Are you ready to discover how blending intuition and unconventional practices, like astrology and past life regression, can lead to extraordinary success in your career?  

Lauren Reed is the CEO & Founder of REED Public Relations, an award-winning Nashville agency recognized as Best Boutique Agency and a Best Place to Work. Named to multiple 40 Under 40 and Most Admired CEO lists, she is celebrated for her leadership and culture building. 

She also cofounded Wealth of a Woman, a community helping women align finances with values, and is an active member of EO and WPO. A global speaker, Lauren blends business acumen with a distinctive philosophy: spirituality belongs at work, and rest can be a growth strategy. 

In this episode, Lauren Reed shares her journey of integrating spirituality into the workplace and the remarkable results it has brought to her business and personal life.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Discover how aligning your spirituality and personal values can bring more fulfillment in your personal and professional life.
  • Explore how unconventional tools like astrology and past life regression can improve decision-making and leadership.
  • Understand the importance of creating safe spaces for women to discuss taboo topics like money, spirituality, and personal challenges.

“Life puts you where you need to be and throws events at you that look like obstacles and hurdles, but ultimately you can end up in a really beautiful place from them.”

– Lauren Reed

Topics Covered:

00:00 – Introduction to the episode and guest Lauren Reed

00:40 – Overview of Lauren’s background and her agency, Reed Public Relations

02:11 – Explanation of EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization) and WPO (Women’s President’s Organization)

03:16 – Lauren’s current role and her transition from CEO to a passive owner

04:41 – The catalyst for Lauren’s spiritual journey: extreme burnout and personal challenges

06:27 – The introduction of astrology and its impact on Lauren’s life

08:28 – How Lauren integrated spirituality into her business practices

10:41 – The results of using astrology in team building and leadership

12:39 – The success of Wealth of a Woman and its grassroots initiatives

14:09 – The taboo around discussing money and wealth among women

16:39 – The challenges women face in bringing spirituality to work

18:41 – Advice for women exploring their spirituality in a professional context

20:58 – The importance of aligning life with core values

Ways to Connect with Lauren Reed:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Lauren Reed

So many women have not aligned their lives, their spirituality, their personal budgets, their physical health desires with their core values, like the core values of who they are. 

Like Lauren Reed, what do I value out of life and what do I want out of life looked very different than the life, the practical life I was living.

Sarah E. Brown

Hello everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. 

I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

My guest today is Lauren Reed. She is the CEO and founder of Reed Public Relations in Nashville, Tennessee, an award-winning agency recognized as Best Boutique Agency and a Best Place to Work, with Lauren named to a number of 40 Under 40 and Most Admired CEO lists. 

She has co-founded Wealth of a Woman, a community helping women align their finances with their values. She’s also an active member of EO and WPO and speaks globally. Her point of view is what makes her stand out. 

Spirituality belongs at work and rest can be a growth strategy, All of which we’re gonna talk about today. 

Lauren blends real operating experience with unconventional tools. think sabbaticals that reset how you lead, and surprising sources, yes, even astrology and past life case studies, that sharpen decision-making. 

She really embodies the dichotomy of spirituality and astrology with impressive seven-figure business growth, which she’s done more than once entirely from scratch. 

Welcome, Lauren.

Lauren Reed

Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. 

Sarah E. Brown

So tell us what EO and WPO is. 

Lauren Reed

Oh, so EO is Entrepreneurs’ Organization. It is a group of, the last time I heard, 14,000 members worldwide. 

It could have increased. The chapter I’m in here in Nashville has between 300 and 400 members, and it’s you meet with a monthly forum and they are like your business board of directors. 

It’s a place for entrepreneurs to be around other owners running million-dollar-plus businesses to share your struggles, your problems, and your successes. 

You know, I didn’t grow up around a lot of entrepreneurs, most of, you know, my friends before I started this business were not entrepreneurs. 

So, you know, as you know, Sarah, as a business owner, an entrepreneur, a high performing leader, you have different challenges and you need to have safe spaces to discuss those.

Sarah E. Brown

I get it. And WPO? 

Lauren Reed

Women’s President’s Organization. So very similar, just women.

Sarah E. Brown

So tell us a bit more about what your current day job is.

Lauren Reed

Yes. So it’s a few things. So I founded Reed Public Relations 14 years ago, about a year ago. So January 1st, 2025, I actually stepped down as CEO. 

So I am simply a founding partner and a passive owner right now at Reed, which is kind of crazy to me still to say that after 22 years in the agency world. 

