We were lucky to catch up with Natalya Turner Chapman recently and have shared our conversation below.
Natalya, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?
I never planned to be an author. Honestly, I never imagined it. I’ve always been the one behind the scenes quietly supporting others, showing up in the background. So, when Anchored in Grace: A Journey of Faith, Solitude, Healing and Transformation began to take shape, it surprised me just as much as anyone.
The truth is that this work wasn’t born from ambition. It was born from loss.
Between January 2015 and October 2016, I lost the three women who raised me: my mother, Carol Ann Gray; my aunt, Cheryl “Shell” Lynn Gray; and my grandmother, Verleader Reed Gray, all within less than two years. That kind of grief doesn’t just break your heart. It cracks your entire identity open. Alongside that grief came other losses, my job, distance from family, long-time friendships, and the version of myself I had known for years. Everything I thought I understood about who I was began to dissolve.
But grief, I learned, can be a doorway. Solitude became the space where my healing took root.
In July 2023, I moved to Arizona. I didn’t know anyone here. There was no history, no expectations, no distractions. Just space, stillness, and wide-open skies. For the first time in years, I could truly breathe. In that quiet, sacred space, something in me began to soften. It felt as though the land itself was holding me while I sat with everything I had carried, the memories, the grief, the prayers, the lessons.
That is where this journal was born.
By late 2024, after reaching a deeper layer of healing, I felt God place it on my heart. It wasn’t a creative idea; it was a calling. I wrote it not from ambition, but from obedience. The Spirit within me simply said, “It’s time.” I knew this wasn’t just for me. It was for anyone navigating the in-between, searching for a way back to themselves.
What began as a personal act of healing naturally expanded into the work I do today. The journal became the foundation for how I support others, through reflection, guidance, and creating spaces for people to process their own transitions with intention and grace. My creative services grew from that same place: helping others make sense of their stories and move forward with clarity.
As for knowing it was worth pursuing, my confidence didn’t come from a business plan. It came from lived experience. I had spent nearly a decade walking through grief, loss, solitude, spiritual awakening, and healing, and doing the work to understand and integrate it. This wasn’t theory. It was testimony.
The logic was simple. When I looked around, I saw how many people were quietly carrying what I had carried, grief, transition, spiritual searching, and the discomfort of becoming someone new. These are universal experiences, but many people don’t have the language or space to process them. I had found that language through my own journey. Anchored in Grace became my way of offering that to others.
The world doesn’t have a shortage of pain, but it can always use more spaces that allow people to process it with honesty, faith, and intention. I didn’t create something I wished existed. I created something I had lived, and that became the foundation for everything I’m building now.
Natalya, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a U.S. Air Force veteran, advisor, author, and soul-led creative with a passion for helping people navigate seasons of transition, healing, and self-discovery.
My journey into this work wasn’t linear. Professionally, I’ve spent over 25 years in structured environments, from active-duty service to working as a Department of Defense contractor, where I specialized in administrative operations, project and portfolio management, strategic planning, and small business consulting. That foundation taught me how to think strategically, solve complex problems, and guide organizations through change.
But my personal journey led me somewhere deeper.
After experiencing profound loss, losing my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother within less than two years, I found myself doing a different kind of work. Inner work. Grief became a doorway. Solitude became the space where healing took root. After relocating to Arizona in 2023, surrounded by stillness and wide-open skies, that long season of reflection, spiritual alignment, and becoming led me to create Anchored in Grace: A Journey of Faith, Solitude, Healing, and Transformation.
What began as a personal act of healing naturally grew into a broader body of work that blends strategy with soul.
What I Do
Through NTC Advisory Group, LLC, I provide strategic guidance and tailored solutions to individuals and businesses seeking clarity, direction, and aligned growth. My services span small business consulting, strategic planning, and portfolio management, but what makes my approach distinctive is that I don’t separate business strategy from personal development. In my experience, both are required to create sustainable, meaningful success. A business can only grow as far as the person leading it is willing to. That’s why I weave 1:1 guidance and Human Design consultations into my advisory work, helping clients understand how they’re uniquely designed to make decisions, lead, and operate so that the strategy we build together is one they can actually sustain.
I also have a dedicated heart for serving our veterans. Through NTC, I assist veterans in navigating the VA disability claims process from start to finish; helping them understand their benefits, file their claims accurately, advocate effectively throughout the process, and work through appeals and denials when they arise. Many veterans have earned benefits they don’t yet know how to access and walking alongside them in that process is work I take seriously and personally.
Anchored in Grace is my debut self-reflection journal and the heartbeat of my brand. It guides readers through eleven themes, including faith, grief, shadow work, self-love, and new beginnings, offering reflection prompts, affirmations, and scripture for anyone navigating transition, pain, or spiritual awakening. It is for the soul in the in-between, when things feel uncertain but something new is quietly unfolding. This isn’t a quick-fix resource. It’s a companion for real, honest, lasting transformation.
Rock Fabulous Finds is where my creativity takes a more joyful form. I design handcrafted earrings created to celebrate individuality, confidence, and self-expression. It began as a creative therapy outlet and became something more, a reminder that healing doesn’t always look serious. Sometimes it looks like wearing something that helps you feel like yourself again.
