Katelyn C.
Award-winning Speaker, Nurse Educator, Author/Founder: Beauty After Breast Cancer at KatelynCarey.com
Hospital and Health Care
Education: BethEl School of Nursing, University of Colorado- Colorado Springs
Exeter, NH, USA
Biography
Katelyn Carey is an award-winning speaker, author, and nurse educator who has spent over 20 years helping people survive and recover from physical and emotional trauma. She has held multiple director’s roles and has broad experience across the healthcare industry. Katelyn’s background includes designing and managing training programs for community, pre-hospital and hospital systems.
Katelyn uses science, humor and stories to take the complex science of how and why our brains process information differently when stressed, and turns that science into accessible tools and brain hacks that allow caregivers and other professionals to become effective in giving and receiving information during stressful times. Through her creation of the internationally utilized Beauty After Breast Cancer book, Katelyn learned and utilized strategies for creating trauma-informed education within the healthcare field. Through her clinical education and residency programs, she has demonstrated effective techniques that improve healthcare relationships and decrease turnover and burnout. From the stage of TEDx to keynote presentations at medical/caregiver conferences, Katelyn has routinely left audiences feeling inspired and motivated to change their practices for the better.
Passion
Mission (The Science of Compassion)
***Turning Complex Science into Common Practice***
I help patients and healthcare providers to be more effective in their communications, avoiding the mistakes that cause disconnection, and instead leveraging science based strategies that bring people to full recovery faster and more comprehensively. These trauma-informed tools and techniques will help you and your team to increase trust and satisfaction levels while optimizing outcomes.
Featured Video
I am willing to travel
More than 100 miles
When it comes to payments
I generally get paid for speaking but make exceptions
Topics
Best Story
Imagine for a moment you are on your way to an amazing romantic vacation. The romantic partner of your choice will be joining you...maybe that’s your spouse, maybe that’s Jason Momoa or Selma Hayek. Whatever. I’m not here to judge. You have a gorgeous cottage on a private stretch of beach waiting for you, and you’ve planned several midnight swims in the ocean.
Question. What movie are you NOT going to watch on the plane ride to the ocean?
Do not watch Jaws.
As your bare toes hit the dark warm waters, the last thing in the world you want is to be feeling heart palpitations for all the wrong reasons. And no matter how tempting the person in those moonlit waters may be, I don’t know about you but I’m not going in, because fear is an incredibly powerful motivator.
Many of the decisions that we make are influenced by what lies underneath the water of our beliefs and our personal stories. Fear drives behavior, and it’s by far the easiest way to shove ourselves into survival-brain processing.
Fear changes the way our brains intake, process, and retain information. Suddenly the way we process information becomes way more about perceptual processing than conceptual processing. What does that mean? It means our brains give way more weight to what we’re seeing, or to anything that creates strong emotions in us. We are focused on the things that we can judge and react to quickly, and way less focused on complex or abstract thinking. Fear (or other intense stress) means that we intake, process, and retain information differently.
Origin Story
Hard science and soft science are not opposites, and we can't afford to neglect the natural partnership they make.
I have worked in the trauma recovery space for over 20 years (mostly as an ICU and ER nurse, as well as a clinical educator). Over time I became known as the rescue person who was sent into the most complicated and emotionally fraught situations to obtain connection and calm again. For the last decade I've been teaching nurses, doctors, aids, and other emergency workers how to effectively communicate during times of stress or trauma.
What is trauma-informed communication?
Trauma informed communication means we examine the space between a person who is stressed, and another person who is trying to help them; then we bring into that space all of the science that makes our messages land with the person who needs to hear them. I've done this at the bedside of critically injured or dying patients, I've done this in the midst of highly escalated and violent situations in the ER, and I've done this in the creation of a new type of trauma informed resource for cancer patients that is utilized internationally.
Now I help others to utilize science based tools and strategies to accomplish connection and effective communication with their own clients and teams.
