About Stephanie
The person behind
the work.
Twenty years at the intersection of performance psychology, neuroscience, and what it actually takes to train — and compete — at your highest level.
Origin Story
Why Kaizen?
Why this work?
Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement — adopted by organizations like Honda to reflect that everyone, from the CEO to the frontline worker, contributes to shared progress.
Stephanie High lived in Japan for seven years. She didn't just encounter Kaizen as a business concept — she lived it as a way of being. The philosophy of small, intentional improvements holds particular resonance for the women she works with: high-achievers who've been sold the myth of overnight transformation, and who are exhausted by the pressure to perform through whatever is happening inside them.
A Kaizen Catalyst is a person who guides others through the improvement process. Together, the name represents her philosophy: meaningful, sustainable growth happens through small intentional improvements guided by awareness, science, and human connection.
Her background as an athlete — triathlete, marathoner, gymnast, and lifter — combined with her academic training in performance psychology, gives her something most coaches don't have: she understands the mental load of sport from both sides of the research.
Expertise & Credentials
Performance Psychology
Mental skills, emotional regulation, sustainable high performance, neuroscience of stress and recovery
Mental Skills Training
Focus, confidence, emotional regulation, pre-competition routines
Athlete Development
Youth and student athletes, identity, motivation, mental toughness
Trauma-Informed Sport
Injury recovery, performance anxiety, pressure from coaches and parents
The Approach
Enough safety to be honest.
Enough structure to grow.
Science-grounded
Every tool and framework draws from peer-reviewed psychology, neuroscience, and organizational research. Not intuition dressed up as expertise — actual evidence.
Built for competition
Every skill is trained to hold up under the specific pressure of competition — not just in the session, not just in practice, but when it counts.
Whole-person focused
Performance isn't just physical. Sustainable high performance requires mental, emotional, and physical systems working together. We train all of it.
As Seen In
Spokane Journal of Business
Feature, October 2025
JFKSOPSS Virtual Research Conference
Future Research, April 2026
Washington State Speaking Circuit
Conferences & Organizations
Sports and performance skills training
Your mental game is trainable.
Book a consultation and let's identify exactly where the mental side is costing you performance.