While these paths may look different on the surface, they are deeply connected. At the core, my work is about helping people move from healing to alignment, and from alignment to intentional action.
What Sets Me Apart
I don’t guide from theory. I guide from lived experience. I know what it means to rebuild your life, redefine your identity, and move forward with intention after everything has shifted.
What makes my work distinctive is the blend of depth and structure, the strategic mind of someone with decades in planning and consulting, combined with the heart of someone who has done meaningful, sustained inner work. In my world, faith and strategy are not opposites. They are partners.
What I’m Most Proud Of
I’m most proud that I allowed my journey to evolve into something that serves others. Anchored in Grace is more than a journal, it’s a reflection of a decade of healing, faith, and transformation. Completing it required a level of courage beyond anything I’ve done professionally, because it meant allowing myself to be fully seen. Now, it’s creating space for others to begin their own journey.
What I Want You to Know
My work is not about quick fixes or surface-level motivation. It’s about real transformation, doing the inner work, honoring your process, and building a life that feels aligned, grounded, and true to who you are.
Whether you connect with my work through strategy, reflection, or creativity, my intention is always the same: to help you reconnect with yourself and move forward with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
You are not behind. You are not lost. You are anchored in grace, and you are rising.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Resilience, for me, wasn’t one defining moment. It was a series of quiet decisions to keep going when everything in my life had changed.
The grief I carried during that season was layered and relentless. It didn’t arrive all at once. It came in waves, one loss following another, leaving me without stable ground to stand on. At the same time, my career path shifted, relationships evolved, and the identity I had built over the years no longer felt like it fit.
There were moments when I felt completely untethered. Not just grieving but questioning everything. Who I was. Where I was going. What my life was supposed to look like moving forward. The question that echoed most during that time was simple: Who am I without them?
What resilience looked like in that season wasn’t strength in the way people often describe it. It wasn’t pushing through or having all the answers. It was allowing myself to sit with the discomfort. To feel the grief. To not rush the process.
I began therapy in December 2016, just one month after losing my grandmother, and that decision became one of the most important acts of self-preservation I’ve ever made. Slowly, I began to unpack what I had been carrying and learned how to move through it rather than around it.
For a long time, my life became quieter. More internal. I spent years doing the work of understanding my emotions, my patterns, my beliefs, and my relationship with God. It wasn’t linear. Some days felt like progress. Others felt like starting over.
A major turning point came when I made the decision to move to Arizona in 2023. I didn’t know anyone there. There was no safety net of familiarity. But I felt led to create space for myself, space to fully process, to breathe, and to begin again. That move required a different kind of resilience. Not just surviving what I had been through but choosing to step into something new without knowing what it would become.
In that solitude, I stopped trying to return to who I used to be and started allowing myself to become someone new. That’s where the real shift happened and in that stillness, Anchored in Grace was born, everything I had endured becoming the foundation for something I could offer to others.
Resilience, I’ve learned, isn’t about returning to your old life after hardship. It’s about having the courage to build a new one, even when you don’t have a clear blueprint.
Those years didn’t break me. They reshaped me. They deepened my faith, expanded my capacity, and ultimately led me to the work I do today.
If there’s one thing my journey has taught me, it’s this: resilience isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks like choosing to stay, to heal, and to keep moving forward, one quiet step at a time.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The pivot I’m most often asked about wasn’t one clean moment of decision. It was three interconnected chapters of the same story and together, they changed everything.
For over 25 years, I worked inside structured environments. Active-duty military service, Department of Defense contracting, and roles in strategic planning, portfolio management, and administrative operations. The work required precision, discipline, and consistency. I was good at it. But for most of those years, I was the one behind the scenes, supporting systems and supporting others, without fully stepping into the center of my own story.
The first pivot began with loss. I lost my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother and with them, the version of myself I had always known. That grief didn’t just break my heart. It reshaped my identity and my sense of purpose. The career that once felt stable started to feel misaligned. The life I had carefully built no longer felt like mine. For the first time, I had to ask myself not just what I was doing, but why and for whom.
The second pivot was geographical, but it was really spiritual. In 2023, I made the decision to move to Arizona. No familiar faces. No safety net. Just a quiet, persistent sense that God was calling me somewhere new. That kind of pivot doesn’t come from logic. It comes from trust.
The third pivot was the one I least expected. In late 2024, after reaching a new layer of healing in that Arizona solitude, I felt God place Anchored in Grace on my heart. I had never planned to be an author. I had always been the one supporting others from the background. But the Spirit within me simply said, “It’s time.” And for the first time, I stopped waiting for certainty and chose to move forward anyway.
What I’ve learned about pivoting is this: it rarely announces itself clearly. It usually shows up as discomfort first. A season that no longer fits. A direction that stops making sense. A quiet nudge you keep trying to ignore. The real shift happens when you stop clinging to what was and allow yourself to step into what’s next.
Today, the work I do through Anchored in Grace, NTC Advisory Group, and Rock Fabulous Finds is a direct result of those pivots. None of it was planned, but all of it was aligned.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://natalyatchapman.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natalyatchapman?igsh=M3kyOW90YXlueXJ6&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1EZy1PUu9W/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalyaturner
