From Comfort To Calling With A Trusted Guide

The most dangerous career trap is not failure. It’s comfort that slowly turns into a cage. 

In this episode of the Untamed Leader Podcast, Lauri sits down with Dr. Karen Koepp, a strategic advisor who helps senior leaders navigate high-stakes turning points. At the heart of the conversation is a childhood expedition that still shapes how Karen guides clients today and the pattern she sees with leaders at every level: you can know exactly where you want to go, but the moment you step out the door, the doubts get loud. Can I do this? Will it cost too much? Am I really the kind of person who can consult others, write the book, or reinvent my career?

In the face of these doubts "important but not urgent" often becomes the graveyard of our most meaningful work.

Karen shares how she listens for the energy in a leader’s stories to find the real seeds of passion hiding under years of shoulds, and how she helps clients turn that passion into something structured, usable, and alive.

If you’re a leader with something real to contribute and keep finding yourself back inside the house instead of out on the path, this one’s for you.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Knowing where you want to go is a necessary but insufficient condition for actually getting there.

2. Taming is sneaky. The comfortable structure that once kept you safe is often the same thing keeping you stuck.

3. Important but not urgent is where our most meaningful work goes to die. Connecting to our purpose helps create the motivation to get started or keep going. 

4. Low-risk experiments beat big leaps when doubts cloud the way.

5. Going it alone is like trying to find the park in the dark. Generic programs built for someone else’s terrain make it worse, not better.

6. Aliveness has a somatic signature. A good guide listens for where the seeds of passion live in your story.

7. Take the first step. Don’t wait for it to become urgent — it won’t. The important thing is always a choice, and you have to be the one who makes it.

Soul Sucker Quiz

Take the Soul Sucker Quiz to learn which Soul Sucker screams the loudest in your mind so you can release them from being in charge and set your voice free!

https://voice-matters.com/soul-sucker-quiz/

Transcript

Lauri 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Untamed Leader podcast. My guest today is Dr. Karen Kepp. She is a strategic advisor who works with senior leaders at key turning points in their careers. When the next move carries real financial and reputational weight, her work focuses on turning years of experience into something structured and usable, like a book, a consulting package, practice, or a portfolio, etc. And I will let the rest of her on her story unfold as the episode unfolds. Welcome, Karen. Thank you. I like to dive right in. So I'm gonna ask the first question is when you see the words untamed and leader together, what does that spark for you?

Karen 0:54

Untamed

What “Untamed Leader” sparks: leading from the inside out

Karen 0:55

leader sparks for me the idea of being your true authentic self. So rather than subscribing to this is how a leader looks, acts, what they need to do, you are self-directed and tuning into what's in your heart, in your soul to bring to this world.

Lauri 1:19

I love it. And when you look back over your life, what is the first leadership moment of your own that comes to mind?

The original expedition: leading two kids to the park (and what it still means)

Karen 1:32

That actually brings me back to a couple things. One is um my mom, when I was very young, babysat kids before I went to school and she went to full-time work. And I got the great idea one afternoon that we needed to do an expedition. So I waited till my mom was upstairs, and then I talked the two kids that she was babysitting into going on this expedition to the park around the block. And Chris was on board, his little sister Katie was on board for a little bit, but we got half a block away and she got scared and went back. And Chris and I continued to the park, and we were in the middle of collecting firewood for our fire when my mom caught up. So trip aborted at that point.

Lauri 2:35

Yeah. And how does that adventurous spirit show up in your life these days?

Karen 2:45

I'm always on the look for what the next frontier is. So I've been in business for about 24 years or so, and I've never stopped evolving. So I started the work uh coaching executives, going back for their masters, and help them learn how to do research. But every step of the way, I was always watching what they needed next and where the market was going next. And that's been really helpful in allowing me to keep pace with market changes so that I'm always evolving with what's what they need and what industry conditions will or will not allow.

Always watching for the next frontier: 24 years of evolving with the market

Lauri 3:33

That feels so much like the expedition to the park, in light of you having just said that, that um markets change and landscapes and sidewalks and whatever the path was to the park around the corner, it probably was not just walk on the grass to the park.

