To be relentless is an unfaltering pursuit of your highest potential.
Relentlessness requires a mindset shift that embraces the unknown and moves beyond mediocrity. It’s about finding strength in the face of adversity; it’s about choosing yourself and your truth above all else.
Being relentless is a commitment to personal growth and excellence.
Meet Kathleen Black, an exemplar of a relentless leader, whose story encapsulates resilience, belief, and transformation.
As North America’s leading high-performance business and mindset expert, Kathleen has worked with thousands of highly successful businesses, influential leaders, and globally iconic brands, establishing an impeccable reputation with her result-driven approach. After launching her coaching career in 2009, she became CEO and co-owner of Canada’s first niche real estate team coaching company. She went on to form Kathleen Black Inc. in 2015 and has spearheaded 80% of her clients to rank among the top 1% bracket in their industries.
With a mission to guide influential, powerful leaders to embrace value-centered lives and rise beyond fear to build their own empires, Kathleen is redefining what success feels like in the business realm. Featuring as the Cover of Exeleon Magazine’s Most Transformational CEOs to Follow in 2023, we look into the story of Kathleen Black – the relentless one.
Kathleen faced a tumultuous childhood growing up. However, not one to shy away from difficult decisions, she made the bold choice to pursue the life she was born to lead and left home as a young teen.
A defining pinnacle of her youth, this became the framework for many decisions to follow. Kathleen made an unwavering commitment to choose the path of uncertainty and prioritize herself over painful circumstances.
After successfully self-funding her way to university and graduating with a newborn in hand, Kathleen made another life-altering decision for herself and her new family – she decided to enter the real estate market.
Years of real estate investing led her to start her career as a RE/MAX Realtor. As a newly single mother, Kathleen worked her way to the top and established her name within the first year of her journey. She became a top 1% producer in the largest real estate board in the world, the Toronto Real Estate Board.
Recalling her journey, Kathleen mentions “I was reluctant to become an agent. I was already overworked, undergoing a draining divorce, and finding my footing as a newly single mother. I became a top 1% producer in the world’s largest real estate board with two small children in tow. It wasn’t easy, and I’m not alone in that struggle.”
Following her rapid-paced growth in the first year of working in real estate, Kathleen made conscious decisions to find high-performance systems that translated into work-life success.
She saw firsthand the impact of long irregular hours on personal well-being and mental health among agents and even the most successful business leaders. Research further proved that over 50% of agents worked more than 40 hours after their first year, with little to no time for family and their personal life. The need for a shift became starkly apparent the more she worked in top one percent national spaces, where the secret of the world’s most successful leaders exposed itself to be a lack of harmony and belief that better is possible.
“That outcome wasn’t an option for me. I needed to be able to show up for my children both financially and as a present, invested mother,” she explains.
Kathleen’s high-performance movement to shift from chaos to calm in all aspects of life rose from this very necessity. She asserts, “I don’t believe in a work-life balance because it’s unattainable. Balance is a myth. Have you ever known someone to achieve it? High performance is about shifting into harmony with your values, your goals, and hyper-prioritizing to realign with what’s most important to you.”
Kathleen is a living testament to the business and life that is possible. Her philosophy centers on an unyielding alignment with authenticity and the courage to show up for your highest self. She isn’t inspiring thousands of people with mere ideas – she is living them.
A question with an evolving answer sits at the root of high performance: what does your best life look like? For Kathleen, it means having the freedom to unplug and embark on spiritual adventures for six to eight weeks each year. Whether it’s an 850km pilgrimage across Spain, summiting the Salkantay pass in Peru, or trekking Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Kathleen finds fulfillment pushing her physical limits to tap into life-altering spiritual and psychological breakthroughs.
Kathleen’s motif is digging deeper into self to pour deeper into others. The life she built on high-performance systems is her company’s blueprint for guiding iconic brands and leaders to claim their best life.
Kathleen lives by the belief that impacting others to shift into consciousness is her greatest purpose in life. She knew that her success in creating a vibrant business and personal life was due to the high-performance systems she had developed over the years as an agent.
Recognizing the need for transformational support in the business community, she set out to work on further developing each system, program, and strategy. The result? A robust platform with training and coaching systems designed to provide ambitious businesses with the tools and guidance to create abundance and build a business that supports personal alignment and freedom.
In 2015, Kathleen formed Kathleen Black Inc. centered on her values of love, truth, and alignment.