I started at a PR agency right out of college, stayed there eight years, and have been running Reed for 14. 

So I was always very much client service and very on. But now, last year, I also started with my partner, Teresa J.W. Bailey, a group called Wealth of a Woman. 

And through that, we really…my day job looks like speaking, doing podcast interviews like this, creating content in courses and running small groups. 

We have what’s called taboo dinner parties to talk about all the things we’re not supposed to, such as money, religion, spirituality, body image, diet culture, all of those things and how they play into our life as women and and women leaders. 

So my day right now looks like, you know, checking in with the Reed team, being available, but really I have such a great leadership team there that I’m spending most of my time working with women, which is, it just looks me up so much.

Sarah E. Brown

And what launched you on a quest to develop your spirituality?

Lauren Reed

Oh, life kicked me in the butt. Extreme burnout. 

You know, there’s so many, I guess, so many answers to this, and it’s a really long journey like it is for all of us. But the short answer is, I went through, in 2019 and 2020, I went through a divorce. 

You know, I know a lot of us have been there. And I was 37, 37, 38 during that time, which is, you know, I had been open to my spirituality before. I had my own story, you know, grew up Catholic. Very active in Christian churches. 

And after my world kind of fell apart through my divorce, a friend suggested I see an astrologer. I ended up marrying that man. 

Literally. First, I accidentally got pregnant by him two months after my divorce. 

So, you know, I joke, life throws you for loops to get you to where you need to be. And that was really the beginning of my journey. It started feeling like everything You know, for so long, I’ve done everything that was right. 

And, you know, I’m doing air quotes with that, right? Everything I think the world expected of me or I thought the world expected of me. I mean, it was me putting these expectations on myself. Nobody else, right? 

Go to all the Bible studies, do the right things, grow the multimillion dollar businesses, be the great mom. 

But I woke up in mid to late 30s just dead inside. And I knew there had to be, there just had to be something more. And, you know, I’m just, I’m a firm believer that life puts you where you need to be and throws events at you that look like obstacles and hurdles, but ultimately you can end up in a really beautiful place from them. 

And that is kind of what caused my deep dive. Okay, if this is working in my personal life, you know, how can this improve my business?

Sarah E. Brown

So you started with astrology or that?

Lauren Reed

Yes. That was the first kind of opening my eyes to this. 

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. And so then what did you do? 

So my husband practices what’s called evolutionary astrology. And so that is, you know, it just takes a different lens at astrology and it looks at it through the view of your past lives, maybe what wounds you brought into this life that were not healed and what you’re here to do in this lifetime. 

So I do subscribe to the belief of reincarnation, you know, despite my Catholic and Christian upbringing. And I still do consider myself a Christian. A lot of people ask me that and feel surprised at that. But like, I’m a firm believer. You can love Jesus. You can believe in the resurrection. You can look at your birth chart and study past lives. 

And all of that has only brought me closer to God. So as far as spirituality in the workplace, so he, through the evolutionary astrology, he would tell me things about my chart. I would learn about my chart. 

And it all felt so dead on and just very relevant to my life today. You know, I struggle a lot with abundance or scarcity mindset. I’m hoping to get to the abundance mindset. Right. But I struggle a lot with scarcity mindset in all areas of my life. 

And, you know, after 14 years of running a successful business, never missing payroll, never doing layoffs, never even being close, you would think I would have worked through this, right? 

Like, why am I still struggling with this? 

So I start just reading more about past lives. The book, and I think you and I talked about this book, ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’ by Dr. Brian Weiss was the first book I read. I don’t know, you know, if you’re into or familiar with the Enneagram at all, but I’m an Enneagram 7, so I read something, I must do it, right? 

I learned by experience versus reading. So I immediately scheduled a past life regression session. And yeah. So the stuff that started coming up, I was just like, this, it explains so much to me.

Sarah E. Brown

Did you have trouble finding a practitioner for a past life regression session?

Lauren Reed

Not really. I’m really fortunate that we have a really great one here in Nashville. And my husband, he doesn’t practice it. 

It’s just kind of another layer of his astrological practice, but he is trained in it as well. So he kind of had that network and knew where to send me. No, but for those who are looking, there’s a website, and I might not get the website right, but it’s a certain type. It’s QHHT. 

And I can’t think of what it stands for, but if you Google that, you can find practitioners everywhere and it’ll tell you who in your market is certified. I would definitely, you know, I wanted to go to someone who had years and years of experience.

Sarah E. Brown

So how did you go about integrating all of this into your business?

