I’m Katherine Sayson - Kate. A woman of faith, a recovering fawner, and the founder of the Bold Purpose Collective. But long before any of that, I was simply the responsible one ... the dependable one ... the woman everyone could count on, who slowly lost track of herself.
I became a Chartered Professional Accountant. I built a career, served in leadership, helped build systems and organisations that worked. From the outside, I was competent and steady - the woman who held things together, the one you could count on.
What no one could see was the cost. Somewhere very early, I had learned that love was something you earned by being useful, agreeable, and good. So I gave. I accommodated. I kept the peace. I performed competence while quietly losing touch with my own voice, my own desires, my own soul.
Looking back now, I can see I was wearing masks - the over-functioner, the good girl, the chameleon, the martyr. Four faces of the same survival instinct: fawning. Keep them happy, keep yourself small, and you’ll be safe.
And here is the part that took me years to understand: it was brilliant. A child’s ingenious adaptation to stay connected, to stay safe, in a world that didn’t always feel like it. There was nothing weak about it. It simply was never meant to run a whole life.
I gave so much of myself, so nobly, that I disconnected from the woman I actually was.
Loss. Betrayal. The inelegant ending of some of my closest relationships. Cancer. A life I had built, coming apart. I gave and gave until I was utterly drained ... and then something finally broke.
For a while, the breaking felt like failure. I could have let it harden me. By grace, I didn’t. Instead, in the rubble, I was met by something I hadn’t earned and couldn’t perform my way into: forgiveness. Grace. An unconditional love that had nothing at all to do with how useful I was.
Not to the roles. Not to the performance. To the woman God made me to be, underneath all of it.
I learned that self-abandonment may look noble, but it carries a high cost. That responsibility without identity leads to exhaustion. That forgiveness does not mean the absence of boundaries. And that my voice was never a threat to love - it is part of how love moves through me.
I wrote about that whole journey in my book, Remember Who You Are. What I didn’t expect was that it would become the work of my life - walking other women the same way home.
Wise, loving, strong, and deeply compassionate.
Kate is a holistic coach, diverse and professional, with a smile that speaks experience and hope.
Katherine is trustworthy and completely confidential!
You don’t have to disappear to be worthy of love. You never did.
So much of what I now teach is simply what I had to learn the hard way - that the strength everyone praised in me had quietly become a prison, and that returning to myself wasn’t selfish. It was the most faithful thing I could do.
If any of this sounds like your life from the inside, please hear me: you are not broken, and you are not too late. You are a capable, caring woman waking up to who she really is. And that is holy ground.
I want to be honest about my authority here: I’m not a psychologist. What I carry is experiential - I lived this, all the way down, and found my way home through faith. But understanding the why mattered deeply to me, and I want to point you toward the people who helped me grasp it.
Fawning is increasingly recognised as a fourth survival response, alongside fight, flight, and freeze - first named in the complex-trauma work of therapist Pete Walker. And clinical psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton brought it into the wider conversation with her book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves - and How to Find Our Way Back.
Her work helped me look at my own childhood adaptation with compassion rather than shame - to see its brilliance first, before ever asking it to step aside. If you want a deeper, clinical dive into the fawn response, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Explore Dr. Clayton’s book here.
My work begins where the diagnosis ends: the remembering. The returning. The faith-rooted journey back to who you already are.
Today I’m a coach, speaker, and author, and the founder of the Bold Purpose Collective - a growing movement of capable women of faith who are done disappearing.
I help women remember who they are, reclaim their voice, and live from their God-given purpose rather than pressure, performance, or people-pleasing - the two faces of fawning I know from the inside. Through coaching, speaking, and a free workshop called Your Life Is Not Random, I get to walk women home to themselves - the very work, it turns out, I was being prepared for all along.
I’m over seventy. And I have never felt more alive, more called, or more myself. If you’ve read this far ... something in you may be waking up too. I’d love to walk with you.
“You are not the hurt; you are the light beneath it.”
See how we can work together →Start with one free circle. No pressure, no performance - just a warm room, an honest conversation, and the first step back toward your own voice.