Karen 3:54

Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of things to consider. And even just recent years, um, my work has changed dramatically as university policies changed. Back when I was primarily coaching theses and dissertations, as internal writing centers became a big thing, and the way courses were arranged to support theses and dissertation, I had to evolve with that, and now with AI and economic pressures that people are going through. So it's been really important to always be attuned to what's happening in the world and in my clients' lives. And what I really uh prize doing is meeting them exactly where they are in their life, in their career journey, in what they're wanting for themselves, in what's feeling alive, and what is most possible at any given moment.

Lauri 5:03

It does feel a lot like guiding them on the expedition. And I'm wondering, do your clients sometimes show up like them where one is gung ho and ready to go on the expedition with you, and others are on board for a bit and want to turn back, or maybe even say they want something and then turn back.

When clients reach the door and want to turn back

Karen 5:30

That actually happens more often than not, because what I've discovered in my work is that knowing where you want to go is only the first step. It's a necessary but insufficient condition for success. Because once you know where you want to go, I've found that that's when the overwhelm sets in. So the fears about can I do this? Do I know what to do? Is this going to require too much of me? Am I going to have to give up the things that I love or time that I want with my family or friends or whomever? Is this going to be rewarding in the way I need it to be? So all of those things subconsciously come to protest against this big expedition. And often what happens unless there are external factors that are requiring you to go forward, what I see time again is that the things that are important but not urgent fall by the wayside.

What shifts “someday” to “now” for a leader

Lauri 6:45

What are some of the things that have it shift from important or someday to urgent or now for a leader?

Karen 7:00

Um sometimes that's a lot of times that's uh when they're facing some kind of sense of loss, that if I don't do this, then my kids won't know the story of who I was or who you know where I've come from. Or if they've lost their primary career and they need to reinvent themselves. Um a lot of times what I see is that the things that we put in place to make ourselves comfortable end up being the impediments forward.

Lauri 7:47

Yeah,

The taming metaphor: comfort as both cage and shelter

Lauri 7:48

I was I was the word untamed has, you know, it's always hovering for me. And it was feeling like we're just gonna keep going back to this metaphor. You know, you offered the two kids that you led on the expedition, they were inside. And I was like, well, that could be a metaphor for like the inside the house, the tamed is the comfort, the comfort that you know inside the house. And then the great adventure is freedom outside the door. And as soon as you open the door and start to go, that's when the like, well, I was simultaneously tamed by what's back inside that house and kept safe by what is back inside of that house. What is your personal journey with taming, untaming, comfort, shoulds, the way society says things have to be done. What's been your journey with that untaming?

Karen 8:56

That's a great question. I would say that I've always been more of an independent thinker and an untamed sort of person, despite best efforts otherwise.

Lauri 9:13

So,

Karen’s own untaming: from straight-A override to jumping off the fast track

Lauri 9:14

like me, you've tried to fit into some boxes, square pig, round hole, and it doesn't always work even when you try.

Karen 9:23

Yeah, yeah. So, for example, in high school, starting, I never did any homework, like all through elementary, middle school, high school, I was all about work life, school life balance. So, whatever I got done during the day, I was fine with. And if I would need to do homework to do that better grade, no, that's my time. And then uh my dad dropped the hammer at the end of my sophomore year because I got two B's, B's, not T's, B's, and the rest of our A's. And um, and then that's when I sort of shifted into that tamed thing of well, you know what? I think I'm going to perform better than you could have imagined, and I'm going to get out of here. So from that point on, I was always, I got straight A pluses, strove to be the very top, top, top of everything, and really worked myself into the ground and continued that through the rest of high school, college, into my early career. And I got to be a management consultant at one of the big four firms and really loved a lot of things about it. I was traveling 100% of the time, had the expense account, everything was great, but there was something missing and I didn't know what, and I didn't have the time to figure out what. So I took the big leap off the fast track and into the almost stopped track, where I still was working in IT, but I had the time to figure out who I was, what I really cared about, what I really wanted to do in life. And that's when everything really changed.

