can go to the site spiritualityinleadership.com or your preferred podcast platform to catch all the episodes and learn more. Until next time, take good care of yourself.