Lauren Reed

Slowly and then all at once. You know, I’m in the Bible Belt. I’m in the South, right? I’m in Nashville. I have a team of 15 amazing women. 

And, you know, it was always kind of joking, like, Lauren’s dating her astrologer. You know, Lauren’s having her astrologer’s baby. It was kind of a funny, funny thing until I start sitting down. I’m like, guys, do you want to look at your birth chart? 

And like Brad would sit down with them one by one. And, you know, as an employer, like HR wise, whatever, you can’t push your beliefs or anything on people. 

So it was just always an open, hey, if you want to. You know, they would get to know Brad and be like, wait, he’s just a normal business person. Like, he’s not this woo-woo incense, you know, throwing astrologer. 

But as more and more of them sat down and got their birth charts, then I would have access to their charts. And, you know, I would look at it with them. And I really started understanding how I could be a better leader to these women based on their birth charts. 

And that was the key for me. It’s not used in hiring or firing or anything like that. Like, I really, I struggle when, like, even Myers-Briggs disc profile, when any tool is used as a weapon, I think sometimes people can use it as a reason, you know, to not give someone a chance, right? 

So I always say, make your decision on whether they’re a cultural fit and then use these tools to integrate them into your team and to be the best leader to them that you can be.

Sarah E. Brown

That’s a very good perspective. And so what have the results been?

Lauren Reed

Oh, wow. I mean, I’ve used it to build teams. 

Honestly, the three women who are I named as partners, I didn’t do that without deep study of their astrological charts and how they’d work together, how they’d work with me, how I would be able to work with them. Because I talked about that kind of tough 2020-ish year and then rolling into an unexpected pregnancy, going from a mama two to a mama four, because I was blessed with a stepchild as well. 

And it just felt like my whole world was crashing down. And I went into a period of extreme burnout to where, I mean, I stepped away, I finally decided in 2024, I have to step away. 

So I set a date of January 1st, 2025, where I was going to step down as CEO and take a sabbatical. I didn’t know if I would come back as CEO. 

I never thought where, let’s see, 13 months later and I still haven’t gone back. Because I planned on taking a 90-day sabbatical and I never went back because the company was running like a well-oiled machine without me. 

But I used their birth charts to see, OK, this person is really great at business development. This person is a nurturer of our team and professional development. This person has ops written all over them based on certain things in their charts. 

And it has worked beautifully. And it also shows you where we can have some challenges. Like, you know, this person might not be as comfortable on the fly making decisions like Lauren would. 

So making sure we surround them with someone who can or know in those situations, just call me, I’ll back you up. So it’s really, we use it like any other tool anybody would use in a workplace, like the Culture Index. 

We also use Predictive Index. So like, you know, Predictive Index is more in the integration process. The astrology is really used more with the leadership team.

Sarah E. Brown

And so how has the business done? You talked about how you did it as a tool for supporting your team and team building and the like, but how has the business done?

Lauren Reed

Since we first integrated it about three years ago, we’ve doubled in size. 

So we were sitting around a $1.5 million business for a few years, you know, growing a little by little per year, but we were led by an incredibly burnt out leader, you know, and then, you know, with me not touching it last year, truly moving to passive owner, we actually had our best year yet.

Sarah E. Brown

My goodness. 

And so has anything resulted for you besides just getting a break? 

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Lauren Reed

That’s a great question. Getting the break was everything. 

I think, you know, by that break allowed me. And when I say break, it’s not like I just didn’t work because I have another organization, Wealth of a Woman. But that really allowed me to pour into Wealth of a Woman and realize kind of my true gifts. 

And once I got out of the operational firefighting mode that a PR agency is, I mean, any small business is, right? And then you add the client service side. 

And I was a single owner LLC, so I didn’t have, you know, a partner to be backing me up and bouncing ideas off. I always had great employees, but at the end of the day, they were employees, right? 

Now that I’ve elevated these three women to partnership, I truly feel like I have partners. So I could step away. But through Wealth of a Woman, what I’ve learned is, like, I’m not uncommon. 

Like, my struggles are so normal that women don’t want to talk about things. 

So we started having these taboo dinner parties. Where, and one of them actually ended up on the front page of the Nashville Business Journal. And I thought, okay, when I had this idea, because again, Enneagram 7, we have these ideas and then we, we just have to do it to see if it works. 

Luckily this dinner party series worked, but I thought I’m going to invite some all age ranges from like the 24 year old rockstar business owner in town to, you know, the 65 year old real estate developer who’s about to retire, but her name’s on every building in town. Right. 

