Katherine M. Sauer, Ph.D. is a scholar and a creative. She has an inquisitive mind, a mystical heart, and a creative soul. Katherine believes fostering the vitality of the human spirit – hers, yours, humanity’s – is one of the most important things we can do in life and work.
Her consulting practice, Ardent Acumen, is focused on thought partnership for people with big ideas. Katherine’s first book MOTIVATED AF: Align Your Inner Drive for Performance and Fulfillment without Burning Out is forthcoming and is dedicated to the high achievers who don’t want to be told to slow down. She previously built a holistic leadership development practice serving conscious leaders who want to change the world with energy to spare, and has herself held leadership roles within a national nonprofit, an investment advisory firm, and in higher education administration. Katherine began her career as an economics professor.
Bismarck, North Dakota is her hometown, but you'll have to listen closely to hear any trace of that accent. Colorado has been home for the past two decades. She enjoys creative pursuits like painting and dancing and loves to travel. She is an avid meditator and is intrigued by the metaphysical side of life. An herbivore, Katherine enjoys plant-based gourmet cooking. Puns are her preferred style of humor. Her last name is pronounced "sour” like a lemon.
Katherine began her career as an economics professor and established a research agenda in the areas of intellectual property rights in the international trade context (i.e., parallel imports), the market for medical tourism, and the scholarship of teaching and learning within the economics and personal finance disciplines. She was honored with numerous teaching and research awards and other accolades.
Alongside her professorial endeavors, she was active in the K-12 teacher professional development space. She has personally trained over a thousand Colorado teachers on the state’s academic content standards for economics and personal finance, delivered engaging trainings, and developed an on-demand curriculum for elementary teachers.
Katherine was invited to design and deliver a multi-week faculty development training for the entire business school at Eurasia University in Xi’an, China. She helped launch their center for teaching and learning, perpetuating best practice for scholarly inquiry and the science of student-centered pedagogy.
Katherine was the inaugural director of financial wellness, education, and research for the University of Colorado system, overseeing programming for employees and students. In this role she administered a prestigious multi-year grant from the Council of Graduate Schools, managed the $3 billion employee retirement program’s transition from a vendor model to a recordkeeper and open architecture model, and created a nationally recognized employee financial wellness program. In this role she became a frequently requested speaker and facilitator at the national level. She was a scholar in the Center for Consumer Financial Decision Making and a TIAA-CREF Institute Fellow.
At a boutique investment consulting firm, Katherine served in a high-visibility role doing the firm’s educational outreach as a leadership and financial education speaker locally, regionally, and nationally. She oversaw the team of retirement plan analysts and coordinated RFPs for recordkeeper searchers. She also served on the capital markets research team, responsible for monitoring the global macro-economic environment, asset allocation modeling, and portfolio construction.
As vice president at National Endowment for Financial Education, she oversaw the $200 million operating foundation’s research, programs, and strategic impact. In this role, Katherine served as a national expert on financial well-being research and programs, and was a sought-after speaker, delivering engaging presentations, insightful panel participation, and high-profile remarks (e.g., U.S. Congressional briefing).
Currently a research fellow at a social sciences think tank, and publishing every couple of years, she maintains loose ties to this space.
To cope with the demands of professional life, Katherine began exploring various work-life wellness disciplines in 2008. She discovered yoga and meditation were powerful stress management tools, adopted good sleep hygiene to cure three decades of insomnia, cleaned up her diet, and learned to take good care of herself during work travel while still performing at a high level. In parallel, she curated frameworks and honed competencies related to personal productivity and email, leadership and management, effective communications, change leadership, strategy, and coaching.
During an 18-month personal sabbatical from the 9 to 5 world, Katherine created and released FocusMinder, an app with quick, workday-focused guided meditations. Since retiring the app, she has reposted several of the tracks on the Insight Timer platform.
When Thrive Global (Arianna Huffington’s foray into work-life wellness) was first launched in 2016, the platform featured twelve of Katherine’s essays on work-life wellbeing topics. Eight more were subsequently published.
Katherine founded Burnout Proof Leaders, a holistic leadership development coaching and training practice focused on serving conscious leaders. Programming centered on the dual priorities of exceptional modern leadership and a well-lived life.
Five of her articles on work-life wellbeing topics have been published at Women on Business.
MOTIVATED AF: Align Your Inner Drive for Performance and Fulfillment without Burning Out is Katherine’s first book and is dedicated to the high achievers who don’t want to be told to slow down. It takes you from relying on a burnout-inducing drive to excel, to a place of sustainable performance and fulfillment, without dialing back your ambitions for career success and a well-lived life.
As an artist, Katherine creates works featuring bold geometrics, colorful abstracts, and themes from the economics discipline. She works primarily in acrylics and mixed media such as paper, fabric, and glass. While she has enjoyed arts and crafts since childhood, it was in 2006 that she began her artistic endeavors with the devotion of a creator. During the pandemic, she held a solo, pop-up exhibition to share her works and it was truly a “bucket list” item that felt meaningful and joyful.
Katherine’s first creative love is dance. The feeling of full-body movement set to music releases all thoughts from her mind and makes her feel expansive and free. She danced continuously from second grade through the first year of graduate school. Her first job was at age 13 teaching dance at the studio where she trained. From there she quickly became in-demand on the side, choreographing routines for little girls in pageants. Being on the junior high and high school dance teams was her favorite thing about her teen years. She was a choreographer on both, and senior year her team won first place at nationals. In college she performed and choreographed for the university’s contemporary dance company. The summer before graduate school, she was offered a position in a professional dance company, but turned it down since she was moving out of state. Her one regret in life is that she didn’t defer grad school by one year to give professional dance a shot. She kept dancing her first year of the economics doctoral program and taught classes that first summer after. Dance slowly fell out of her schedule, but complex-choreography step aerobics was an okay substitute and offered at the student rec center. Regular dance classes made their way back into her life around 2012. Today, she deems her week a success if she takes at least three dance classes.
Katherine’s current consulting practice incorporates creative and embodied intelligence into thought partnership services.
Katherine has earned credentials across a diverse array of disciplines.
A voracious learner, she is always learning something new through intensive self-directed inquiry.
You can connect with Katherine on LinkedIn.