 Raeanne Lacatena The Integrated Entrepreneur Raeanne Lacatena and I crossed professional paths about 15 years ago, when our passion for social work and families experiencing complex trauma and grief overlapped at a pediatric palliative care program. We both learned how precious life is and how powerful connection is. For me, I took that work and developed my clinical practice to continue to serve families, complex trauma, and complicated grief journeys - For Raeanne, she took the perspective and compassion to her integrated approach to coaching people to be their best selves. Our friendship has evolved as our personal and professional lives have. Raeanne has created a business focused on wellness, awareness, and growth, with space for both personal and professional transformation. Raeanne believes that in order to be a successful business owner, one must be aware of unhealthy patterns of thinking and behavior, and commit to personal work to allow the best version of the whole self to thrive! The Integrated Entrepreneur sets the bar high for holistic business coaching of mind, body, and spirit for a lifetime of transformation! There are so many opportunities to learn from Raeanne and gain valuable insight and inspiration - individual or group coaching, attending an all inclusive retreat with her, following her on social media or buying her book, "The Integrated Entrepreneur". Check out Raeanne's upcoming retreat here: Fall Insight Room Retreat | 2026 Read the full conversation below! When was your business founded and what inspired its development? I was one of the many people who decided to open something new in 2020, and at that time, I had already been trained and worked as a business coach. My business, The Integrated Entrepreneur opened in October 2020. I actually started my professional career as a mental health therapist and that was a business evolution in itself. It took me a long time as a mental health therapist to realize that I was a business owner. A lot of us in the helping field call our work different things, but they don't always recognize that it is in fact a business. So, I had a business very early in the process of my career with individual clients and contracts and working with insurance companies and different networks of people right in my mental health practice. The inspiration of the business coaching practice opening was really because I knew that I was ready to do this on my own. I had been working with someone else for a long time, and the writing was on the wall that it was time for me to blossom and stretch my wings and do my own thing - and it was a really amazing move. It was empowering to be able to say I am no longer an employee of someone else's business. I am now officially fully a business owner, doing something that I absolutely love. And by then I had realized I was a business owner in the mental health field, but to step out and say I'm actually closing my mental health practice and opening up this business and going all in on it was very, very empowering. I found my purpose. I found my passion, and it was time to stretch my wings. How does your business support mental health and wellness in our local community? I am very protective of the mental health of my clients and of the mental health field. One of the things that I've had to do as a business coach is to learn how to discern when is this coaching and when is this mental health. Sometimes when a client comes to me and I see that their chronic, persistent, or acute mental health needs are the primary thing interrupting their business, I will tell them you need to be working with a therapist, and that is your business plan right now. There is no greater thing that you can do to be successful in your business, than to work with a therapist and take care of your mental health. Sometimes therapy is necessary before someone can benefit from coaching, and sometimes it's reasonable for us to do it in conjunction. I will apply some of the clinical techniques to complement the coaching work as appropriate, but there's a point in time when we have to separate out what is counseling and what is coaching, and so I will often work in conjunction with therapy. I just happen to refer most commonly to Tree of Hope Counseling, especially because I know people coming by a good fit counselor is sometimes the hardest part of receiving services, so it's a very active conversation with my clients. Every single new introduction that I have with them, because they see the letters after my name, I will tell them - while I have therapy skills, I'm not your therapist, and I reserve the right at any given moment to say this is a therapy need, not a coaching need, and it's best that we create a care plan for you to be connected to somebody. What makes your business different from others that may offer similar service? There are a lot of coaches in the world, but not all coaches can reasonably and respectfully use some of the clinical evidence-based practices that I have as a coach. Actually, in my coaching training, I was impressed and happy to see that they discourage coaches from using mental health practices because they're not trained and licensed in that modality, but I am both. So I am a unique flavor of both understanding neuroscience and emotional wellness, in addition to business strategy. I also happen to be a Reiki master, so I understand the energy of it all as well, so bringing all those different pieces together really makes me unique in the marketplace of business coaching. A lot of people will go to business coaching and want help with just the numbers, the KPIs. What is the strategy? How do I get in front of more people, which are very important things to look at as a business coach. But what I teach that's different at the Integrated Entrepreneur, is that we are one human being having lots of experiences, and that if we only look at the KPIs and the strategy, we're missing the human essence of who we are. And a lot of the business owners that come to me, they don't only want to build the currency of revenue, they want to build the currency of relationships, they want to have healthy bodies, and healthy minds. They often are also parents, and they don't want their business to be their favorite child. They want their children to be their priority, and they don't want to sacrifice being present to their lives, to their babies, to the people who they love the most. But they also want to build successful careers, and so finding the way to be all of yourself without losing out on one category or the other is what a lot of people will come to me for. How does your own journey or life experience shape how you show up in your work? My own journey and my life experience shaping what I do is exactly what I teach, that everything that we are as human beings gets to be a part of what we're building in business. I have to say how grateful I am for my career beginnings in pediatric palliative care, and here are a few of the examples that I bring into my work every single day. First, life is not guaranteed. Those children, those kids, they taught me that quickly in my early 20s, because I was bearing witness to things that people don't want to think about or see. These stories are happening in our community every single day. And so, when someone is complaining to me about something that feels small, I have a different perspective because of these rich experiences that these families gave me early in my career. I don't sweat the small stuff as much as other people do, and I help teach them that perspective as well. Life is not guaranteed, tomorrow's not guaranteed. There’s an amazing gift in bearing witness to the miracle of someone going through something hard and still finding the beauty in it - they become the defining moments, they become the greatest teachers, they become the greatest spiritual enlightenment moments, and they become the biggest business building moments. So when something hard has happened as a result of everything I've been through in my own personal life, and by bearing witness to hard things in our career as therapists and as coaches, it's easier for us to say, "Hang on, friend, yeah, you are in the goo, the liminal space, you are in the imaginal cells of the butterfly, you are about to transform, and there's going to be an identity shift, and it's going to be hard, but you are in a beautiful space right now, even though it feels terrible, and I'm here with you”. Business ownership can be stressful - how do you take care of your own mental health and wellness? I often say that I have a village. I have a therapist, a cranial sacral practitioner, an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, and I exercise daily. It is a non-negotiable for me to move my body every single day - and meditation, breath work. I do all the things, and I used to think I was extra and high maintenance for needing all the things, but now I know that practicing putting my oxygen mask on first ensures I'm the best version of myself in service to others. My kids especially - because we do this work all day and I want them to have the best of me at the end of the day. My new favorite one is Visionary Days. I've always given myself little moments of time to step away and think about the business and what I want in the future - but now we do it at a spa, or in the mountains of Denver, because when you take yourself out of your typical space and put yourself in a new environment, it resets your nervous system in an invigorating way. If people were to take away a feeling or message after experiencing your business, what would you want that to be? You are whole, you are enough, you belong, and by virtue of being human, you have the right to be here, your voice is important and deserves to be heard, and what you're building has value. Website: theintegratedentrepreneur.com Social: @raeannelacatena / LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raeannelacatena Comments are closed.
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