I invited 10 women. And I was like, I’m going to ask them to come talk about their fears, their successes, their feelings around money. And then I was like, and then I’m going to invite a reporter to sit at the table and write about all of this. And I thought, there’s no way. There’s no way anyone’s going for it. It was so awesome. I know, right? They ended up putting us on the front page. 

But what I, what I learned from that is, and I’ll have to send you the article. It ended up, it shares a lot of conversation from these women and their fears.

ut what it ended up doing was showing like women crave these opportunities. When we launched Wealth of a Woman, we had a standing room only. You know, I plan events and launch products for a living, right? 

So I know you invite this many people to get this many people. So we invited like 250 people hoping for 100. 

We had over 200 people standing room only at Soho House in Nashville because everyone was like, wait, we’re going to go talk taboo? We’re going to talk about money? What? But that’s not polite. 

And like we’re in the South, so it’s extra emphasized for us on what’s polite and what’s not. Right. And I grew up here. 

But it just showed there’s this demand. So, I mean, we developed a completely free course. Like Wealth of a Woman is a grassroots initiative. It is not an LLC model or anything like that. 

It’s truly a grassroots storytelling initiative where we’re creating safe places for women to talk about wealth, whether it’s physical wealth, physical health, I’m sorry, because health is wealth, spiritual wealth, or like the tangible money in the bank wealth that people need for security.

Sarah E. Brown

Hmm. Got it. 

So if you were talking with a woman, I wanna go back again to the spirituality thing for a minute, and then we can talk about Wealth of a Woman, because I know women, well, let’s just talk about the Wealth of a Woman right now, because I know money is a taboo topic. 

So when you have gotten the women to talk about money and wealth, what has it done for them?

Lauren Reed

Well, so what we’ve realized, and I had to realize this myself, like I always joke I’m a failing forward kind of girl, right? 

Like I’ll go for it and I might fail, but I’m always going to fail forward and be two steps in the right direction versus being paralyzed and never having gone for it. But what we’re learning is so many women have not aligned their lives, their spirituality, their personal budgets. their physical health desires with their core values, like the core values of who they are. 

Like Lauren Reed, what do I value out of life and what do I want out of life looked very different than the life, the practical life I was living. Give me an example. Okay. I’m someone who values adventure, family time. my faith, my spirituality, but I wasn’t being true to myself in that, right?

Sarah E. Brown

If I’m still- But you weren’t giving it enough time or why?

Lauren Reed

I think for me, it’s different for everybody. 

Me personally, I was worried what people would think. If I was like, guys, I’m doing past life for aggressions, I was worried what people would think of me. Even though I, in the process, was feeling closer to, you know, I say choose your own adventure, the divine creator, God, you know, I say God, but to me, it’s all there. 

I, on the surface, I was showing up at the Bible studies and furiously taking notes and then secretly studying my birth chart and doing past life regressions. 

Things that I was taught were wrong, were sin. 

So I needed a place to kind of integrate that and be around other women who were feeling the same way. and talking about those things to where I could feel like, you know what, I’m just, and I have, since we’re talking astrology, I have five planets in Scorpio, so if anyone who’s listening, like, knows what that means, it means, like, I am drawn toward the taboo. 

You tell me not to do it, like, I’m doing it, right? 

So I really, I learned to kind of be who I am and be the one to step out and say, okay, women, I’m gonna get us in a circle and I’m gonna share, you know, I have an example where my father, when I was in college, opened up credit cards in my name, ran up $50,000 in debt that I found out about two years later as a newlywed to my first husband. 

But I have never talked about that. I have felt such shame that I did something wrong. And to be able to have those conversations and begin to connect it with, well, no wonder you have a scarcity mindset. 

The rug’s been pulled out from under you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah E. Brown

OK, so why do you think it is so hard for us to bring our spirituality to work? 

So I get it for you that looking at astrology and past life regressions, that aspect of spirituality kind of doesn’t resonate with being in the core of the Bible Belt. I get that. 

But why do you think in general that it’s hard for us to bring our spirituality to work?

Lauren Reed

I think there’s a couple reasons. 

I think number one, and this is just like the most practical reason, but especially as business owners and leaders and managers, I mean, there’s the whole HR situation. You can’t discriminate. 

Like, and not that it’s discrimination in any way, but if I, you know, said, I believe X, Y, Z, and then someone challenges me. And then, you know, six weeks later, they do something that deserves to be let go. Could it turn into that? 

