Leah Harper is an area faith-centered life coach who specializes in helping women find peace, purpose, and healing. As a certified life coach, she works with clients individually and in retreat-like settings to help them build confidence and emotional resilience, navigate life transitions, view self-care as a non-negotiable, and be free from burnout and overwhelm.
“I’ve hosted a total of seven women’s retreats at Kraus Farms. I incorporate horses because it helps the women learn to slow down, and to spend time in nature with a larger animal that they have to learn to trust. It’s been a beautiful experience,” Leah says.
She has also written a book called Through a Daughter’s Eyes, that is part memoir and part guided workbook that is designed to help women that are walking through life carrying invisible wounds while trying to hold everything together.
Prior to her work as a life coach, Leah spent 10 years as a Child Life Specialist, helping children and families facing fear and uncertainty in hospital settings. In 2020, just days before the world shut down due to the global pandemic, Leah left her position at the hospital to be a stay-at-home mom.
But not long after that transition, she began to feel the effects of not only the pandemic and helping her then five-year-old son with his virtual schooling, but also the overall demands of motherhood. Leah began slipping into a mother and wife that was tired, stressed, and snapping at the ones she loved.
“I recognized that I needed to work on some inner stuff and acknowledge the internal little girl within me that I had ignored my entire life.”
She points to the pain that surfaced during that time as pivotal to her healing and her future. It’s what led her to work with a life coach, which she attributes to helping her learn emotional regulation and other coping skills, leading her deeper into her faith, and helping her take the next step in her career.
“I’ve really been coaching people throughout my whole career, but I didn’t actually see it that way at the time. Working with my life coach was such a valuable experience that I knew that would become my next step in life,” Leah shares.
After working with her own life coach, Leah made the decision to pursue her formal training to become a life coach so she could help other women and has been a life coach for two years. She has certifications through the Take Action Coaching Academy and SSLS Mindset and Life Coaching.
About the memoir
Around the same time she began working with her life coach, Leah began documenting some of her painful childhood memories on her phone and sharing vulnerable posts on social media. The responses she received from her social media posts made her realize how many women are dealing with their own trauma and don’t understand what they should do with it.
Soon after, Leah decided in addition to her life coaching business she could help even more women if she compiled the videos she’d recorded of herself sharing parts of her story into a book. Through a chance meeting at a women’s networking group, Leah found Little Black Book Publishing and the publishing company helped her share her story with the world.
Through a Daughter’s Eyes is a memoir that follows Leah from early childhood through her late thirties as she reckons with the lifelong impact of her father’s addiction, abandonment, and eventual imprisonment for murder. Leah shares moments from her life with honesty and vulnerability and does so in a way that will resonate with women who have experienced childhood trauma, have felt guilty about succumbing to the stresses of motherhood, or grappled with how to become a cycle-breaker for themselves and their families.
She weaves stories of what it was like to grow up as a little girl who admired a father struggling with addiction, with the latter portion of the book moving toward healing, forgiveness, and spiritual awakening, and a guided workbook to help readers begin their own healing journey.
If you would like to learn more about Through a Daughter’s Eyes, it is available for purchase on Leah’s website. You can connect with Leah on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, or learn more about her life coaching business on her website.
Small Town Socialite 