Lauri 11:34

It feels like you knew what brought you to life when you were doing. I did as much of the homework as I could during the day. And then when I get home, that's my time. And then you lost connection with it. And then when you jumped off the fast track, you it almost mirrors the schedule of you're still going to school and having your life at the end of the day. You were still working, but having some space in the day that was yours to remember what you knew when you were younger.

Karen 12:09

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. And what I realized at that point was that all these external things of the career in IT, I never I never enjoyed that. I I did internships during college, never enjoyed the internships, but it never occurred to me, hmm, maybe this isn't the career for me. So I find that it's so critical to make that time to listen to yourself and get to know who am I really? What do I really care about? What are those seeds of passion? Because I believe that that's it's those seeds that hold the clues to the difference we uniquely are meant to make in this world.

Lauri 13:02

What were the seeds of passion that you discovered?

Listening for the seeds of passion beneath the shoulds

Karen 13:07

What I'm really passionate about is helping other people connect to their passion and holding up the mirror to them to say, yeah, that's really powerful. Your perspective, how you see things, how you do things, the differences that you are passionate about making, we need that because I find that it's something that they sort of know it's it's almost like this guilty pleasure, or this thing that gets over drowned out in the pressure to go to work and pay the bills and all of those things we need to do. So they're they're doing the thing they're supposed to do and miss out on doing the thing that they are driven and passionate about doing.

Lauri 14:07

Yeah, the all of the shoulds and the way our world is set up, you know, adulting is hard, is the thing that a lot of people say. And I feel like in light of this conversation, it's actually harder than it needs to be. But as a society, we're not putting the creative work, I'm gonna call it, in up front. So we should all over our children as brains are developing. You have to get the A's. The point that you were talking about sophomore year in high school is like the point where you're starting to find who you are, and you got should it all over. I did the same thing in different ways. I was a teacher's pet, a good girl. I did actually get one C. Um, despite having cheated on a, I think it was the same class where like we were getting the answers to previous years, and I still ended up getting a C in that class, um, which as a recovering good girl is like one of the biggest confessions I've probably ever made. And if we put the work in to help when the brain is coming into adulthood, what is it that you love? What lights you up, what feels natural to you, then we wouldn't have to undo it later. And what you're describing is helping people to undo it to actually know yeah, what are what are you here for? What do you love doing? Those things are the same for a lot of people, not so much the shoulds of work this kind of you know, doctor, lawyer, engineer, make the money, get the job, and then maybe you can travel, like when you're describing the job that you had, you loved the perk of traveling, which aligns with the adventurous spirit who walked out the front door with two other people, not IT type work. Yeah, how do you help your clients get in touch with the seeds of their passions and then stay with them when those the resistance, the fear, the taming start to kick in and they want to run back into the house of comfort?

Karen 16:43

So

How Karen guides clients from aliveness to architecture to action

Karen 16:44

I begin by listening to their stories. So I listen very deeply, and I just listen for where the energy is in what they're talking about. And there's a really palpable difference when they're talking about something that they should be talking about or they should think or they should do, and what they what really lights them up. So just somatically, it feels very different. And when we find that thread, I follow it and I ask more questions and we dig into it more. And it's funny that it can take a little bit of wading through the shoulds to finally get to that offhand comment about what they're really passionate about. But once we find it, then we dive in deep. And what I find is that they a lot of times they do know what they're passionate about, but they don't know how to bring it to life. So that's when I work with them, and often it's in a very compressed time frame, three hours, six hours, and we're able to flesh out what would this look like as an offer? What would this look like as a book, as the structure of it? What would this book do in the world? Or what if they want to create a portfolio career or find a different place in their field, we dive into their stories about when they felt most alive and doing their best work and feeling like they're making a meaningful difference in in the world. And from the patterns that we discover in that, we reconstruct what would a passionate career look like for you? What would you be doing? So once we've got that architecture of their book, of their coaching or consulting offering, or of their career, then we design together the go-to-market strategy. So specifically, who are you talking to? What are you saying to them? What do you say next? What happens next? So that they have everything they need to get out there and start bringing it into reality. And then when they start doing that, that's when things can break down and the hesitations and the fears arise. And when that happens, we talk through it and we diagnose where is the breakdown? Is it in what you're doing? You don't know what to do, or you don't know how to do it? Is it that it doesn't feel rewarding? Is it creating too much pain and anxiety for you? And we design the system that supports their forward movement. And then a lot of times this also comes down to some identity questions like, is this me? Can I do this? Am I the kind of person who can sell consulting? Am I really an author or not? And so we work through that and we we do little low low-risk experiments, I call them, to get help them get traction and just get one step at a time toward their vision.