So I find it like a liability conversation. I think that was my fear in a lot of ways. I think, you know, that can be worked around with like, hey, we have these astrology in the workplace session. You can drop by if you want. 

You know, never required. I mean, because to me, it’s no different. I wouldn’t require my employees to attend a Bible study. Right. 

But I do know a lot of corporations offer those. Right. 

So I think that’s one just kind of practical reason. But I really think, you know, I’ve always like softened my language, like I’ve always brought my spirituality work, but softened the language around it. 

Like from day one, my PR agency has had a guardian angel. I 100 percent know that. We’ve, like so many businesses, lived too many situations we shouldn’t have made it through. 

From employee theft to losing, you know, our biggest clients to pandemic where so many businesses were struggling. 

You know, we lost 40% of our clients in two weeks. There are a lot of situations where I look back and I’m like, we shouldn’t have made it through and I alone did not do that. 

But I always danced around it. And I think it’s, for me personally, and what I’ve learned from a lot of the women I work with, it’s just for fear of being pushing your opinion or being offensive or like, I think a lot of times as women, we don’t want to take too much space and that even means with our opinions and our beliefs.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. 

So I want to circle back to the spirituality thing and how you would advise any woman in work, out of work, it doesn’t matter, to begin to explore her own spirituality. 

Lauren Reed

Yeah, I love that question. Begin with yourself first, right? It’s an inside job first and figure out what makes sense to you. 

Because like to me, all paths lead, you know, the Enneagram tells me a lot about myself that is says the same thing as my birth chart does. 

This is the same thing as, you know, my Myers-Briggs or my DISC profile. That tells me the same thing as like even the deeper past life hypnosis regression work does. So to me, I’m less dogmatic to the tool. 

And I just ask women to commit to finding something that feels good for you. You know, a lot of women are more comfortable dipping their toes into the Enneagram than their birth chart. 

So figure out what makes sense for you and then just study it. And like, for me, I did not want to be in Enneagram 7. Like, when I’m reading about all of it, that it’s the type that makes you feel icky because you feel so seen. 

That’s what I was told. Like, I wanted to be an Enneagram one, the perfectionist. Like, I do things right. I am moral. Are you a one? Yeah. 

And like, you’re very, like, you’re reserved. Like, I wanted to be that. You’ve talked to me for 15 minutes, you know I’m not that. 

But, you know, there are some things about a seven, the low side of a seven, because, you know, all the numbers in health are not health. Same with birth charts. 

When I was reading about the low side of a seven, I felt icky because I knew I had that potential and I’d been there at times. 

So I would say pick something to dive into. You know, whether you do it with, like, a consultant. Like, there’s a great, great Enneagram consultant. She’s a therapist, but she also just will do, like, Enneagram work. 

You know, her name’s Katie Gustafson, and she owns a company called The Practice. And they’re in Nashville, but she’s everywhere. But pick one, whether you just do it internally or, and just study that and see where that takes you. 

I don’t think it needs to be an Enneagram 7 free-for-all, a buffet of all things spirituality like I did.

Sarah E. Brown

Got it. Okay. 

So, Lauren, what did I not ask you that I should have that will help our listeners think about the role spirituality might play for them at work?

Lauren Reed

Let’s see. 

I mean, I think, like we just talked about, it starts with, you know, kind of exploring yourself. 

I think another way we do this with mindset around, you know, your spiritual health, your physical health, your financial health, 

So it’s kind of an answer for all three, but it works with any of them, is we do what is called a lifeline. 

And it’s something I learned from Entrepreneur’s Organization, where you literally, you take a piece of paper and you start at zero, your birth date, to today, and you chart the highs and lows of your life. 

And how they might be impacting you in certain areas today. So let’s use spirituality for an example. 

Twelve years of Catholic school, like grew up into a huge Catholic family. So I very much, a lot of my spirituality, what’s right and wrong with the Ten Commandments, it’s sin, right? 

So I’m able to look at kind of challenges I’ve had in my faith today and trace it back to that. And it’s not in a blaming way in any way. It’s a, oh, give yourself a little grace here. 

I got to work through that. It’s more just identifying. And, you know, I’ve done that with my finances. 

And then, like, also, we really like women to align their lives to their core values. And just kind of a quick litmus test. Write out your core values. And before you make decisions, hey, does this match these?

Sarah E. Brown

Got it. Got it. 

Well, Lauren, this has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Lauren Reed

Thank you. 

I appreciate you having me on this very non-traditional topic.

Sarah E. Brown

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. 

If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. 

You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. 

Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown