Cathy Fitzhenry
Cathy “Fitz” Fitzhenry is an author, speaker, strategist, and CEO coach with more than four decades of entrepreneurial experience. She has been in business since 1981, when she launched her first venture at a young age driven by necessity and a determination to create financial independence. Today, she is widely recognized for her work in executive leadership development through Vistage Worldwide, where she has spent approximately 17 years serving as a trusted advisor to CEOs, presidents, and business owners within the world’s leading CEO peer advisory organization. In this capacity, she facilitates high-level leadership development, decision-making, and organizational growth for executives navigating complex, fast-changing business environments.
She is the author of the Heartbeat Series, a collection of six published books with two additional titles currently in development, reflecting her commitment to producing consistent, practical thought leadership. Her most recent work focuses on intuitive leadership and the design of leadership frameworks rooted in internal awareness, clarity, and alignment. Across her body of work, Cathy teaches that human beings possess an innate intuitive intelligence—an internal guiding system reflected in the natural order of life, from biological rhythms such as the heartbeat and breath to the broader patterns of nature. She emphasizes that this intelligence is not abstract or purely philosophical, but a functional form of inner knowing that becomes accessible through disciplined mind management, emotional regulation, and nervous system awareness.
In her coaching and teaching, Cathy integrates leadership strategy, branding, marketing, and business scaling expertise with her intuitive leadership methodology, helping executives build both high-performing organizations and sustainable leadership capacity. She is also experienced in financial modeling, including unit economics and operational scaling strategies, enabling her to support leaders in both vision and execution. In what she describes as the fourth quarter of her professional journey, her focus is centered on mentoring leaders to design leadership intuitively and reconnect with their internal wisdom as a practical decision-making advantage. Working from her home office, she continues to produce video content and LinkedIn thought leadership on topics such as discernment, mastery, and modern leadership, with a mission to help leaders lead from a grounded, clear, and internally aligned state of intelligence and strength.
• CBAP- Business Administration
• Understanding SEC Compliance at the Board Level
• Financial Reporting and SEC Compliance
• Ethics & Compliance In The Boardroom
• What To Know When Interviewing For A Board Position
• Understanding the Role of the Audit Committee
• Vistage Worldwide
• HER
• Member - HerCircleOmaha.com
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I would say keep your vibration plugged in to the energy of love versus fear. There's really only two energies, love and fear. If we plug into fear, that's when our ego gets in the way, tells stories, fabricates things, makes us future trip, and sends us back into history. But if we plug into just the energy of the innate, which is love and has no judgment, that's where things get very crystal clear and that's where you hear your wisdom. When people take the time to figure out how to manage their mind and plug into the right energy, they hear their wisdom, and that's the best advice I ever got. I look at my dad, who grew up and passed on now, but he was given away at the age of 5 because he was too poor. He grew up in an orphanage, ran away at 16, got married young, and stayed married to my mom his whole life till he passed. When he had nothing, anything but just his imagination, he just loved himself. He said I'm gonna build great skyscrapers one day and great buildings, and that's what he did because he was plugged in. When everything was stripped away from him, there was nothing he could do other than just love himself, and so that was an advantage for sure. That's where I learned it from.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I don't care what field they go into, they need to understand the mind and the brain and manage the mind. The brain is the thinking apparatus that sits between your shoulders and runs all your systems and circuits in your body. Your mind is the one that tells the thoughts, and you've got control of the thoughts. When you can manage the mind, you can settle the chaos and the fear. You're gonna go through storms, it's like weather, it comes and it goes. But when you can manage your mind and settle the storms and settle your soul, then you can hear your wisdom, and your wisdom will give you the right information of how to move and where to go. It's trackable, like a key indicator. Understanding your inner wisdom and learning to hear it is the most important strategy in your business. They teach that in other countries, but they don't teach it here in the United States. It's just not part of our religious system. I grew up Christian and have a faith, but we put too much on that and not on our own mastery of what is our inner voice. It tells us when it's not right through an upset stomach, a pain in your neck, a sore back. Start to listen to it, it'll communicate with you. That's what I would tell them, I don't care what field they go into. And they've already experienced it, because it's innate, it helped them walk as a baby.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think the challenges are going away. There was a point where I used to hear that intuitive leadership was very woo-woo. In fact, my first book I wrote 7 years ago was on heart-based leadership and why heart-based leadership and courage matter. People said that was very soft. Now, heart-based leadership is accepted worldwide. And with intuitive leadership, I heard it was a little bit of woo-woo, but it's really come around in the last year, because I always say it's not woo-woo, it's wow. It's W-O-W, working opportunities with wisdom. The world is ready for it. It's growing, and it's exciting, and if I can be the light and the bridge to kind of help people figure that one out, I will do it.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Authenticity and integrity are most important to me. Authenticity means if you screw up, you own it, and you don't go into the fearmonger of 'oh, I screwed up.' You go, that's part of life, you know, I'm learning. Make it right, do my best, get out of it, learn from it. That's being authentic. And integrity is just tell the truth as you know it in the moment. You can get more information and your story changes, but that's okay. Whatever I do, it's always lined up with authenticity, integrity, and the passion to be the bridge to help people understand they've got wisdom. I write about an exercise in one of my books called What Makes Your Heart Sing, and when you understand what makes your heart sing, everything in your world lines up, whether you're going out with friends because you want authentic conversations, or whether you're working in a job amongst people who are authentic and bringing that to you and they have high integrity.