Katia Birch is an experienced and multi-passioned Learning and Development practitioner with corporate and start-up leadership experience in tech, creative, and fashion. Her current career portfolio includes individual and group leadership and transition coaching, facilitation, professional skills training, and mentor coaching for ICF credentialing. Katia is a neurodiversity-affirming and trauma-informed practitioner.

UNOFFICIAL BIO

I am an explorer, creator, and obsessive sense-maker who likes to connect the dots. I also can’t tell my left from my right, often transpose numbers, see words as pictures, compulsively make lists to systematize things and thoughts, and deeply enjoy alone time in nature. And I laugh. A lot!

Professionally trained in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Co-Active Coaching, and mindfulness meditation, I work with change and people leaders, leaders with neurodivergent traits, and those with unconventional career paths who want to excel professionally.

My identity has been shaped by many contrasting experiences like growing up on a farm in Russia, living through traumatic events, coming to the U.S. as an immigrant teenager, entering the workforce as a white-bodied woman, co-founding two businesses, changing careers three times, studying and practicing shamatha meditation, adopting a sober-curious lifestyle, and becoming a coach and group facilitator.

Every twist and turn has been a lesson in resilience, adaptability, and humility.

I jokingly call myself a “Professional Quitter” because I quit three wonderful career paths in my search for professional fulfillment: running a media production company, marketing at a global tech company, and a fashion start-up.

Becoming a Learning & Development practitioner, however, was the unexpected destination that tied together the various threads of my career journey. Looking back at my squiggly path, I see that a profound need for connection and understanding drove my search for fulfillment.

But any form of connection, to myself or others, has been elusive. Behind the scenes of my dynamic, circuitous journey lay a deeply personal struggle – a lifelong intricate dance with social anxiety rooted in the unique wiring of my brain and nervous system and compounded by the intricacies of trauma. This silent companion has shaped my path in ways both profound and challenging. Its protective mechanisms meant that I was constantly doing the delicate tightrope walk as I navigated the world. It often hindered the connections I yearned to make and so desperately wanted to experience, slowed down the pace of learning, obscured possibilities, and obliterated my confidence.

Deciding that I needed to understand my condition, learn to live a thriving, beautiful life, and show up as a leader in my profession and community, is the most important decision I’ve made. And my most cherished career reinvention happened when I started my coach training. Only then did I begin to ease into the healing power of presence, connection, and purposely built relationships. 

Becoming a professional coach has changed my life because it opened up a deeply nourishing well of fulfilling relationships. It helped me experience the healing power of acceptance, attention, and attunement. It also convinced me to adopt the Bio-Psycho-Social-Spiritual perspective in my work with clients and in the relationship toward my Well-Being. I am constantly developing strengths and competencies that inform my work today: the ability to connect the dots, synthesis, exploration, creativity, bias for achievement, and empathy.

These strengths have proven valuable to over 800 individual coaching clients from leading tech, advertising, financial, and social impact organizations, in supporting a range of important topics such as:

  • career transitions/change and professional reinventions

  • unmasking authentic leadership

  • goal setting, planning, and attainment

  • executive presence and influence

  • balancing priorities and work-life harmony for busy professionals

  • navigating uncertainty and change management

Thank you for reading about my journey!

Would you like to talk about yours?

Schedule your Discovery Call or send an email to get in touch.

EDUCATION, TRAINING, CREDENTIALS

MBA with Marketing Specialization - Kania School of Management, The University of Scranton

B.A. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology - Brooklyn College, CUNY

Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) - Co-Active Training Institute

Professional Certified Coach (PCC) - International Coach Federation

Certified Mentor Coach (CMC) - inviteCHANGE

Neurodiversity in Coaching: Context and Skills for Effective Practice (upcoming for 2024) - Animas Centre for Coaching

Certified Conscious Business Coach - Conscious Business Center led by Fred Kofman

Accelerating Coach Excellence (ACE) Level 2 Coach - Helping high-potential leaders accelerate their development and gain extraordinary results. Led by David B. Peterson, Ph.D. and David M. Goldsmith. WBECS

Certified Meditation Instructor - Training led by Susan Piver, Open Heart Project.

Neurodiversity-Informed Mindfulness Training - Mindful Society Global Institute

Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness - Comprehensive program for Mindfulness Practitioners by David Treleaven

Crisis Counselor Training - Crisis Text Line

Additional training and coursework in Motivational Interviewing, Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling, Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg, Internal Family Systems and Inner Team, Non-Violent Communication, Positive Intelligence (PQ), TheoryU, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Breathwork, and courses on Healing Trauma with Jeffrey Rutstein, Ph.D. and Peter Levine, Ph.D.