Lauri 20:33

Yeah.

The hall of mirrors: what going it alone actually looks like

Lauri 20:34

Of course, the metaphor just keeps coming back. I personally have spent a lot of time. There's a the phrase or a you know, a saying out there, you have to design your offers around the meeting place of what you're passionate about with what the market wants, which is true, and that's a great high-level idea. And I just want to illustrate for people listening what that how that can go without someone like you. What I was seeing in my head as you were talking was the way that I tried to do it by myself, which was like I would boldly run out of my house. I'm incredibly creative and adaptable. So for me, with all of the shoulds, it was sort of like that the movie working girl. Well, who do you want me to be? Who do you want me to be? How what do you want me to make out of? Well, it seems like the market wants this. Number one, I'm not the expert that Karen is. So me going, it seems like the market wants this, is like running around trying to find the park in the dark. And I had a feeling of my own aliveness, but it was like I would feel a bit of aliveness, and then I would be like, Let me shove it over here in this box. Wait, why isn't that working? Okay, come back to the aliveness. Let me run back inside the house now. Now, let me run back outside of the house. And then toward the end of when you were talking, I started feeling like it is like trying to go it without you there as the guide, saying, Let me show you the way to your park. And then all of a sudden, the like scary dark outside alone actually turned into like a fun mirror room where there are actually mirrors everywhere. And you can't find your way out when, or it's hard to, you know, it's fun when you're in an amusement park, but that there was some strange combination for me over the course of 18 years between being out in the wilderness without a guide and looking at every guide, every bit of feedback that people were giving me as they were giving it. And as I'm saying this, one because I'm so creative, I remember at one point decades ago, somebody introduced the idea of having like a lower-priced community offering. Like he was having a stroke of genius about what I should create coming from this is an idea. And I went off and created it, and then he didn't even buy it.

Karen 23:14

Oh, jeez. But I'm bumped. That's the punchline.

Lauri 23:21

That's the punchline. He didn't even buy it. So working with you is much more like finding your park with a guide and one mirror, feeling for the aliveness instead of going it alone. Is there anything else you want to say about what that's like?

Karen 23:45

Yeah, I think that's a really great way that you described it. Because when I when I partner, I and I truly do partner with my clients. So it's not, I have this curriculum and go through my 12 chapters and let me know or not about how it goes. But here's the here's the payment link.

Lauri 24:07

Yeah, you and I are pretty aligned on that. We don't like a cookie-cutter 12-step process. We like things that are more partnered, customized to the individual that's there with us.

Karen 24:21

Right, right. Because so many things can come up. And while human to human there are so many similarities, how it's experienced, how it's navigated is unique, as unique as you are. So to bring forth what you are doing in the way that only you can, my view is you need a partner along that journey who is in there with you and walking with you and holding the flashlight and the mirror. And troubleshooting every every glitch, every challenge you encounter.

