✦ Kerry's Story
She didn't just write the book.
She lived it.
Kerry Pastine has always been someone who goes all the way in. Into her coaching practice. Into her music. Into her art. Into her life. That quality — full presence, no half-measures — is exactly what makes her extraordinary as a guide.
She began coaching in the late 1990s, years before "life coaching" was an industry, drawing from her own experience in psychology, years of self-inquiry, and an instinct for human truth that couldn't be taught in a certification program. She built her practice in Denver, Colorado — working with artists, creatives, restaurant owners, tech companies, designers, and musicians who needed someone who could hold the full complexity of a creative life alongside the deep work of knowing oneself.
In 2012, Kerry crystallized her framework into Know Thyself — a guided journal that quietly changed the lives of hundreds of readers. The six-chapter framework — Discover, Understand, Accept, Nurture, Be, Design — was the distillation of everything she'd learned guiding clients through every kind of life reinvention.
"I wrote the book I wanted to read and work with, but never found. A tool, not a diversion. Something that helps you connect with yourself on the page."
In 2013, Kerry stepped away from coaching entirely. Not because she was done — but because she wasn't done enough. Her band was calling. The road was calling. The canvas was calling. She fronted rock bands across the country, wrote and performed music that she'd been putting aside for years, and found her way to the visual arts — painting with the same intensity she'd brought to every other pursuit.
Over the next decade, Kerry's art found its audience internationally. She exhibited in galleries across the US and Europe. She kept performing. She kept living, loudly, on her own terms.
Then life interrupted. Loudly, completely, and exactly the way it always does when you've been putting off the next chapter.
Through her pandemic journaling — pen and paper, always pen and paper — Kerry came to a radical clarity: she wanted to move. Not just cities. Countries. She and her husband packed their lives and moved to Lisbon, Portugal. What looked from the outside like a bold romantic adventure was, from the inside, an initiation.
Within months, she was in the grip of a narcissistic relationship that would take everything she had to leave. Immigration was brutal — paperwork, bureaucracy, financial hemorrhaging. Her nervous system unraveled. She couldn't sleep. She cried daily. She was depressed. Then came the physical: chronic fatigue, skin problems, panic attacks.
She used her own framework to come back to herself. Pen and paper. The questions she'd been asking clients for decades, now asked of herself. It took longer than she expected. It cost more than she imagined. And it gave her something that can't be faked: the lived authority of someone who has actually lost herself and found the way home.
By 2025, two things were clear: the world needed the work again — perhaps more urgently than it ever had — and Kerry had more to give than ever before. She returned to coaching. She rewrote Know Thyself completely, emerging with Take Back Your Self: the same six-chapter journey, fully transformed for 2026 and beyond.
She is now based in Lisbon, working with clients globally. She is still a musician. Still a painter. Still someone who goes all the way in. The difference is that now she's also been to the bottom and back — and she knows, from the inside, that the way home is always through.
