In today’s conversation, we’re thrilled to sit down with LeeAnn Mallorie, a writer, coach, and founder whose work blends intuition, embodiment, and leadership in a way that feels both refreshing and deeply resonant. Join us at What We Reading as LeeAnn shares the unconventional path that brought her to authorship, the inspiration behind Guts & Grace, and how her embodied approach continues to shape her work. From the challenges of being a young coach supporting underrepresented leaders to the intuitive writing process that “channelled” her book into being, she offers a candid look at her creative life, her breakthroughs, and the future she hopes to build!
Thanks for speaking with us, LeeAnn! First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.
Thanks for asking. My journey as a writer was probably both inevitable and a little unusual. I have always loved words, sound and expression. When I was about six years old and my sister was two, I remember sitting with her with toddler books and essentially teaching her how to read.
But I found in high school and college that I didn’t always want to follow the conventions of traditional grammar or structure, so I didn’t always get top scores in class when it came to writing. This trend carried through when I began to work. The writing that led me to publish my book Guts & Grace was very specifically in service of my clients – both executive coaching clients and also movement class clients (I was teaching dance fitness at the time). I would sit and meditate, tapping into what the person or group was going to need to hear, sense or learn about in our upcoming time together. I’d put my fingers on the keyboard and the writing would just happen. Then I’d share these short pieces and they would become the jumping off point for our transformational work together – and more often than not, something important would get unlocked by the combination of reading and somatic practice.
After a number of years of writing this way, I realized I had both a course and a book. I took myself on a solo retreat and fairly quickly pulled everything together into the curriculum for our Guts & Grace women’s embodied leadership program. Then, a few years later, I took the extra step of adding scientific research and client case studies and published what is now Guts & Grace, the book.
If you asked me today, I’d say the original parts of the book were channeled. But not everyone believes in that sort of thing… so I just say it was written through the wisdom of my body and intuition.
Talk to us about Guts and Grace. Where did the inspiration for it come from, and how was the process of writing it?
As I already mentioned, the process was really an intuitive process of guiding my clients’ transformation, that just happened to evolve into a book when enough of the pieces came together.
The inspiration – that’s another story. When I started working on Guts & Grace, I was a very young consultant and executive coach at a top boutique firm in the SF Bay Area, working with executives from around the globe. Because I was young, I’d often be tasked with supporting the most junior person on the team. Which, at that time, almost 20 years ago now, was sadly often the only woman on the team, or the only BIPOC person on the team. And it became abundantly clear to me that their needs were different, both in terms of leadership development and support for their wellbeing.
Guts & Grace was born, practice-by-practice, as a series of steps women in leadership could take that would help them get a head at work while avoiding the typical pitfalls that lead to burnout. The problem with traditional leadership models is that they teach women to override their bodies and instincts in order to get ahead.
If you want something different, it requires some un-learning. Guts & Grace helps women unlearn those habits and gives a giant, embodied permission slip to build some new ones.
What is the number one goal you want your work to have with readers?
Transformation. Not just for the sake of random change, but for the sake of whatever they feel is missing, depleted or not quite aligned in their lives. Guts & Grace is like a 12-step program for recovering work-aholics and women who were trained to do business like men… and burned out.
If you work through every chapter in the book, you will literally reprogram your nervous system and become a different, more self-determined and resilient kind of leader. (We also walk our clients step by step through this process when they join our Guts & Grace coaching and leadership training program).
At the start of the book I let the reader know that once they finish the introduction, they’re welcome to jump to any chapter that feels MOST needed and start there. Then work through the rest of the chapters like a circle. But the first half lays a new resilience foundation, and the second half gets into purpose and influence, so the beginning is a great place to start.
What do you think makes you stand out as an author?
My commitment to the process of embodiment in the writing itself. Since the work is both embodied and, we could say, channeled, it’s not primarily working on your mind – though it does include a lot of scientific evidence about why the practices work, as well as client examples.
