In the beginning...

Before she began the Passion Catalyst process, Kathy – who worked at a large software company in Redmond, Washington – had the Monday morning blues down to an art form. It was so bad that, in her own words, “I got to the point where I could stay up Sunday night till two, three, four in the morning. Once in a while I wouldn’t go to bed at all, because it delayed Monday morning.”

Driven by a vision of “success” that wasn’t really her own, she was trapped in a career loop that she didn’t know how to step out of.

Finally she reached the end of her tether. “ I didn’t have little tricks in my bag to make the career OK any more. It was just not good. It wasn’t a happy place. I was thinking, ‘What the heck am I going to do? Because I’m going to go nuts!’”

And now…

Kathy changed careers, moved across the country, and feels more confident about her decisions than ever before. She has embraced her creative side, redefined her vision of success, and is developing a career in interior design.

“I feel like I’ve come back to being a kid,” says Kathy. “The things that I enjoyed as a kid, the things that made me interested and got me excited, are back.”

She feels far less stress because she’s not trying to be someone she’s not and do something that isn’t her natural groove. “That’s a huge shift,” she notes. “I feel like I’m a different person. The difference is amazing!”

And yes, she’s getting more sleep.

The process

Kathy needed to get out of her own way so she could listen to what she already knew. Her work with Curt helped her identify the fears and beliefs that were holding her back and move past them.

One substantial obstacle had been Kathy’s definition of success. “I realized what my tightly held perception of success was, and how that didn’t really have anything to do with me. It wasn’t who I was. It wasn’t how I worked. And even those things – who I was and how I worked – were things we discovered going through the process.”

Much of the process was about opening doors that would otherwise have remained shut. One of the biggest benefits Kathy saw in her work with Curt was the way he helped her get beyond her own perceptions and open herself to the possibilities.

“It was a really good experience,” she says. “I couldn’t have done this without his help. I wouldn’t have let my head go there. I wouldn’t have stepped outside the very rigid constraints of my having been successful in what I was doing.”

Working with Curt

Curt made it easy to take the honest look at reality that real progress requires. “There was not one iota of judgment. There was not a critical response or thought out of what we were looking at and going over. A lot of empathy and compassion.”