At Kathleen Black Inc, Kathleen and her team of experts see the core of people as unique individuals who are built to win. For her, tapping into the potential of these individuals is what drives her. “We don’t look at business owners and entrepreneurs as machines built to grind and hustle their lives away for an inch more of a profit margin.”
Since its inception, Kathleen Black Inc. has been responsible for billions of dollars in sales growth annually.
The company emphasizes the importance of energy and momentum to ensure consistent sales growth for its clients. To harness this energy, Kathleen Black’s Elite Performance Coaches work one-to-one with their community using a holistic, comprehensive toolbox of certifications and techniques to develop inner clarity and confidence.
She explains, “Our first priority is guiding them to gain a tangible grasp on their vision. Once they know with clarity what inspires them into action, we align them with targets that will get them as close as possible to that outcome.”
Moreover, Kathleen stresses the importance of helping clients achieve their desired outcomes by understanding their value proposition. She mentions “Every top team or agent we have ever worked with, who multiplied their business, have all worked with this specific approach in order to get the ultimate results.”
According to her, when one combines personal wellness with best-in-class, data-driven systems, the outcomes are unparalleled.
Coaching is only one pillar of Kathleen Black Inc. Kathleen is focused on finding as many avenues as possible to expand her impact and inspire more leaders to take hold of their life’s reigns.
Her training systems have been adapted into bestselling books and headlining keynote experiences. She is currently touring her keynote SHIFT across international conferences as a movement to create profound shockwaves and inspire individuals, teams and leaders to step into a heightened level of consciousness, awareness and alignment.
“My mission centers on impact, and the way that looks will constantly evolve with me.”
Pioneering a shift in the narrative around keynotes, Kathleen delivers an energetic experience from the stage that sparks a collective movement towards spiritual, empowered leadership for over one million ambitious individuals annually.
She believes that love is the highest frequency, and for one to operate at a high level, love needs to be infused at the core of everything they do.
Kathleen explains, “If you don’t love your life, your business and how you spend your time in both of those spheres, you run into the trap of burning energy without any way of refueling. How long can you drive on empty?”
Kathleen’s second bestselling book Relentless to Rise recounts the pains, adventures and triumphs that bloomed from her tumultuous upbringing. However, her story unfolds as a testament to the boundless potential that lies within us all, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
From tragedy to triumph, Kathleen’s relentless pursuit of alignment, truth, and purpose transformed her experiences into a best-selling book that resonated deeply with readers around the world. This literary success soon took on a new form, with the release of the internationally acclaimed documentary, “The Relentless One.”
The two-time Emmy nominated documentary has moved audiences touring international film festivals, garnering praise and winning over 17 film awards. The overwhelming success of the film reflects the impact and inspiration sewn into the story, and its ability to harness hope in viewers who struggle with similar traumatic experiences.
When asked what being relentless means to Kathleen, she shared “‘Relentless’ sounds like a cold word, but that’s not how I see it. Being relentless means choosing yourself and your truth above all else. It’s about getting up so many times it becomes muscle memory.”
Kathleen’s journey serves as a powerful reminder of the fact that abundance can emerge from even the most challenging circumstances and that even the best can become better.
For Kathleen Black, being relentless is not merely a matter of perseverance; it is the act of transforming potential into tangible creations. It involves harnessing the power of pain and using it as fuel to propel oneself forward.
At Kathleen Black Inc, Kathleen has inculcated a culture of collaboration and accountability. Each of the team members embodies an entrepreneurial leadership style while taking ownership of their individual roles.
Talking about her team, she mentions “We thrive because we work with a team of passionate leaders who are willingly accountable for their leg of the business.”
She adds, “I’m grateful for their support, and because of that, I don’t have to enforce a director-like delegation or micro-manage.”
Achieving a team like this has taken considerable time and effort from Kathleen as well as the senior members of her company. As the CEO, she is responsible for understanding at ground level all the moving parts of the business.
Her role is to build training, keynote, and book content to further expand the reach and impact of the company’s mission. However, what’s really important is that Kathleen spends intentional time connecting with her team to understand how to support them personally, professionally, and honor their unique genius.
She clarifies, “Building a passionate team starts with being passionate about them as people, their strengths and their personal goals.” Kathleen oversees the company at a high level to support the team towards achieving their goals, hitting their targets, and developing their direction.
