Lenore Kantor is a transformational coach, author, mentor, career advisor and inspirational speaker who guides smart high-achievers to greater personal growth, professional fulfillment and higher income by overcoming their blocks to creating soul-aligned work. She is the author of So, What Do You Do? The Authentic Alchemy Path to Find Who You Are, an unconventional guidebook and eight-step path for conscious leaders to discover their work in the world. Lenore’s holistic multi-disciplinary approach evolved over 30+ years as a former corporate marketing executive, soulpreneur and founder of Growth Warrior. She combines empathy with no BS, business strategy, marketing and product launch expertise with intuitive insight and multiple healing modalities. Lenore has been a strategic advisor and outsourced CMO to high-growth businesses, mentored founders across multiple startup accelerators, and is a Capstone and Career Advisor to Bard’s MBA in Sustainability and part of Columbia’s Career Coaching Network.
Lenore’s training includes a Columbia Business School MBA, design thinking, multiple coaching and practitioner certifications in somatics, group process facilitation, energy medicine, shamanic and crystal healing, tarot counseling and modern feng shui. She also leads cacao ceremonies and is a brand ambassador for CacaoLab. Clients appreciate her fierce compassion, commitment to creative possibility and growth guidance to create authentic alignment on an inner, outer and interpersonal level across mind, body, spirit, energy, emotions and environment. Lenore is available for private coaching, professional development programming, workshops, book talks, and more.
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Table of Contents
Please share your origin story with us as we begin.
Lenore Kantor: I spent 20 years as a corporate marketing executive in diverse financial technology companies. After helping to take a company public and subsequently working through a merger and acquisition, I decided to leave the corporate world to start my own consulting and coaching business, Growth Warrior where I advised high growth businesses and leaders on marketing strategy. In my work now, I’m a transformational coach, author and inspirational speaker for conscious leaders, soulpreneurs and founders seeking professional fulfillment through personal growth and I’m author of So, What Do You Do? The Authentic Alchemy Path to Find Who You Are.
You talk about integrating practical, tangible business strategies with personal development and inner work to strike a powerful balance. How do you lead clients and followers to strike that balance?
Lenore Kantor: We have to be practical and live in reality – to know what things are within and outside of our control. This helps us to know our priorities and what we need and then make smart and intentional choices around where and how we direct our energy and attention based on what matters. Everyone needs to find their own balance based on their personal situation and where they are in their lives. Alignment and authenticity come from when we are in sync with our thoughts, words, actions, emotions, energy and environment. When we are living and working in tune with our values, that will be reflected in how we show up and will increase our resonance with others and ability to make a greater impact.
In a world driven by hustle culture, how do you help clients redefine success on their own terms?
Lenore Kantor: This comes back to looking at what matters most to you and rethinking what metrics you use to measure yourself. If you’re constantly driven by extrinsic factors that may emphasize quantity and performance, then it can be easy to caught up in the grind. However, when you create more meaningful intrinsic rewards, like the quality of your relationships, personal wellbeing and health, it allows you to make smarter decisions, evaluate tradeoffs and determine how best to use your energy.
You emphasize authenticity in work and life. What are some key practices for uncovering and embracing one’s authentic self?
Lenore Kantor: We’ve all heard the expression “walk your talk,” and we all know times when we’re listening to someone, but don’t believe them because something seems off. To create more authenticity, we need to be honest with ourselves and others about how we feel and what we need. That doesn’t mean we have to reveal everything all the time, but it requires a level of awareness around what may really going on when we react to something. By understanding our values, priorities, feelings, and reactions, we can then make more conscious choices about the space and places where we want to show up and who we might want to connect with. With all the changes happening in society now, we get to choose where we want to focus our energy.
How does inner work, such as self-love, gratitude, and forgiveness, create space for external transformation?
Lenore Kantor: When we go within – to listen to our heart, our intuition, our gut instincts and sense of inner knowing – we gain access to a deeper sense of truth that resides within ourselves. This gives us an internal lie detector, like an extra sense of knowing, which we can use to guide our choices.
A perfect example that I’ve experienced and helped clients to make choices around are when something looks great on paper, but as you dig deeper, you notice some red flags. These might show up as doubts, uncertainty, ambivalence or discomfort – that sense that something just isn’t adding up. When I’ve ignored those signs, I’ve ended up in challenging situations with bad bosses and when I listened to and followed my own instincts and passed, I often later discovered that I avoided a real headache. So our inner work can guide us to make wiser choices in our external environment. Sometimes the rational mind can believe that it’s hard to walk away from a high dollar amount, but the inner voice can recognize when certain prices are too high to pay and the money alone is not the only deciding factor.
You incorporate holistic and spiritual practices such as shamanism, energy medicine, and tarot into your work. How do these modalities enhance your coaching process?
Lenore Kantor: These are additional tools in my kit that I incorporate depending on a client’s needs, openness and the specific situation. My coaching training has a somatic underpinning, so I often incorporate embodiment practices to support clients to physically experience the impact of what they are doing in their bodies. Similarly, with energy work and tarot, having individuals experience their reactions and feel the shifts opens up multiple creative channels.
To me, while inner work may seem challenging (for example to face one’s fears), it doesn’t need to be difficult,. In fact, it can be inspiring, enlightening and ultimately empowering, dare I say fun. For me, coaching is all about transformation and creating positive change, so that’s the vision I hold for my clients – to step into the best version of themselves to realize what they desire.
What role does environment play in our inner work process?
Lenore Kantor: I studied modern feng shui and believe the energy of where we are can often be more important than we realize. The first step in my process of creating change is about clearing – making space for the new. We can’t step into something different if we’re entrenched in the past, so we need to intentionally open up as a way to allow new possibilities to emerge. Similarly, I’ve noticed clients who don’t realize they are in the wrong company, culture or work space for their needs. Someone who has ADHD should not be working in an open plan office without headphones. You might think this is obvious, but people who don’t understand their inner needs may make poor choices that don’t support them to show up as their best selves.
What shifts do you hope to see in the way society approaches work and career fulfillment?
Lenore Kantor: For me, a powerful change would be to validate individuals’ natural skills, preferences and interests. To not dismiss, diminish or push people to do what their parents did or only focus on the jobs that seem important now (ie. like programming AI). Our society is in need of major changes to sustain the earth and we need innovative thinking, creativity and leaders who are willing to question the old ways of doing things. If we can shift from looking only outside ourselves to compare and integrate our inner preferences and values with the broader goals of making the world a better place, then I think people will feel a greater sense of purpose, engagement and impact.
Brooke Young, VIP Contributor to WellnessVoice and the host of this interview would like to thank Cindy Witteman for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
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