Ceal “Coach KB” Starks is the founder of Ready to Live Soap Therapy® and the creator of The Sensory Reset™. With over twenty years of corporate leadership and talent acquisition experience, she bridges performance culture with sensory based healing to address burnout at its root. After navigating personal loss and professional disruption, she transformed her own regulation journey into a structured wellness framework that has served over 14,000 participants. Her work focuses on nervous system regulation, preventative wellness infrastructure, and designing environments where clarity, resilience, and sustainable performance can thrive.
Name:
Kabisa “Coach KB” Starks
Family dynamics:
I am a wife and a mother of four, and that shapes everything about how I lead. I have built this business while navigating teenage sports schedules, college transitions, marriage, and everyday life. My family keeps me honest. They see me beyond the founder title. At home, I am not the wellness expert. I am mom. I am wife. That balance reminds me that success is not just scale, it is presence. My children also inspire my work. I want them to grow up understanding regulation, boundaries, and self awareness in a way many of us were not taught.
Hobbies/Pastime:
I genuinely enjoy stillness. I enjoy quiet reflection and designing ideas in my mind before they become real. I love creating experiences from scratch. I also enjoy cheering people on. I was a cheerleader growing up, and that spirit never left. I am energized by helping people see what they are capable of.
Business/Talent:
I am the founder of Ready to Live Soap Therapy® and the creator of The Sensory Reset™. My talent is not just soap making. It is environment building. I see how stress lives in people’s posture, speech, and decision making, and I design structured sensory experiences that help regulate that. I combine my background in talent acquisition, leadership, and mindset coaching with sensory science to create infrastructure for healing.
Where are you from?
I am from the East Side of Atlanta, but born in Nuremburg, Germany, yes, an Army Brat. My family is from Boston, and my roots influence how I build. There is resilience here. There is community. There is faith. I carry all of that into my work.
What are you passionate about? What is the driving force behind it?
I am passionate about helping people regulate before they break. I have seen burnout normalized for too long, especially in high performing and marginalized communities. The driving force behind my work is changing that narrative. I want people to understand that emotional regulation is strength, not weakness. I want environments to support people instead of draining them.
What is your skill set?
I bring together twenty years of corporate leadership experience, recruitment strategy, human behavior insight, and certified mindset coaching. I understand how performance culture operates. I understand how stress accumulates. And I understand how to design systems that shift it. My skill set is strategic, but it is also intuitive. I can read rooms and design for regulation.
What sets you apart from others in your field?
What sets me apart is that I understand pressure from the inside. I spent twenty years inside corporate America recruiting, leading, building teams, and watching how performance culture operates. I understand KPIs, retention metrics, productivity expectations, and executive decision making. I have also personally navigated burnout and rebuilt from it. That dual perspective allows me to bridge two worlds that rarely talk to each other effectively. I can sit in a boardroom and discuss performance outcomes, and I can sit at a table and guide someone through regulation. I do not approach wellness as a trend, a retreat, or a temporary morale boost. I approach it as infrastructure that directly impacts capacity, clarity, and sustainability. That combination of corporate insight, lived experience, and structured sensory design is what makes this work different.
What is your purpose in life?
My purpose in life is to create environments where people can access clarity. I have seen how chronic stress clouds judgment, distorts perception, and impacts how people lead, parent, and live. When the nervous system is regulated, thinking sharpens. Emotions stabilize. Decisions improve. I believe many people are not lacking intelligence or ambition. They are operating from overstimulation. My purpose is to design spaces and systems that interrupt that cycle. Whether through Soap Therapy® or The Sensory Reset™, everything I build centers around helping people return to themselves so they can move through life with intention instead of reaction.
If you could choose any career in the world, would you still choose this one?
Yes, I would still choose this work. It is not separate from who I am. It integrates my corporate experience, my personal healing journey, my leadership style, and my faith. It also opens the door for the larger vision I carry, which includes public speaking and contributing to conversations at scale through articles, panels, and platforms. I do not want to just build programs. I want to shape dialogue around burnout, regulation, and performance culture. This work allows me to teach, to speak, and to advocate in rooms that need these conversations. It feels aligned, and alignment matters more to me than prestige.
What would you tell your younger self?
I would tell my younger self that her worth is not measured by how much she can endure. For a long time, I believed strength meant carrying everything without complaint. I would tell her to listen to her body sooner, to recognize the difference between ambition and self abandonment, and to rest before exhaustion forces it. I would tell her to trust her instincts earlier and not wait for disruption to choose alignment. Most importantly, I would remind her that she does not have to prove her value through overperformance. She is already enough.
Knowing what you know now, would you change anything?
No, I would not change it. The burnout was painful, but it refined me. The loss forced clarity. The discomfort sharpened my discernment in ways comfort never could. Those seasons stripped away ego and exposed what truly mattered. Without them, I might have continued performing instead of aligning. This work was born from disruption, and I would not trade the clarity that came from it. I do not romanticize hard seasons, but I respect what they revealed. They shaped the depth, conviction, and intentionality behind everything I build today.
Who are your role models?
My mother, Mawakana White, is one of my greatest role models. She worked in a male dominated industry, HVAC, at a time when women were often dismissed before they were heard. She faced harassment, doubt, and people telling her what she could not do. Instead of shrinking, she built. She became the first woman in Georgia to own her own HVAC business, and now she is building again with Gram’s Jam. Watching her navigate resistance without losing her work ethic or her faith shaped how I move. She taught me resilience is not loud. It is steady. I am also inspired by women who build with integrity. Women who are not chasing attention but are focused on impact. Women who understand that visibility means nothing without substance. Those are the leaders I study.