Example talks
Real-life Resiliency Hacks- not the stuff you should do someday, but the truly effective things you can do now
High stress jobs require high functioning (but accessible) science based strategies for self care and team care. This class provides both foundations and advanced concepts for improving resiliency, work/life balance, and general happiness. We’ve all been told we need to try healthy diets, more exercise, mindfulness and good sleep. If being told to do those things worked, we’d have done them already. This training recognizes that good techniques need to be paired with a solid understanding of the “why”, and hacks to introduce healthy habits and ways of thinking more easily and naturally into our hectic lives.
In this presentation, participants will:
Examine the fundamental science of stress and trauma
Learn brain hacks for healthier perspectives and habits
Understand ways to maximize agency and improve team dynamics in day to day practice
Learn how to apply the 3 most powerful aspects of happiness to daily life
Sample Feedback:
“This presentation was deep, insightful, and highly educational. In 20 years in the field I have never before had a workshop where the presenter understood [our stressors] so well.”
Michael, Firefighter/Paramedic 2021
"I really appreciate and respect the Resiliency piece: self-care, understanding your own changes in behavior, and remembering to support colleagues. I have been a nurse for 19 years and have never acquired this kind of information from a hospital. It’s truly important!”
-Asante RN 2019
A Patient Lifeline- how to build patient resources that are engaging, empowering and understood
Science based compassion means taking what is sometimes thought of as “soft science” concepts (like anecdotal patient stories and experiences), and pulling the data from statistics, studies, and evidence-based practices that apply to these areas. Trauma-based studies and science present a wealth of information on how people intake, process, and retain information differently when in a stressed or traumatized mindset. Cognitive science gives us understanding of the way people’s minds make innate errors in judgments and responses to certain situations. These innate errors and responses oftentimes lead to poor decisions- some of which can have deadly consequences (such as up to 8% of women refusing recommended chemo due to unconscious biases tied to Identity Threat).
Using inspiring stories and well established cognitive tools, we will explore the science behind trauma-informed medical education and holistic recovery strategies. You will walk away with a checklist of how to create and optimize your own trauma-informed communication strategies and educational resources.
In this presentation, medical providers will:
Explore methods that improve patient retention of medical education
Examine the trauma-based science behind what keeps patients engaged and compliant with their care
Learn cognitive science based strategies that improve patient resilience, patient decision making, and patient satisfaction
Understand the relationship between trauma processing and altered morbidity/mortality
Sample feedback:
“Mind-blowing and incredibly useful information that will change my practice.” AONN Conference attendee 5/2023
“Excellent speaker and an inspiring topic, this was my favorite presentation from the conference.” AONN Conference attendee 5/2023
The Science of Compassion- A game-changing strategy for decreasing burnout and improving communication
Is it possible to teach good instincts? It actually is. Great communication doesn’t just come from useable tools. The kind of strategies that meaningfully change our practice for the better work because we have a foundational understanding of the science behind them and a perspective shift that makes the use of them feel natural and intuitive. One might call this the science of compassion. Using trauma science this presentation examines interactions that occur in high stress situations and demonstrates science-based strategies that make communication effective in these times. This presentation will teach you a core perspective and approach that accomplishes connection and effective communication with your patients/clients and teams, and helps to ensure you leave each day feeling fulfilled rather than exhausted.
In this presentation, caregivers will:
Discuss how compassion as a tool intersects with and improves self, team and client care
Analyze different interventions and how they affect client/patient care & engagement
Review cognitive research on the ways that stress affects mental processing
Build a toolbox of methods that support you and your team as caregivers
Sample Feedback:
“An open-hearted, inspirational talk that I will carry with me the rest of my life…thank you so much!!”
“Very valuable information when you work in a field dealing with very sick patients in high stress situations.”
“Very engaging speaker, with excellent scientific data to back up the concepts.”
“Amazing. Applicable. Best learning we could ever have asked for in this profession!”