Meet Sonya Stattmann
Facilitator. Guide. Advocate.
For women in the business arena who are done
adapting and ready to lead as themselves.
The mission behind everything
SHIFTING THE BUSINESS ARENA FOR WOMEN
My mission is to challenge the status quo that exhausts, depletes, and sidelines women in arenas of power.
The business arena was not designed for everyone. It was built from cultures that placed one kind of person, one kind of thinking, and one kind of energy at the centre, and organised everything else in relation to that centre. The hierarchies and power structures. The productivity metrics. The separation of reason from feeling. The body treated as irrelevant until it breaks down. The rewards for those who prioritise output above everything else, and the quiet penalties for those who do not.
And we adapt. Because we feel we have to. Because the alternative is exclusion. We learn to suppress the very qualities that represent our deepest intelligence: the relational, the intuitive, the cyclical, the embodied. All of it suppressed in order to participate in spaces that were never designed to hold us. We make ourselves smaller, more manageable, more palatable. And we believe it is what success requires.
The cost has been enormous. Not just to individual women, but to the organisations, the systems, and the world that has been making decisions without the full range of human intelligence in the room. The exhaustion most women feel in the business arena is not personal. It is structural. And the solution is not better adaptation. It is not more resilience, more strategy, or a more skillful performance of the self the system wants to see. It is reclamation. Women returning to their own intelligence, their own authority, their own essential nature, and building from there.
The business arena needs rebuilding, and we are the ones who will build something new. While we are rebuilding, we have to exist in the current system without losing ourselves. That is what this work is for.
Meet Sonya Stattmann
Facilitator. Guide. Advocate.
SHIFTING THE BUSINESS ARENA FOR WOMEN
My mission is to challenge the status quo that exhausts, depletes, and sidelines women in arenas of power.
The business arena was not built for everyone. It was built from cultures that placed one kind of person, one kind of thinking, and one kind of energy at the centre, and organised everything else around it, the hierarchies, the metrics, the body treated as irrelevant until it breaks down.
So we adapt. We suppress the relational, the intuitive, the cyclical, the embodied, the very qualities that represent our deepest intelligence, in order to participate in spaces never designed to hold us. We make ourselves smaller because we believe it is what success requires.
The exhaustion most women feel here is not personal. It is structural. The answer is not more resilience or a more skillful performance of the self the system wants to see. It is reclamation, women returning to their own intelligence and authority, and building from there.
The business arena needs rebuilding, and we are the ones who will build something new. While we are rebuilding, we have to exist in the current system without losing ourselves. That is what this work is for.
The story behind the work
Living in the Arena:
I know this terrain because I lived it.
I have always been able to feel the gap between who people actually are and who they are performing. As a child, I named what I felt in others and quickly learned that not everyone wanted to hear it. So I turned that sensitivity inward, trying to understand what I could feel but could not yet name.
The arena is not built for congruity. It teaches us to survive, and survival requires burying: building identities that are accepted, suppressing the parts that are not, adapting so completely that eventually we mistake the adaptation for ourselves.
I fell into that trap too. I over-explained myself in rooms that did not ask for explanation. I softened my observations to make them easier to receive. I made myself smaller, more palatable, more careful, exactly what the arena asks of the women inside it. I would wake up to it, choose differently, and believe the pattern was broken, until the next layer revealed itself. I am still in that cycle, not as someone on the other side of it, but as someone who has learned to see it clearly enough to make a different choice.
I became obsessed with understanding the gap between who we are and the identities the arena asks us to take on, not just in myself but in every woman I worked with. I watched it happen in thousands of conversations across decades, and I kept asking the same question. Why did we keep burying ourselves under so much weight? That question became the work.
What I built inside the arena:
I have always held the conviction that the arena could be more congruent than it is. That women could live more fully, more honestly, more aligned with who they actually are, even while still standing inside it. That congruity is not a spiritual concept, but the actual foundation of a life lived well. These convictions have driven everything I have built.
What I built was not a series of businesses or programs. It was a way of working with our biology, our psychology, and an arena that keeps asking us to adapt and deny our truth, built in hundreds of rooms and across thousands of conversations. Each one refined the next.
For years I labelled it in ways that did not quite fit. Business coach. Wellness coach. Corporate trainer. I packaged the work to be palatable, ironically adapting the very thing meant to offer a way out of adaptation, inside an arena that rewards exactly that kind of shrinking. The labels kept narrowing what it actually was, until I stopped using them.
What I offer now is the map I wish I had been given. Not a formula, but a body of knowledge that bridges biology, psychology, and business, one that allows us to unbury ourselves and live more truthfully, inside the arena or anywhere else.
“Sonya is like no other coach or mentor I have ever worked with. Her genius goes beyond business structures to the much deeper self-work, the work that dismantles and heals the personal blocks standing in the way of what your heart truly desires.”
~ Bec Ampt
Fun facts about me:
coffee bliss
My own machine, measured to the gram, every morning. A true coffee snob.
source of joy
Being in nature, traveling, and time with the people I love most.
Astrology
Scorpio Sun, Pisces Moon, Cancer Rising. Depth-seeking & highly intuitive.
secret pleasure
Curling up with a good book or a deeply engaging and honest drama series.
Best nomad stop
Mexico! Where we spent eighteen months as a traveling family.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
For more than two decades, I have worked across coaching, facilitation, training, and program design with women, founders, and teams. The work has taken many forms and found many containers, but the essential question has always been the same: what does it actually take for human beings to function well, lead honestly, and build something that lasts?
My practice is grounded in nervous system science and trauma-informed methodology, including certification in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, and more than two decades of applied work with real people in real circumstances.
Over 10,000 hours of 1:1 coaching and facilitation More than 500 workshops, keynotes, and facilitated sessions delivered in person and virtually Host of three public podcasts with more than 280 episodes, including Women in the Business Arena, ranked among the top business podcasts at its peak Co-founded one of the first coworking spaces in Austin, Texas, integrating wellness, yoga, childcare, and business support for founders and entrepreneurs
Watch me in action…
TEDx: MOVING BEYOND #EMPOWERMENT
In 2017, I gave a TEDx talk in Australia. It was the beginning of a question I am still exploring: what does it actually mean for women to reclaim their own authority?
“She doesn’t offer a template or a solution but holds space for one to uncover their own truth. Sonya’s decades of lived business experience and rich internal world create an effective mix of depth and her ability to see people for who they are.”
~ Anna Kochetkova
Ready to begin?
Wherever you are, there is a place to start
Work with Me
Private weekly sessions for women ready to do the deeper work.
Retreat with Me
A private, multi-day retreat designed entirely around you.
Regulation Toolkit
A self-paced audio path to regulating your nervous system.