About · Lisbon, Portugal

She goes all the way in

Kerry goes all in. Whether it’s her music, her art, or moving to a country where she didn’t know a soul, she just goes for it. That kind of lived experience is exactly why people trust her to guide them on their journeys.

Twenty-five years of the work, then it happened to her

Kerry started coaching in the late ’90s, long before it was a mainstream industry. Backed by a psychology background, her own deep questioning, and a knack for hearing what people don’t say out loud, she built a thriving Denver practice that she ran for fifteen years.

In 2012, she mapped her framework into six core chapters, each starting with a single question. It became a guided journal called Know Thyself, passing hand-to-hand for a decade.

Then, at sixty, she moved to Lisbon and lost her footing entirely. She spent three years using those same six questions to rebuild her own life on paper. That hands-on reset is the difference between the woman who wrote the original journal and the woman who wrote this book.

She knows the road because she has walked it in both directions.

Late 1990s  /  2012

The Denver years

She built her practice purely on word of mouth, working mostly with painters, touring musicians, chefs, designers, and founders: people whose work and personal life are completely intertwined. For fifteen years, she was the person they trusted with the things they couldn’t say anywhere else.

How the framework was born

She developed the six chapters one client at a time, only seeing the full pattern after years of work: Discover, Understand, Accept, Nurture, Be, and Design.

2012  /  2013

Know Thyself

It was never meant to sit on a shelf and be read. It was built for a pen, meant to be written in and used over and over. Hundreds of people worked through it, filling the pages as they went.

Stepping out of the office

Kerry wrote Know Thyself in 2012 as a way to capture her practice before making a hard pivot. In 2013, she shut her doors to hit the road and play music full time.

2013  /  2022

Bands, canvases, the road

She fronted rock bands across the country and wrote the songs she had been putting off since her twenties. She started painting in the middle of her daughter’s illness, as something to do with her hands at three in the morning, and it turned into a practice that has since hung in galleries in the United States and across Europe.

What shifted it

Her mother died, Me Too happened, and then the world shut its doors and she found herself journaling every morning with the calendar wiped clean.

2022  /  now

Lisbon, and the way back

She and her husband moved to Portugal for what was supposed to be a romantic new chapter, but Lisbon brought unexpected trials. A predatory friendship cost them deeply, both emotionally and financially. Combined with the stress of settling in a new country, Kerry’s body eventually hit a wall with chronic fatigue and anxiety.

How she found her way back

Sitting alone with pen and paper, Kerry turned her own six questions on herself to rebuild. That process reshaped her work: in 2025, she returned to coaching with a fully revised, renewed vision of her book, evolving Know Thyself into Take Back Your Self.

Kerry Pastine in her studio in Alcântara, Lisbon

Why Lisbon

Because it was the brave thing

When people ask why she moved at that age, she tends to say it was terrifying, and that anything that terrifying is usually the right move. She and her husband had been dreaming about it and writing about it for years, and at some point staying put started to look like the bigger risk, because their life in Denver was comfortable and closing in at the same time.

What followed was harder than either of them planned for. Kerry has been open about all of it, publicly and with clients, on the grounds that honesty is the only container strong enough to hold this kind of work. Every question she puts to you is one she has already answered on her own page.

Lisbon is home now, properly and expensively earned. The light gets into the paintings and the pace gets into the sessions, and the city has taught her what it costs to begin again somewhere that is still learning your name.

Where the light ends up

The artist and the guide are the same person

The creative work comes from the same root as the coaching, which is a refusal to live a life that looks like somebody else, and that is why artists and makers have always found their way to her. She describes the creative life from inside it, because she is in it this week with the same problems you have.

01 Rock vocalist and songwriter Three decades of stages She has fronted bands for thirty years, most recently Kerry Pastine and The Crime Scene. The voice is loud, unguarded, and set on sounding like herself. 02 Painter, oil and acrylic Exhibited in the US and Europe She paints big gestural canvases that have the same quality as her questions, direct and unfiltered and felt before they are thought about. The subjects are cities, instruments, abstracts and a long-running series of cats. 03 Author of two books Know Thyself, Take Back Your Self Her writing sounds like her coaching, which is the point. It is warm and direct and built to get through to somebody who has been avoiding themselves for a while.

Who ends up in her calendar

She mostly works with women over forty-five who find themselves at the start of an unplanned chapter, and with creative professionals of any description who have lost the thread of why they started.

Painters and makers Touring musicians Restaurant owners Design studios Founders and tech Women after divorce Women over 45

The short version

25 years Guiding and mentoring
Two books 2012 and 2026
Lead vocalist Multiple bands, thirty years
Painter Shown in the US and Europe
Based in Lisbon Originally Denver, Colorado
Clients worldwide Sessions over video

Press kit and bios How she works

Start with twenty minutes

The intro call is completely free and unscripted. You talk, Kerry listens, and by the end, she’ll give you a straight answer on whether she’s the right person to help.

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