We were lucky to catch up with Ashleigh Henry recently and have shared our conversation below.
Ashleigh, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.
I’d love to say I’ve avoided burnout, but like many entrepreneurs I’ve waltzed with her a few times. In the corporate world and startup culture, it seemed nearly inescapable. While I was running my own social media and lead generation agency for female founders I found myself consistently pushing and pulling with burnout, hoping that one day things would slow down enough for us to take our foot off the gas.
But now, as a life coach for well-accomplished women seeking to deeply edit their lives, I see now that it’s all rooted in how you design your life.
My aim in 2022 was to redesign my life and business structures, to prepare to become a mother with (at the time) four businesses between my husband and I, and to pause the dance with burnout. I no longer was interested in just temporarily patching it, but rewiring my relationship to energy, worth, and ambition.
I became brutally honest with myself and looked directly at what was draining me energetically, emotionally, physically, and even morally. I acknowledged the patterns that were consistent by lifetime mapping to find those patterns over the last 15 years of my life. I noticed layers of over-responsibility, an addiction to the elusive more, a craving for external validation, and even subtle self-abandonment.
That energetic audit led me to reconsidering my pace and how I was outsourcing it to the world and weaponizing my ambition against my own body. Hustle logic, outdated versions of success metrics, and the like came to a pause for me to redesign my systems based on what I teach: harmonious living method.
The harmonious living method supported me to nourish and recalibrate my life in the different sectors of life that are often missed in the pursuit of more — usually in relation to work. I pursued to support my health, spirituality, creativity, relationships, community service, and the like to slowly, but strategically calibrate to maintainability instead of speed.
Ultimately, I reclaimed my identity beyond output, ritualized recovery, divested from draining dynamics, and began to reconnect being a modern woman with time-worn ways of being to decenter external paces from being my measurement of peace and success.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I’m Ashleigh C. Henry — a life coach, speaker, writer, and former business advisor to 6- and 7-figure founders. Today, I guide well-accomplished and high-achieving women through identity shifts, ambition recalibrations, and emotionally safe transitions out of burnout, over-giving, and false urgency. My work is rooted in narrative excavation, somatic attunement, and nervous-system-led pacing — and it’s changing the way women return to themselves.
I’ve spent the last six years consulting for powerhouse entrepreneurs and leaders, and the decade before that refining my ability to hold space across industries — from leadership roles in startups and hospitality and boutique retail to higher education in the legal field. My journey has never been linear, but it’s always been led by one question: What becomes possible when we stop performing wholeness and start living it?
That’s where my current body of work comes in.
I created The Sacred Reorientation™, a signature coaching methodology and life reclamation process for women who’ve built success and are well-accomplished but want to feel more alive inside it. It’s offered in two formats: A 6-month private coaching experience for those craving individualized depth and integration, and a 4-month group program for women ready to root into personal agency and steadiness with others on the path.
What excites me most is the caliber of woman who’s drawn to this work.
She’s accomplished, discerning, and spiritually attuned, but she’s also tired of being the one everyone else leans on. She’s been handling it all and she’s not here to burn down all of the hard work it’s taken to get to where she is, but she’s not sure how to reorient to her inner compass. She’s here to realign with who she actually is — without rushing, over-explaining, or shrinking her standards.
In addition to coaching, I write a weekly newsletter called The Deep Edit, where we discuss identity, integrity, and inner clarity while somatically helping the body to reorient to pleasure.
What I’d want people to know most is this: You don’t need to become better — you need to remember who you are and reorient to the deepest version of you.
My work helps you do exactly that.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Discernment, narrative intelligence, and nervous system literacy have been my go-to’s within my entrepreneurial journey. Discernment keeps you in the right rooms with the right people. Narrative intelligence helps us understand our inherited stories, internalized ones, too, and where we’ve unconsciously obeyed “rules” that we no longer desire to subscribe to; it’s the heart of identity work and what I love to work on with my clients. Nervous system literacy has allowed me to honor my capacity, pace my ambition to my inner clock, and regulate my body without bypassing it in order to achieve some external goal on a specific timeline.
When you step into your discerning arc, start small. Notice how your body reacts before your mind rationalizes: does this person influence me to expand or contract or even contort into something else? You’ll learn to notice the difference between resonance and dissonance.
When you begin to understand your internal narrative, seek out new pieces of information on the topic you’re stuck on. Read widely, scribble out your thoughts, and reflect as honestly as you can on your own. Pay attention to which thoughts repopulate often, consider the phrases you repeat about yourself or others, where did those come from? Is that the language scaffolding you desire to build your life on?
When you connect with your nervous system, seek harmony instead of balance. What feels harmonious to you? What feels like capitalism’s version of balance or traditional rules that no longer seem to apply to you? Track where you feel consistently urgent, where silence shows up in your body when your mind is telling you to speak, consider how your body feels in certain rooms with certain people. Then create rituals that honor both your nervous system and your desired vision.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I’d adore collaborating with seasoned-but-soft visionaries (usually with female founders) who are deeply established in their work, yet open-hearted and in a space of co-creation. I’m interested in those that create conversations instead of following them, where they do not dominate a space — but wholesomely invite those that are curious to be at the table with them. I enjoy working with folks that lead with depth, have done their inner work, and meet their communities eye-to-eye, not from a pedestal or projection.
Creatives and slow-burn strategists that are nervous-system aware and desire to deepen that work and spread the message that we can work with our natural rhythms, especially as women. Those that are creating spaces of sustainability and maintainable brands/business structures who care about tone, texture, and soul — not just polish or virality.
In the coming season, we’re seeking to create a space full of thoughtful bridge-builders that desire to co-host workshops, firesides, and panel conversations, to explore the deeper meaning (and need) behind modern ambition weaved with the tapestry of time-worn ways to support ourselves in a fast-paced world.
In terms of industries: wellness practitioners, business consultants, marketing agencies, branding/web design agencies, designers, photographers, podcasters, business managers, financial managers, coaches of all sorts.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tinyurl.com/thedeepedit
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleighchenry/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighchenry/
Image Credits
https://corryfrazierphotography.com/
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
