Ashleigh Henry shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Ashleigh , so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What do you think others are secretly struggling with—but never say?
I believe others are secretly struggling with the load that modern life has asked of us. With the clients I’ve worked with over the years, they have been high-capacity individuals seeking to continue to expand their lives, deepen their sense of self, and help their brands and businesses to prosper. These same individuals often struggled with the darkest, hardest experiences that were met with modern society’s anthem — “keep going, do more, accelerate faster, pioneer the dream at all costs.”
These individuals often held deep grief around: their identities, the projects they’ve brought to life and must continue to foster long into the years to come unless they’re brave enough to put them down in favor of a future offering and the shifts that have to happen to bring a new offering to market with the same hope of interest and revenue, their relationships often being the last line on their to-do list, their joy being completely removed from their to-do list, divorces, friendships lost, etc.
The list could go on and on, but what comes to the front of the line within this conversation is just the raw, icy hot feeling of grief.
I fully believe most of us are walking around with deep griefs in our hearts that we aren’t quite sure how to release.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Ashleigh C. Henry — a writer, speaker, and life coach helping high-capacity women move from constant performance to grounded presence. Through my signature Sacred Reorientation™ and Holistic Harmony in Life & Business® frameworks, I guide clients to integrate their thriving ambitions with nervous-system care, rhythmic and defined living, and ritualized self-trust. My work blends narrative excavation, somatic support, and nervous system pacing, inviting people to live in full color — rooted, enlivened, and sustainably successful.
A session shifts based on the clients in front of me — but narrative excavation helps the client to let the inherited stories that live inside of them come to the surface, beliefs if you will, and digging into them through verbal and written processing allows the body, mind, and soul to work in tandem. Somatic support and nervous system pacing is the combined affect of the client(s) and myself listening to the inherent rhythm in the room; are we going too slow to meet a result or too fast and sailing quite past it?
I’m currently working on a book proposal for Hay House/Penguin Random House in the teaching memoir category; my days look like writing from a balcony that overlooks Lake Washington in Seattle, hearing the seagulls laugh, with a piping hot cup of decaf. Which, might be odd in a city that loves caffeine, but it works best to keep the jitters away.
As well, my group program — The Harmonious Living Program — is launching for its fall session. It is a four-month seasonal group coaching journey for high-achieving women who’ve built the success the world recognizes — yet feel an ache or disconnect that success hasn’t healed. This space isn’t about doing more; it’s about slowing, feeling, and reclaiming your own rhythm. We meet twice monthly, move through somatic and emotional prompts, tap into nervous-system awareness, re-narrate stories that no longer fit, build rituals and sustainable boundaries, and leave with a blueprint that’s singularly yours for living deeply and fully from the inside out — ambitious yet unburdened.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
Ah, the over-performing high-achiever that secretly was seeking external validation instead of internal trust.
I’ve honored ambition and high output for years — launching multiple businesses, sustaining growth, and proving I could do it all. That drive was essential for stability and credibility in its own right, but even looking back I can see where I could have executed on less and still had plenty of credibility by my voice and perspectives alone. Now it’s become clear that doing more isn’t the path forward for me or for the clients that I serve. What served as fuel is now friction; what once protected my self-trust has shifted into a more intentional, wiser pace.
My last company was called The Cheetah Company and though the name has undertones of The Cheetah Girls’ values — the deepest narrative I’ve noticed from my naming of that business was that a cheetah is fast, accelerates quickly, moves with precision but still moves quite fast. A cheetah isn’t always chasing, but I was prepared to name my first book “Chase Your Cheetah” and it’s incredibly indicative of where my psyche was at the time.
Fast = excellent.
Now, I’ve shifted into a rhythmic pace that doesn’t strive or chase, but unfolds based on who I am in the season, where I am in the year, and I know when to accelerate and when to slow down to have the reserves to quicken and hasten in the future.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering taught me how to inhabit my life instead of perform it. It gave me reverence for limits where I did not have them, a deeper well of compassion for myself, and the courage to build a career — and a world — where wholeness isn’t proved, it’s lived. This has been influenced by a pandora’s box of difficult experiences throughout my life that live both in the “big” T and “little” T trauma categories. A large trauma occurred in my life when I was just 12 and again and again I’ve learned that isolating post-trauma is the key to all of our downfalls and thus, I’ve created rooms for women that could “lose a lot” by being incredibly honest about the difficulties that they’re experiencing.
Success is easy. Simple, often. A reverse-engineered roadmap, even if you’re pursuing something that hasn’t been done exactly the way you’re doing it — there are still layers of opportunities and possibilities to scramble together to pioneer the dream. The grief-mapping, the identity shifting, the internal operating system that knows when to shift gears to go faster or slower in order to truly sift through the layers that are populating to help you abide by the deepest version of you.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
Safety.
The title of life coach is simple and I’ve often desired to dismiss it for something different — life guide, architect even — because the perceived value of life coaching is either incredibly high or low.
Life coaching has long since creation influenced audiences to believe that a few sessions will influence deep safety for the rest of time — that once you know how to shift your mindset or lower your body’s fear through breath that you’ll never have to tangle with safety or the lack there of again.
I don’t claim this.
I’d be lying.
Your sense of safety will always ebb and flow based on your surroundings, your internal systems, your external systems, what you allow in, what you close off to, the state of the world at large. Safety itself has staying power ONLY by returning to it again and again through a sacred reorientation™. A sacred reorientation™ is what it sounds like: when you can reorient to the sacred of what feels peaceful, what feels light, what feels connective, and what feels safe — then and only then do you really have the space to linger in the depth of grief and heal through it again and again.
Healing and safety are parts of us that we return to when we are influenced by internal and external systems to feel unhealed and unsafe.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
My voice carries my ancestors in it every day — I often wonder where this wisdom comes from and it can be strange to feel at times disconnected from your own wisdom, but I’ve felt like I’ve lived thousands of years simply through the oral histories of my ancestors, the lived experience I’ve had in this life by regularly shifting my life as I see fit and accepting the consequences and gifts from those shifts.
With that, yes, I absolutely feel that I am doing what I was born to do because I’ve coached the people in my life and random strangers on the street since I was a child. Once called bossy and too much and too loud — to chosen for stages and clientele that understand the depth of my voice and the sharpness of my perspective to support them to move diligently into the life they most want instead of the lives they’ve been told to want.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ashleighchenry.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleighchenry/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighchenry/
- Other: Past Podcast Host: Your Conversation Pit
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-conversation-pit/id1706546160
Image Credits
https://corryfrazierphotography.com/
