We were lucky to catch up with Corey Blake recently and have shared our conversation below.

Corey , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

The defining moment of my professional career happened about 6 years ago. At the time I was a successful business
owner and entrepreneur, full time veterinarian, team leader, mom of two, and wife. What I wasn’t was ME.
I had carefully built up this pyramid of stability and success, strategically laying each block according to what I was told, striving, and pushing to make success happen.
Which I did. Quite well as a matter of fact.
What I didn’t know was that all that success and hard work created more and more responsibility. It carried a greater need to fit myself into a tighter and tighter box. A box which was constantly being bombarded by people who needed support or fires that needed fighting. My ability to make and keep connections was in the toilet – the drive that had made me so successful had become an intensity that repelled other people – and I felt more and more alone.
As my career was getting bigger and bigger, I was getting smaller and smaller.
And I didn’t know it until I had marched right on through my max capacity. I was so spent, so depleted, and so numb to what was going on around me that I would have tried just about anything to make it stop.
So, being the overachiever that I am I began to resource myself in new ways. I got a coach and a therapist, I went on retreats, I learned to meditate and actually kept up with it.
Yet, it all felt like a band-aid to the constant doing and running and responsibility. It was clear to me that I was using coping mechanisms that, while helpful, weren’t getting to the root of the issue.
One weekend I found myself at a seminar in New York City and I’m sitting in the seats listening to a woman I’ve never heard of before start to talk about sacred objects and deities that have been worshipped and cared for over the millennia. She goes on about gods and goddesses and how they might relate to the people who believe in them. She talks about how we care for sacred places and objects – with reverence. I’m listening and yet not really getting where she’s going.
And then she takes the money shot. She asks us to imagine, given all that we just talked about, “What if YOU were Sacred?” How would that change the way that you show up in the world? How would that affect your ability to set and hold boundaries? What about your need to defend yourself or your actions?
That was my defining moment.
Paradigm shifting, doors opening, fireworks exploding. That was the moment when my life changed.
A switch literally flipped in how I thought about the world and myself within it.
No longer did I rely on other people to tell me I was good enough, that my dedication was noticed, that I had made a difference.
No longer did I rely on other people to tell me how I looked or how to respond to a certain situation.
I began to trust myself. I learned to reconnect to myself in ways I never realized were possible. I learned to find all of myself sacred – including every part that I had learned to hide. I learned about pleasure. I remembered what fun feels like. I learned how to honor my own truth.
And I started to expand. My life became my own again. I began to enjoy the responsibility I held, enjoy leadership, and to excel at it. My team flourished. Not only was I building connections with so much more ease but, I was actually being sought out to connect with.
I redefined who I was by my own standards. I went from yearning for a way out to actually enjoying my life. I moved my career even farther forward with so much less effort.
My world shifted on it’s axis. And stayed that way.

Corey , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Dr. Corey Blake is an executive leadership coach, pleasure coach, consultant, and creator with a focus on giving purpose driven women leaders the tools to thrive personally while succeeding professionally through deep embodiment, energetic management, and bioalignment. Corey’s passion for creating space for pleasure driven feminine leadership led to the founding of Sacred Leadership Institute, a company dedicated to helping woman leaders reconnect with their pleasure, rekindle their felt sense of aliveness, and live as whole women within leadership roles. Corey is set apart by her commitment to working with the whole woman in leadership – her work is characterized by deeply intimate body work, emotional alchemy, and soul-expanding alignment culminating in incredible expansion, connection, and freedom for those who work with her. Corey takes purpose driven women leaders from compartmentalized, coping, and surviving to thriving, turned on, and expansive -all while succeeding professionally.

As a longtime CEO and entrepreneur for a professional corporation focused on saving lives on the daily, I’ve been in leadership for a hot minute. As an executive leadership coach and consultant I’ve worked with many women who are badass career women making a difference in the world. In both those roles I’ve seen first hand how easy it is for women in mission driven careers to lose sight of their individuality and their personal happiness.
At Sacred Leadership Institute I’ve combined my background as an entrepreneur, leader, and executive coach and combined it with my training as a Pleasure Coach.
I’ve focused this business on working with women leaders who are ready to incorporate their own joy and fire into the leadership roles they take on and to live their lives by design, alchemizing powerful leadership and personal investment to create expansion and exponential growth personally and professionally.

