We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katie Kurtz a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Katie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Population studies show that virtually everyone experiences one or more traumatic events in their lifetime , and almost half experience a trauma in childhood .

As we continue to live through the historical collective trauma of a pandemic, we have a shared lived experience that connects every person on the  planet. So why wouldn’t we equip ourselves with the knowledge, skills and tools to ensure we are leading in a way that resists harm and promotes healing?

Trauma-informed care is an approach that promotes a culture of trust, personal safety and healing; an approach adoptable and available to everyone. To put it simply: it’s how we expand our empathy into action to ensure we are treating people and ourselves more humanely.

Gaining its start in the mental healthcare industry, clinicians listened  to people account for their trauma and realized  the need for an  approach that  ensures we aren’t  causing people further harm and allowing them access to multiple healing pathways.

Now, we are seeing trauma-informed care enter various industries,  integrated alongside other organizational culture initiatives like diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives.

As a subject matter expert on trauma-informed care, I train industry leaders of all kinds on how to adopt this approach and integrate to ensure they are not only resisting harm but promoting trust, belonging, accessibility and inclusion in the spaces, services and support they offer.

Katie, 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?

What sets me apart is a culmination of my subject matter expertise, training style and how I lead this work out loud. I offer opportunities for people to not just learn about this approach but feel what it’s like to receive this kind of care.

I am a licensed social worker who has been practicing for 15 years within the trauma field. Although my career has led me throughout various organizations and systems, I have always specialized in trauma and trauma-informed care. About 7 years ago, I received my coaching certification and launched my own business while still working full time as a social worker. I began seeing wider discussion about  mental health and trauma in the online business world. I have been both excited to see this happen because it helps break down stigma and create more compassion. I also grew concerned about  how it can be misunderstood. People can misuse their power and pathways for harm. Since the pandemic, I decided to blend my two worlds together and offer professional training and consulting for people in the coaching, wellness and online business industries.

In 2022, I left my career  to work full time as a trainer and also helped form the Evellere Group, a social impact consulting firm specializing in trauma-responsive care. I now train across multiple industries using the same methodology to help leaders and organizations expand their capacity and deepen their skills in leading with a trauma-informed lens. I am the regional co-chair of the State of Ohio’s Trauma Informed Collaborative and a subject matter expert with the Integrate Network. I have been both recognized and awarded for my work both within the social work and coaching industries.

What sets me apart from other trainers is that I specialize in making trauma-informed care adoptable and inclusive for ALL professions. The most common complaint I hear with people who are familiar with trauma informed-care is that it is often delivered in a very clinical manner. The original model was developed by and for mental-health clinicians. But this creates both confusion and exclusion for most professions where this approach is very much applicable.

I developed the Trauma Competency Framework™ to help create shared language and a learning guide for trauma competency. I apply this framework to all of the training I lead both personally and with the Evellere Group. I take instructional design seriously to ensure we are offering accessible learning options of neurodiverse adult learners.

Trauma-informed care is an active practice. We need people to take the training and actively integrate, apply and embody this lens. In order to do so, we need to go beyond brain-to-brain knowledge learning and offer experiential training for people to learn how to actually integrate and apply it into their everyday lives.

It can be easy for people to read this or hear me talk about trauma-informed care and get stuck in the language because it might feel unfamiliar. I encourage people to start with shared language and understanding. When they do, they are able to not only better understand what I am talking about when it comes to trauma, but also understand why this approach is necessary.

Once you have shared language and understanding, you can then begin to develop the tools and skills to apply to your personal scope of practice (aka: professional boundary). Being trauma informed actually has nothing to do with knowing or addressing other people’s trauma and has everything to do with understanding the complexities and insidious nature of trauma to inform how they can show up and act and interact with others in their personal and professional lives.

In the fall of 2022, I published the Contain Card Deck as a reflective tool to hold space for yourself and others. This was a 6-year dream in the making and I’m grateful to my friend and colleague Jane Buresh who helped me bring it to life with her guidance and beautiful illustrations.

