110 How Katherine Works: Slaying Dragons and Prioritizing Impact

Katherine Wintsch struggled with self-doubt and perfectionism for years-even while outwardly achieving all her goals as a successful advertising executive. Then she decided to confront and slay those dragons of fear and doubt, rethink her priorities, and start her own company, where she could redefine work-life culture.

When Katherine Wintsch sent me her book, Slay Like a Mother, I thought. Oh no. Another book telling me how I can have it all. A high-powered career. Kids. Family. Fulfilling hobbies. Muscles. A non-profit on the side. Why not toss in a marathon or two.

Then I opened the book. And I couldn’t shut it. It turns out, Katherine wasn’t talking about slaying life—she was talking about slaying the dragons that get in the way of actually living and enjoying your life. Evil dragons like self doubt, insecurity, and fear. Dragons that attempt to incinerate any flicker of joy before you even get a glimpse of it.

The book is just fantastic, partly because it gives very tangible exercises you can do to slay your own dragons and create the life you want to live. It’s really a hybrid between a book and a workbook. One of my favorites exercises is listing all the things in your life that deplete you and another list of what energizes you. Once you look at these lists, you can use them to design a life with more things that light your fire and less of what makes it fizzle.

Today Katherine is going to tell us how she did just that. How she got off the path of what she thought should make her happy and carved a new road to an entirely different destination—one she made up herself. She left her advertising career and founded her own company, called the Mom Complex, which helps companies develop better products, services and experiences for mothers.

This episode is part of an ongoing series I’m building about how moms work, from managing our homes to caring for children to pursuing careers and building businesses. Every mom’s career is a unique story with different choices, pathways, pivots, failures, and successes. More than a balancing or juggling act, these are stories of identifying and shifting priorities as our lives themselves shift and change through different stages and as we learn and grow and get to know ourselves better.

As I have been collecting these stories I’ve been amazed not only at the sheer variety of options for specific careers but also how these women weave work and family together in such different ways, creating unique and intricate fabrics, often wildly different than they imagined at the beginning, and usually way more interesting and beautiful.