Guides who walk the path themselves.

Chris Sarris

Creator of the Aligned Model · Founder, Soul of Business

"There is no such thing as an ordinary person. We are all extraordinary, but most of us don't know it."

That belief sits at the center of everything Chris does. Beneath every role someone plays and every story they've been told about themselves lives something extraordinary — the natural genius, the gifts, and the purpose that were there all along. Most of us didn't lose it. We only forgot it. Chris's work is helping people remember, and then build a life and a way of leading from that place.

He has spent the better part of thirty years sitting with people in the moments that matter — the ones where something has to change, and the old way of being has run its course. His purpose is simple to say and takes a lifetime to live: to unleash the power of the human spirit in individuals, leaders, and organizations.

The Aligned Model, and the Soul Coaching method at its center, grew out of more than twenty thousand hours of that work with hundreds of individuals, couples, and leadership teams. It isn't a theory he arrived at. It's a map he drew while walking it — one conversation, one life at a time.

How he got here

Chris didn't set out to be a guide. For thirteen years he owned and led a full-service marketing and advertising agency, advising hundreds of companies, their founders, and their teams. Somewhere in those years he noticed that the real work was rarely the strategy on the whiteboard. It was the person in the room — what they believed about themselves, what they were afraid of, and what became possible when they set it down. The coaching found him before he found it.

He formalized that calling through the Coaches Training Institute in 2003, and has been in daily practice ever since. Along the way he developed a 140-hour training and certification path for coaches and leaders who want to hold this kind of space for others.

What it's like to work with him

People tend to relax around Chris. He is easy-going and candid in equal measure, quick to laugh, and unafraid of the honest conversation. He listens for what's underneath the words, and has a gift for taking in a great deal — a life story, a team dynamic, an organization's culture — and finding the thread that explains it. Clients describe the work as feeling less like a program and more like a place of belonging: rigorous where it needs to be, and human all the way through.

That same depth carries into his work with founders and leadership teams. Culture, change, and the human systems inside an organization are where his experience runs deepest — and he brings the whole of himself to all of it, whether the room holds one person or a hundred.

But Chris will tell you his greatest accomplishment isn't a framework or the hours logged. It's the inner work he continues to do each day. He leads from there.

Chris holds a bachelor's degree in Communications and Marketing from Ferris State University. He lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan, with his wife Kristen, their three sons, and their dog Wesley.

Jillian Lorenz

Co-Creator of Aligned · Embodiment & Practice

The body knows before the mind does.

That understanding sits at the center of Jillian's work. We can think our way toward the truth for years and still not live it — because the truth doesn't land in the mind alone. It lands in the breath, the nervous system, the body we've spent a lifetime learning to leave. Jillian's work is helping people come back into it, so that what they know can finally become who they are.

She came to that understanding the long way. Jillian spent more than two decades building a career across consulting, wellness, and education — first a decade advising global businesses at Accenture, then co-founding The Barre Code and growing it into a national franchise before its 2023 acquisition by Barre3. Today she's a Venture Partner at Exit Quotient Ventures, where she invests in and walks alongside founders through scale and exit. In 2024, Michigan State University recognized her with an honorary doctorate and invited her to deliver its commencement address.

Somewhere along the way, she noticed what the achievements couldn't answer. Success can be built on a body that never feels safe. Leadership can run entirely on adrenaline. Jillian had lived it — and she'd watched hundreds of women live it too: capable, accomplished, and quietly disconnected from their own voice, their own body, their own truth.

Twenty years in wellness, including NASM- and AFAA-accredited program development, inform the somatic practices at the heart of Aligned. Nervous system regulation, breathwork, and movement aren't add-ons to the inner work here. They are the ground it stands on — the physical steadiness that makes clear thinking and steady leadership possible under real pressure, and the felt sense that lets a person stay open when everything in them wants to close.

People tend to feel safe around Jillian. She is warm and direct, deeply practical, and unafraid of the moment when a room goes quiet and something real begins to move. She holds space the way she once built companies: with clarity, with care, and with an unshakable belief in what the people in front of her are capable of.

Her work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Self, Vogue, Fit Pregnancy, and more. But if you ask her, the work that matters most is the daily practice of returning — to her breath, her body, and the truth of who she is. She teaches from there.

Jillian is a wife and mother of four.