Sophie K is a joy-seeker, a mama of two, an entrepreneur, vitality and life coach and the founder of The Thrive Guide. She has made it her mission to live an extraordinary fun filled life and is now teaching her clients to do the same.
Sophie was born in Auckland, New Zealand, to two German parents. She grew up on the other side of the world in Germany until returning to New Zealand as a teenager.
At 30 years old her life looked amazing on paper. She had the house, the car, the family, the degrees, the corporate job and a small business on the side. To people on the outside, her friends and her community, it looked like she had it all worked out.
It took being faced with a great challenge in her life that she finally allowed herself to see that she had been keeping up a facade. That underneath the pretty picture she had spent most of her adult life in survival: Running on the treadmill of her life, juggling family, business, job and the relationship with her partner and children while running on an empty tank.
It was in those moments where she hit rock bottom and decided to make a change.
After years of self-development, researching, trying and testing, she discovered that there is a
formula to accessing our thrive zone. Our happy zone, where we have a spring in our step and
the resilience to deal with whatever life throws at us in an empowered and confident way.
Sophie has found a way to turn the challenges of life into breakthroughs and is now teaching her clients to do the same.
She has made it her mission to empower every single one of us to ditch the old paradigm of survival, hustle and burn out and embrace the richness of our human-ness and our lives to thrive no matter where we are right now.
Sophie K, Vitality Coach
Tell us about your professional background.
Ha where do I start! I am a little bit of an allrounder and have worked many jobs. I was even a Nanny and a dog walker once!
I have a Bachelor in design and worked in the art, event and theater industry for about 5 years. My focus throughout those years, even without knowing it at times, was experience design.
At 23 I had my first daughter and therefore received a crash course in the school of parenting. I have to say, my children, I had another daughter at 27, are my greatest achievements to date. The journey of raising another human is probably one of the most humbling journeys I have ever navigated.
My corporate career in media and broadcasting started after having my first daughter and this is where I spent the next 7 years of my career as a Digital Producer.
Throughout that time I also completed a Diploma in Te Reo Maori, our national language here in New Zealand. I have always had a love of languages and have all up learnt 6 languages in my life. Those languages being German, French, Spanish, Latin, Te Reo and of course English.
My parents weren’t native english speakers so when we returned to Germany when I was 3, I forgot how to speak English and had to learn this again at school.
I started my coaching business in July 2020, the year the Covid pandemic hit, after I had completed my coaching certification in Australia prior to that.
I know Covid was a tough time for many and believe me it was not without its challenges for me either. But it was also an incredible time of my life where I found even more time and space to reconnect to my joy and deeper levels of me.
It was in the first lockdown here in New Zealand that I decided to ditch my corporate career and embark on the journey of entrepreneurship once again.
What motivated you to do the work that you do now?
I have always been a bit of an observer. Incredibly interested in people and what makes us tick.
When I was traveling you could find me in a cafe or a bar drinking a beverage observing the world around me. It was my favorite pastime besides of course exploring the sites and meeting new people.
When I started working in the corporate space this was a completely new environment for me. As I was learning on the job I was observing what was happening around me.
And what I saw was that I was surrounded by incredibly talented people.
As I started to mingle with more people in the corporate environment it became clear to me.
Even though talented, great at their jobs and once having been passionate about what they were doing, so many people around me were miserable in their lives.
They were unfulfilled and yearned for a change. But many didn’t know how or believed it was possible for them.
And I asked myself: Considering what these amazing people are already creating while they are unhappy with their lives, I wonder what kind of creative output they would have if they were loving their lives? If they were fulfilled?
What would this mean for the business or organisation? What would this mean for the bottom line?
And not just that, what impact would their personal and professional fulfillment have on the lives of the people around them? On my life?
These questions sparked a desire within me so strong that it drives me to this day.
A desire to have my children live in a future world, where people can have the job, the car, the house, the family, the money and be fulfilled at the same time and live in symbiosis with the people and our environment around us.
This is not a world with the absence of challenges but a world that embraces the duality and the beauty of the full spectrum of the human experience.
Wow. I love this big picture thinking here. You mention “embracing your human-ness”. What does that mean?
As a coach one of the many things I do is to teach my clients about the human body and mind. How it functions and why it functions that way.
