We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cat Boyko. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cat below.

Hi Cat, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Honestly? I’ve never been someone who was afraid of risk. Terrified sometimes, yes – but the fear that’s always driven me more is this one: what if I stayed? What if I stayed somewhere I’d outgrown, in a life that no longer fit, just because it was familiar?

I’ve switched careers multiple times. I work hard, I move fast, I reach the top – and then I find myself deeply unhappy and know it’s time to change course again. Most people see that pattern as restless. I’ve come to see it as honest.

One of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken was selling my apartment in New York City and going nomadic.
I had changed. The city hadn’t – but I had. The more somatic and embodiment work I did, the more I could feel what New York was costing me. I was always armored up – like Iron Man. Too much energy coming at me, too fast, with nowhere to exhale. I knew I needed to find a place that felt more like home – and that I had no idea where that was yet.

So I left. I picked up every three or four weeks and moved to a new location, alone, not knowing anyone, testing places out with curiosity instead of a plan. It was scary – but I did it anyway. These have always been the moments I learn the most about myself – because as they say, “Change doesn’t happen from our comfort zone.” And it’s true.

It’s what brought me to Austin. And Austin brought me community, partnership, and a sense of belonging I hadn’t felt in years.

People often look at big moves – changing careers, leaving cities, starting over – as the risky choice. But for me, the greater risk has always been staying stagnant somewhere I know isn’t right. Staying costs something too. It just costs you slowly, quietly, in ways that are easy to ignore until you can’t anymore.

Cat, 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?

I’m Cat Boyko – a certified somatic coach and the founder of The Embodied Boss. I work with high-achieving women in leadership who are succeeding by every external measure but feeling like something fundamental is off. They’re capable, driven, and accomplished – and exhausted in a way that rest alone doesn’t fix.

My background is not what most people expect from a coach. I spent over a decade in the advertising industry, rising to Executive Producer at McCann, leading global productions for some of the world’s top brands. I managed massive budgets, impossible timelines, and high-stakes creative under constant pressure. I was good at it. And I burned out doing it.

That experience matters because it’s what my clients are living. I see it over and over – women who are pushing through, pushing down, and over-functioning, trying to do it all, and burning out. They aren’t showing up how they want at work or at home. I know it because that’s exactly how I was living too.

After leaving advertising, I trained as a somatic coach through The Embody Lab, learning from some of the world’s top psychologists and thought leaders. Somatic work is the practice of working with the body, not just the mind, to create lasting change. When we’re in stress or burnout, it’s a body-based problem – not a mindset problem. Most coaching and leadership development skips this entirely. It was never taught in any corporate environment I worked in. That’s the gap I work in.

I offer private 1:1 coaching, online group programs, and corporate workshops. The through-line across all of it is the same: helping women build what I call Embodied Leadership – the ability to lead from a regulated nervous system rather than a state of chronic survival – so they can show up better for themselves, their teams, and the people they love.

What I’m most proud of is the simplicity of what actually shifts when this work lands. Women stop performing strength and start embodying it. They make clearer decisions. They stop over-functioning. They lead in a way that’s sustainable – and that actually feels like them.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

This question is at the heart of why I do this work – and it feels especially urgent right now. In the age of AI, the most important thing we can do as leaders is lean further into what makes us human: empathy, connection, and genuine attunement to the people around us.

The managers who get this right are the ones who take time to truly understand each person on their team – their goals, what lights them up, what they’re uniquely good at. And they’re clear about the kind of environment they’re creating. Do people feel safe enough to bring a problem before it becomes a crisis? Do they feel like they belong – not just as a function, but as a person? Is their dignity intact, even when things get hard?

Those three things – safety, belonging, and dignity – are what my teacher Staci K. Haines identifies as the inherent needs of every person on a team. You need all three. Sacrifice one and people start to suffer, even if they can’t name exactly why. This is the framework I build my leadership programs around, because once a leader can see those three needs clearly, they stop managing performance and start cultivating people.

That shift – from managing to cultivating – is where the real results live.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

If I could go back, I would have studied sociology. I was at Northwestern University and stumbled into sociology courses – and fell in love with them. But I came from a family of artists, and something purely academic felt out of place for me. So I followed the creative path instead, moving from musical theater into fashion design and transferring to Parsons in New York.

But that curiosity – understanding why people do what they do – has never left me. It’s been the quiet thread running through every chapter: fashion designer, tech startup founder, Executive Producer, and now somatic leadership coach. The modalities kept changing. The question underneath never did.

Would I change it? I don’t think so. Without every detour, I wouldn’t be building the work I’m building now. The wisdom I bring to my clients isn’t just from my training – it’s from having lived a lot of different lives and paid attention to what each one cost me.

The one thing I wish I’d done earlier is pause to ask what kind of life I actually wanted to create – not just what I wanted to achieve. I was always ambitious, always building toward something. But it took going all the way through that to understand the difference between a life that looks successful and one that actually feels like yours.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.embodiedboss.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theembodiedboss/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584384177414
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catboyko/