What would you say to those starting out in your field?
I would tell anyone starting out in this field to take it seriously. Study deeply. Learn nervous system regulation and trauma informed principles, not just aesthetics and vibes. People are trusting you with their emotional state, so your work has to have structure and integrity. Build a real foundation before you chase visibility, because attention without depth will collapse. Get clear on your values and protect them early, because growth will tempt you to dilute what matters. And regulate yourself first. Your presence sets the tone. You cannot guide people into safety if you are operating from anxiety, urgency, or burnout. Your nervous system is part of the work.
What is your favorite quote? Explain.
My favorite quote is “Protect your peace.” It sounds simple, but it is not easy. Peace is not passive. It does not just happen because you want it. It requires boundaries, self awareness, and the discipline to say no when something disrupts your alignment. For a long time, I equated being strong with enduring everything. Now I understand that strength is knowing what not to carry. Protecting your peace means choosing environments, conversations, and commitments that support your nervous system instead of draining it. It is an active decision to prioritize clarity over chaos. And in my life and work, peace is not a luxury. It is foundational.
If you were an animal, what would it be and why?
If I were an animal, I would be an elephant. Elephants are calm, but they are powerful. They do not move in panic. They move with intention. They are deeply connected to their community and protective of their own. They are emotionally intelligent and highly aware of their environment. That resonates with how I lead. I value steadiness over noise. I believe strength does not have to be loud to be effective. Elephants also have strong memory, and I carry my experiences with me in a way that informs how I build. Grounded. Observant. Protective. That is the energy I bring into every space.
What inspired your gift and vision?
My gift and vision were born in my lowest season. Losing both of my jobs stripped away the identity I had built around performance. It forced me to sit with who I was without a title, without constant validation, without busyness. That pain exposed something I had ignored for years, how normalized burnout had become in my life and in the lives of the people around me. The gap became clear. There were high performing, capable people everywhere quietly dysregulated and calling it ambition. My family gave me the reason to build something different. I wanted my children to see strength modeled with regulation, not exhaustion. And as the work grew, the thousands of participants who trusted me confirmed that this was bigger than my own healing. Their openness, their stories, and their transformation expanded the vision beyond a session. What started as survival became structure. What started as personal became purposeful.
What is your favorite holiday and why?
Christmas is my favorite holiday because it represents faith, family, and reflection. For me, it is not just about gifts or decorations. It is about gratitude and presence. It is a time when everything slows down, when family gathers intentionally, and when I am reminded of what truly matters. Christmas also centers my faith. It reminds me that even in uncertain seasons, there is purpose unfolding. As someone who built something meaningful out of one of the lowest seasons of my life, that message resonates deeply. Christmas brings warmth, tradition, and perspective. It allows me to pause, look around at my family, and remember that the greatest success is not what I build professionally, but what I nurture at home.
Do you have any regrets?
I regret not listening to my body sooner during my corporate years. There were signs. Chronic fatigue. Irritability. Mental exhaustion that I justified as ambition. I was high functioning, so I convinced myself I was fine. I equated pushing through with strength and saw rest as weakness. Looking back, I realize I was normalizing dysregulation. I do not carry shame about it, but I do carry awareness. I rectify it now by honoring my limits, protecting my energy, and modeling regulation openly. I teach what I had to learn the hard way. And in many ways, that lesson is what shaped this entire journey.
What has been your biggest accomplishment?
My biggest accomplishment is building something meaningful from one of the most uncertain seasons of my life and watching it impact thousands of people in tangible ways. It is one thing to survive burnout. It is another thing to transform that experience into structured healing that helps others regulate before they break. But what makes it most meaningful to me is that I built it without losing my presence at home. I remained a present wife and mother while building this vision. Success for me is not just scale or visibility. It is alignment. It is building something impactful without sacrificing the people who matter most.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years?
In five years, I see The Sensory Reset™ fully integrated into corporate environments, airports, hotels, healthcare spaces, and large scale activations. Not as an add on, but as part of how environments are intentionally designed. I see organizations understanding that nervous system regulation directly impacts retention, leadership clarity, and productivity. I also see our work expanding digitally through Mood Chemistry Lab and structured training models that allow the framework to scale responsibly. In ten years, I see sensory regulation as standard infrastructure. Just like fitness centers became expected in corporate spaces, regulation rooms and sensory systems will be expected. I see this becoming global, culturally adaptive, and research backed. Personally, I see myself mentoring founders and leaders who are building sustainable, purpose driven systems. I do not just want to build a brand. I want to help shape a category.
If you could leave a lasting legacy, what would that look like?
If I could leave a lasting legacy, it would be a structural shift in how we understand human capacity. I want nervous system health to be normalized in homes, workplaces, and schools. I want burnout to stop being worn like a badge of honor and instead be recognized as a signal that something needs recalibration. I want healing to be accessible, culturally aware, and structured, not mysterious or stigmatized. I want environments designed with regulation in mind so people do not have to break down before they slow down. If future generations grow up understanding that clarity, emotional stability, and sustainable performance all begin with nervous system health, then this work will have done what it was meant to do. That is the kind of legacy that outlives a name.
Coach KB
Founder & CEO, Ready to Live Soaps
Phone: 470-757-3484
Email: CoachKB@readytolivesoaps.com
Website: www.readytolivesoaps.com
