About me

Hello! I’m Katie Cowan. I am a coach, consultant, mentor, educator and creative lady living in Christchurch, New Zealand. Below is a little narrative to let you know how I came to be doing this work.

I am a complex systems and humanity enthusiast, which means I have rarely fit into normative environments or the status quo, and often seek to remake them wherever I can. This is why I work for myself, and why I work with a population equally eager to change things for the better.

I began my career as a civil litigator in top commercial firms, before moving out to establish my own practice. I wanted to transform the status quo, not only for how law could be practised for clients, but also for how law could be practised for lawyers: in both cases with greater humanity and an eye on complex systems theory.

In this time I created The New Lawyer Project, a writing and podcasting series intended to bend the conversation around law and its culture toward greater equity, mental health, and humanity. I published The New Lawyer Companion with LexisNexis New Zealand, and shared dozens of conversations with people all over the industry.

I am also an improv pianist, songwriter, and performer. In 2021 I created a sold out show - Dark Songs with Katie - a narrative piece of entertainment about complex PTSD, and complex humanity, complete with neuroscience, songs and cake. In this piece I reflect on my own complex mental health journey, and the frameworks for making sense of some of the hardest things we go through.

Now, in my work in this practice, I draw on everything I have learned in my previous eras of work and education, but also everything I have learned by experience, by research, and by training, about living in the world as a highly sensitive and gifted person.

After experiencing serious illness, disintegration, re-integration and transformation, I now live a life that is resourcing and rich. I understand the strengths and limitations of my traits and authentic self, and I account for all of that in how I live my life, how I lead this work.

From all that multi-pronged input and development, I see the world, and my clients, through a lens of adaptive complex systems, and with a constant eye on people’s deepest humanity. This is way more fun that it may sound - existential and emotional intelligence, essence-based living, generative work, it’s all so beautiful for this weary and (still) recovering high achiever.

So many of the norms of our capitalist, patriarchal, individualist culture undermine our humanity, and it takes such work and persistence to shed what is not ours, to see what could be, and to move towards that. This is the work that thrills me in my coaching practice.

I really can’t wait to work with you.

Even more about me

It can be hard to get a sense of someone in text, even text where they describe themselves!

If you would prefer to get a sense of my in person vibe, and perhaps understand a big piece of my development, you may enjoy watching my show, Dark Songs with Katie. It’s a deeply personal piece about my mental health background, and even if the work we will do in coaching or consulting will not be about me, or (mostly) touch directly on mental health, it may give you some comfort to understand me a little better.

I mention high sensitivity a lot in the show, and though I did not discover giftedness as a form of neurodivergence until after I made the show, the challenges and nuances of those traits are also clearly part of the story I’m telling.

Click the image below to watch on Vimeo.

About my professional background

Law and commercial background

  • LLB and BA in Political Science from the University of Canterbury

  • Admission to the Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand

  • Practice as barrister and solicitor at Minter Ellison and Buddle Findlay

  • Director of my own boutique litigation practice, Symphony Law

    Coaching and facilitation training

  • Assessment and completion of the Playing Big Facilitators Training by Tara Mohr

  • Assessment and completion of The Coaching Way training by Tara Mohr

  • Currently undertaking Gifted Psychology for Coaches with Jennifer Harvey Sallin at Intergifted (2024 into 2025)

    Creative works of note

  • Author of The New Lawyer Companion: Essays on law, life and humanity, published by LexisNexis

  • Creator of The New Lawyer Project and The New Lawyer Podcast

  • Creator and performer of Dark Songs with Katie

About Symphonia Limited

Symphonia Limited is my company, through which I contract and do both my coaching and consulting work and my creative work.

Its name comes from author Dan Pink’s concept of Symphony, which he wrote about in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future:

“Symphony, as I call this aptitude, is the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair.

Symphony is also an attribute of the brain’s right hemisphere in the literal, as well as the metaphorical, sense. As I explained in Chapter 2, the neuroscience research conducted with functional MRIs has shown that the right hemisphere operates in a simultaneous, contextual and symphonic manner. It concerns itself not with a particular spruce but with the whole forest - not with the bassoon player or the first violinist but with the entire orchestra.”

Since the beginning of my working life I have loved this idea, and it is fundamental to how I approach everything I do.