At Sacred Leadership Institute we focus on expanding the lives of women leaders around the globe: enhancing their personal pleasure on the daily, re-aligning with the natural world, and using feminine light to take the world higher.

I teach high performing women leaders how to cultivate pleasure in their lives
I re-connect women leaders with their FIRE. (with that element that’s missing in their lives -they just don’t know what it is yet)
I work with high achieving, high performing women leaders who feel unfulfilled and I connect them to their aliveness
I work with women leaders who put their mission above their own happiness /aliveness and I teach them how to live fully as leaders while cultivating their own life force / fire.

What sets me apart: I focus on the on the individual embodiment and ownership of what it means to be a woman as the catalyst for powerful leadership. Instead of focusing our energies on external achievement and conforming, we focus on honing pleasure, learning to use our emotions as a source of strength, and deepening connection to our own sacredness. Women who work with me learn how to have fun again, to embrace their sensual, to alchemize the challenges in life into pure power through authentic connection to themselves AND sisterhood.

I connect women to their nature, to their innate feminine intelligence, and teach them to lead with those parts of themselves – so instead of pushing against themselves they start to work in concert with their nature – they learn to connect to their desires and know the exact path that will take them there.

This work is edgy AF. It’s outrageous and outside the box. It’s paradigm shifting.
You will walk away with a new way of looking at yourself and the world around you, empowered with an unshakable confidence, and an ease that will spread through your life. If you’re brave enough.

Through this work women leaders learn to:
*Overcome overwhelm
*Evaluate whether they’re spinning their wheels putting out more effort than necessary
*Prioritize their needs in leadership, feeding themself first
*Simplify their life through ritual
*Regulate their nervous system
*Reconnect to their primal
*Manage emotional charge and alchemize it into fuel for success

Products and services I provide:
Online courses: Elemental, Primal Leadership
Group Coaching
1:1 VIP Coaching
Elemental Membership Program
Sacred Leadership Planner for aligning your life and leadership with your feminine nature
Rituals for incorporating pleasure and reconnecting with nature on the daily

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

In having built a thriving business and successfully sold it, I learned some key skills about managing a team and maintaining high morale.
1. Listen Deeper – pay attention not just to the words your team is speaking but to their energy behind what they say. Dig deeper. Don’t assume you understand what they’re saying. Ask clarifying questions to truly understand. Acknowledge and validate their experience without jumping into the box with them. You can acknowledge a person’s experience and validate what they’re going through without agreeing with them – it allows them to feel seen – vital to building the bonds of trust needed to weather disagreements and difficult decisions.
2. Separate your worth from their success and satisfaction – When we focus too much on our role in someone else’s success and job satisfaction it can lead to a level of defensiveness on our part whenever they come to us with a concern. Own your role, take responsibility for your words and your actions. Work as hard, if not harder than your team. But don’t tie your personal worth to whether another person is successful – when you do you put your worthiness in someone else’s hands. Hands you don’t control. You are the only person that dictates your worth – hold that close.
3. Align team actions with strengths and desires – when the team is personally aligned with the professional tasks they need to complete AND they feel like they can be successful in their role, high morale come naturally.

Can you talk to us about your experience with selling businesses?

I sold my first business in 2021 – a Veterinary Hospital that I had built from the ground up over the prior 10 years. The biggest things I would say that contributed to the success of that sale was:
1. paying attention to the team I put in place, ensuring their values were aligned with the values of the business so that it could carry forward on brand and maintain revenue and ROI for the investor
2. Having a system in place prior to the sale that separated me as the founder from the identity of the business. I consciously made sure that marketing efforts were not solely focused on me, the my associates and managers had visible roles with the public and understood the inner workings of the business. When my business was purchased the investor was able to see continuance of product in this way regardless of whether I was present or not – which made for a more stable investment for them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sacredleadership.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacredleadershipinstitute
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sacredleadershipinstitute
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sacred-embodiedleadership/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sacredleadershipinstitute

Image Credits

Color photos by Joy Leduc Photography
Black and White photos by Tatiana Godard Photos