Lauri 25:05

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. The it feels like part of what we're saying is the only way is to go the untamed way, the way that is the real you taking the path to your park. And it is much easier when you're going with a guide that is going to support that instead of the many mirrors that I was looking at. I would, even though I hate them and I talk about, I hate cookie cutter, I don't like one size fits all. Still, I have done them. I have bought them. And there have been some times when I've been very conscious and intentional. I'm paying for this one thing. I'm gonna pull a little bit of their cookie recipe and bring it over here and use it. And most of the time, sadly, became much more like the hall of mirrors where I got stuck and I was doing everything in their one way and wondering why it wasn't working. And now I have more clarity about it, like the way those things are built and who they're built for was never really me. Maybe every once in a while, like the one that I remember that actually worked was I'm a pretty good storyteller and a pretty good writer. But I was noticing on social media that not very many of my things were getting noticed by people that I didn't already know, but every once in a while they were. Sometimes I might write something and not even be sure that the hook is the best hook that I'm putting out there. And sadly, other times I've been more like, I use that's working.

Why the map matters — and why most maps are three years out of date

Lauri 27:32

I'm in the Hall of Mirrors alone, the guides are nowhere to be found.

Karen 27:38

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot out there that's not right for the kind of offering that any one particular person giving out. And it's can be very difficult to detect that when that's you know, you have your thing, that is your thing, that you do better than anyone else. And when you are launching something, whether you're writing a book or launching a new practice, you have to wear all the hats. And to navigate that yourself to do it all in a vacuum is beyond difficult.

Lauri 28:26

Yeah. The other thing that popped into my head is at the very beginning, you mentioned that part of what you love to do is you're noticing trends. How is the landscape changing? How is AI changing things? And another one of the things for the people who have created their 12-step system, where it truly came from a place of service, but now all of a sudden it's not working anymore for the people that are buying it. One of the reasons that just struck me is that it was built for the terrain three years ago.

Karen 29:08

Yeah.

Lauri 29:09

And it's not working because the terrain is different. Even those people could probably go revamp it with your help if they wanted to.

Karen 29:17

Yeah. That's a great idea, Laurie.

Lauri 29:22

If they are listening, Karen is available to help you. And Karen, I'll be here all week. Um, I will definitely put how to connect with you in the show notes. And I love to ask people to say verbally what is the best way in case someone's driving their car and they want to try to mentally remember it.

Karen 29:43

Yeah, that websites nextwithcaren.com. So what you're doing next, nextwithcaran.com.

Lauri 29:53

Love it, love it. And do you

Final words for the leader with their hand on the door

Lauri 29:56

have any like a final word that you want the untamed leader out there who has something unique, who is either standing inside of their comfort tame house with their hand on the door, or who's walking outside in the hall of mirrors dark trek to their park. What do you want them to know?

Karen 30:27

What I want them to know is that that's a thing that they really want to do. That's real, it's needed, and it's possible. If you stop waiting for it to become urgent, it won't, it's important. You have to create the urgency and by just taking the first step.

Lauri 31:00

Thank you. All right. Now it's time to

Pivot Pivot: rapid-fire questions

Lauri 31:04

slide into the Pivot pivot. Karen, what is your favorite word?

Karen 31:20

I don't know if this is my favorite, but it just came to me perceptive.

Lauri 31:26

What is your least favorite word? Moist. What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally? Vulnerability? What turns you off? Arrogance. What's your favorite cuss word? What sound or noise do you love?

Karen 32:09

The wind in the trees.

Lauri 32:12

What sound or noise do you hate?

Karen 32:17

Um children crying makes me sad.

Lauri 32:25

What profession other than the ones you've already done in your life would be fun to try?

Karen 32:37

Oh gosh. I'm a natural horsemanship trainer. Very specific.

Lauri 32:51

Horses have been a theme in my life lately. Oh, yes. Yeah. Um, final question. Karen, what do you hope people say about you on your 100th birthday?

Karen 33:06

I can't believe she's still skiing and mountain biking.

Lauri 33:10

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I have really enjoyed chatting with you.

Karen 33:18

Likewise, thank you.

Lauri 33:20

Yeah. And if you're listening and this touched you in some way, if you see yourself in what we're talking about, or maybe see a friend in what we're talking about, please do all the things. Share the episode with that friend, review it, follow it, um, so that we can spread spread conversations like these to more people out there wandering in the mirror wilderness. And I will see you back here next time.