We ALL have the ability to hold space. The keys to holding space include elements such as active presence, listening to understand and witnessing someone without judgment or the need to fix or solve. We can hold space for ourselves by applying the same elements. Because to hold space means to ‘be with’ — to be with our humanity which includes our thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, joy, grief, stress and gifts. This deck is a versatile tool to be used personally or with others to help you be with whatever is present in your life. It was designed to ignite curiosity and reflection as you practice being with what’s present in your life and hold space for it to exist without judgment.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I’m a licensed social worker and have been practicing for 15 years. I became a certified coach and opened up my business 7 years ago. I worked full time while running my business all the way up until the summer of 2022. I started my business with a few one-on-one clients hosting monthly, local in-person gatherings. I spent years using my free time  building my website, marketing and growing my business.

Something we don’t talk about enough is that if you don’t have investors, generational wealth or other resources, it’s not so simple to just quit your job and be a full-time entrepreneur. I had to work full time while running my business out of financial security but also to fulfill requirements for student loan forgiveness. I think we as a culture often put a lot of emphasis on quitting your full-time job as a big sign of success. Which it definitely can be!

It also  comes with a lot of risk, anxiety and responsibilities. I didn’t have the intention in 2022 to quit my full-time job and focus on my business. Of course I always hoped this would be the case but knew several things had to be in place for this to happen. Due to the alignment of timing and opportunity, I was able to quit my job in June 2022, mainly because of the steady growth of my business and an opportunity to join a consulting partnership that allowed me to make this happen.

I am grateful I’ve been able to make this transition with a lot of support from my partner, family and friends and being grounded in who I am and what I do. I believe in the work I’m doing and know that by being able to devote my time and resources to it full time will allow me to expand how and how I serve.

But I am also very much aware of the realities of full-time entrepreneurship, especially the grandiose stories we see in the coaching and wellness industries of becoming a 7-figure business overnight. If you want to lead and run an ethical and humanity-affirming business, it will take time, resources and energy. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes you have to get creative in how that will work for you. Some people might end up going back to working a more stable or secure job for benefits or for their mental health, and that’s okay! It can look like whatever it needs to look like for you. I think we need more normalization of the realities of entrepreneurship and spaces to speak honestly about what this looks like.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I’m In a fairly niche market. I’m a professional trainer and specialize in trauma-informed care. I work across multiple industries including the coaching, wellness and online industries as well as healthcare, corporate, government and nonprofit sectors. I’ve become a leader in this market because of how I show up and lead out loud.

Here are a few key things I do to help me stand out as well as grow in my market:

1. I don’t assume trust, I build it over time. There is this old bro and girl boss marketing tactic to assert authority with clients. It’s rooted in oppressive systems of the belief that power is finite and in order to gain more you take it and yield it over others. We see that play out far more covertly in the online business spaces but it’s happening. I lead from what I teach. Trust is not assumed. When we assume trust, we are assuming that people should just believe and do what we say. But trust isn’t built that way. It takes time, effort and consistency in the relationship. By showing up with predictability, transparency and consistency, I’m able to build trust with the people I serve and collaborate with that creates not only lasting relationships but far richer experiences.

2. I aim to educate, not sell. My work is primarily marketed via social media and email. I was taught all the typical sales and marketing tactics to go after pain points, always have a call to action, etc. For me personally, it never felt aligned. And as someone who sells training and consulting based on an approach that does the opposite of this, it didn’t fit. Instead, I show up to share, educate and guide. I offer insight and depth in a natural and organic way. I use transparent and ethical sales techniques when I am launching something, but honestly, by showing up and educating first, I’m able to then naturally sell my offers.

3. I lead out loud. I specialize in an approach that you can’t just passively adopt, but rather actively apply. All of my training, workshops and consulting is experiential meaning, you don’t just learn what trauma informed care is, you learn what it’s like to experience it in real time. Everything I teach others to do, I do myself. I integrate all of the practices, skills and tools and use them to lead out loud. People don’t need to wait to take part in one of my training sessions. When they interact with me, my website, my social media, they are already experiencing who I am, my ethos, and my style. This helps me build trust with others and lets me share my work in a way that promotes sales and customer loyalty.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.katie-kurtz.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/_katiekurtz
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekatiekurtz
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-kurtz-msw-lisw-s-76658b187/
• Twitter: twitter.com/_katiekurtz

Image Credits
Laurie Hamame Photography Website: lauriehamame.com