Because I have found that so many of us do not fully understand how our human-ness really works and how it influences our everyday life, our actions and behaviors.
This is not the kind of stuff we are being taught at school unfortunately.
We don’t learn about the human brain, how it forms neurological connections and this is how we form habits and behaviors.
We don’t learn that the one thing that actually drives all of us is the drive to survive.
We don’t learn about our central nervous system and its importance to our health and well-being. A system that is designed to help us stay safe and survive.
We don’t learn that we are essentially still primal beings.
We don’t learn that our physical body still operates the same as our ancestors' bodies thousands of years ago when we lived in the jungle and the bush.
Our life as a society has changed drastically over the last 300 years since the industrial revolution and our biology has not had time to adapt to its surroundings.
Our modern world, our surroundings, are so much more complex now than they have ever been. There are an incredible amount of stimuli we have to navigate that activate our nervous system frequently, our physical stress response.
According to the latest studies since the pandemic, it is estimated that, on average, in the Western world, every person spends around 70% of their waking time with their nervous system in stress response.
And the stress response, even though necessary and useful, it is an incredibly depleting process that requires us to replenish ourselves afterwards.
Which is also something many of us aren’t conscious of.
There is so much to learn about our human body and mind and it is all incredibly useful knowledge that helps us navigate our everyday life in a much more empowering and less overwhelming way.
That is what I mean by embracing our human-ness. Working in symbiosis with our biology in the context of this very intense modern world.
Tell us more about your business and how all of this translates into your work.
As a Vitality and Life Coach I help my clients find more time and space for the pleasures in their life. I help my clients understand themselves better, why they do what they do, where they want to go to and what fulfillment and success really means to them as individuals.
We all are such unique beings. We have different upbringings, different genetic make ups, different experiences, different beliefs that shape who we are. And I help my clients learn how to embrace all of that and use this uniqueness they have to their advantage so they can live a life of fulfillment.
When clients come to me they are usually in one or two of the following spaces.
One: They are finding themselves busy all the time and with not enough time for their hobbies, the things or the people that are really important to them.
They are doing their very best to just keep on top of life in our complex modern world and are often finding themselves exhausted and tired. Their to-do list seems never ending and ever growing and no matter how much they do, they just never feel on top of things.
Two: They have the house, the car, the job, the family and are waking every morning feeling unfulfilled, lacking that spring in their step that they used to have. And they just cannot figure out why.
I have developed some different programs over the years that cater to my clients at different stages of their journey.
One of them being my signature 1:1 program called The Thrive Guide.
What’s the biggest challenge or misconception you come across in your work?
The biggest misconception we as people have is that we think if we want more in our life and get different results we have to do more and work harder.
I call it the “Pushing S*** up the hill” syndrome.
Now let me tell you, this is not how it works. Because honestly, if working harder and doing more was the solution to all our problems and the bringer of all our desires then most of us would already be living the fulfilled and amazing life we so desire.
So many of us work our bottoms off, even to the point of burn out and we still don’t have what we actually want.
The key is to work smarter. And this is what a coach can help you do.
Look at what is working and what isn’t working. Why you are doing what is working and what isn’t working. Ditch what isn’t working and do more of what is. Get a vision of your lifestyle, goals and the kind of life you want to live and start aligning with that. Deal with all the things that arise along the way and don’t stop until you have what you want.
The only way to fail is to stop trying.
Now that is true! Is there anything else you want our readers to know before we finish up?
Yes! This is for those of you who may find life tough right now.
You deserve to live the kind of extraordinary life you want to live.
You deserve to be fulfilled.
You deserve to thrive. Period. And never forget that.
Just because you may not be able to see your path right now doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for you.
Sometimes we have to stumble in the dark for a bit before we find our light switches. Others around you have found theirs. And if they can do it, so can you.
Go seek them out, they are bound to have some wisdom to share.
And remember, your happiness and quality of life doesn’t just affect you, it affects everybody around you.
And the greatest gift you can give yourself and others is to give the gift of fulfillment to yourself.
If any of the above resonated with you, get in touch with Sophie K via her website and connect with her on Facebook (Facebook and LinkedIn (13) Sophie K | LinkedIn