But the main writing sections work more like the experience you have when you drink plant medicine, receive Reiki or sit in a shamanic ritual. Something is getting rewired as you read, practice and complete the journaling questions. Ninety-percent of the time, when you’re ready to move to the next chapter, things have already started to change in your life that make you feel that chapter is exactly right on time.
Clients always say, “how did you know I needed that next?” It’s built that way. I’d say this is one of my greatest gifts and superpowers. Readers experience it a bit like an x-ray vision, that creates intimacy and a deeper invitation to continue down the path.
What would you say has been your biggest success so far?
This is tough. Truly, I see my life as a series of small moments – both successes and failures. Some authors have this one big moment they reference when everything changed. Either a trauma or a big revelation. Not me. It’s been one small step at a time (though some of my small steps might look big to others).
In 2017 I finally achieved my dream of running Guts & Grace as a virtual + live year-long training program with four retreats per year plus individual and group coaching. It’s a small thing… and many people have build programs like this. But for me it felt like a huge win because I finally landed the blueprint of the work that felt most aligned to my soul. Each one of our retreats are actually energetic initiations, so there’s a lot involved to make them happen – and for people to decide to attend! I’m proud that my team and I have been able to do this.
Another big win was the first live retreat we ran in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Testing, masks, teaching outside… the whole thing. But we did it safely and people were literally STARVING for connection. It anchored my commitment to meet in person and transmit the work live, when everyone else is going virtual and even delivering their teaching via AI. Rather than try to keep up, we’re happy to be doubling down on live events in the coming years.
If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?
This is tough. There were a few. Since we’re already on the subject, I’d say The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. When I came across this book, I realized that writing could also be transformative. I grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, so books were really my only gateway to consciousness work and personal development.
A lot of my peers in this industry had the benefit of growing up in California with parents who were already teaching psychology, meditating or practicing yoga. Not me. I now know that Cameron’s simple, accessible 12-step approach was inspired by the recovery community and has been around for a very long time. But at the time it blew my mind. I could take a simple action, answer a few questions, and somehow my life (and in this case, my relationship with my own creativity) was changing.
This book definitely opened me up to the creative path, gave me a simple structure for how transformation could transmit through writing and probably contributed to the development of my informal, direct and invitational style as an author.
What’s one tip you would give your younger self if you had the opportunity?
I struggled a lot as a kid. I was super shy, too smart for my own good, and I ended up getting bullied a lot through middle school and highschool. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I now understand that some degree of neurodivergence and gender questioning were also part of my growing-up experience. I just never quite understood what my peers were doing and why. None of it made sense to me, so I just did my own thing and took a lot of hits for it.
The town I grew up in didn’t really have the resources or understanding of how to deal with a kid like me – so I got a fairly normal work-class education and just figured it out myself. Today, I’m grateful for my super “normal” childhood because I think it helps me understand my clients who didn’t come from privilege or are totally new to the world of consciousness and transformation.
All of it makes me a much more empathic teacher and coach. If I had a chance to go back and chat with my younger self I’d let her know that it’s all going to be worth it. And even more importantly, that she’s NOT crazy… she actually IS that weird.
But the good news is, other people are too (a lot of them!) even if you don’t see any of them anywhere around you now – and when you meet them it will all finally make sense.
And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?
This is a great question. Because I never set out to write a book, I’ve been hesitant to commit to the next one. But we have a very juicy new methodology called ACTIVATE which I will likely develop into a book someday.
Beyond that, I’d say I’ve got a pretty interesting memoir in me (when I’m brave enough to tell all the stories behind the practices and wisdom I share in Guts & Grace)… and I’m intrigued by the intersection of innovation, technology, AI and embodiment – as well as the advancement of human consciousness and the use of our human operating system in collaboration with the unseen forces around us like nature and spirit. So stay tuned for more writing on these topics soon!
Follow LeeAnn and Guts & Grace on their website or Instagram
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
