Identity: More Than the Thing You're Known For

Matt Gilhooly (00:00)
Kate picked up a cello at four and half years old because of a boy. She spent the next four decades becoming one of the best in the world, playing with Jay-Z and Nora Jones and many others, touring internationally and living a life that she genuinely loved. And then on a stage in Bermuda as the world locked down, her voice went a little shaky and the audience thought that she was heartbroken. She wasn't. She was relieved. Not because the cello had been a lie, but because she had finally caught up to something true.

what Kate does with that relief and how she finds herself again after a lifetime of being known as just one thing is the kind of story that makes you want to ask yourself some very uncomfortable questions.

Kate Kayaian (00:41)
There was no book out there, no resource, nothing that I could find, certainly no examples of other classical musicians who had stopped, not because some sort of crisis or traumatic event had forced them to stop, but just because they decided in a moment that they were done.

Matt Gilhooly (01:32)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the LiveShift Podcast. I am here with Kate. Hello, Kate.

Kate Kayaian (01:37)
Hello, Matt. Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Gilhooly (01:39)
Well, thank you for wanting to be a part of this and not knowing exactly where we're going to go today, think is the exciting part.

Kate Kayaian (01:45)
I love that, I'm ready.

Matt Gilhooly (01:47)
You know, I think of these conversations as really a blessing. I think of the younger version of myself who felt very afraid to ask meaningful questions, I guess, because I was afraid of the no or being wrong or making someone uncomfortable. And I think that the more that I get to do it here on the LifeShift Podcast about, you know, often really deeply personal things.

think it connects us more. I think it brings people together way more, even if I'm totally off base and wrong, because then we can talk about it and see how my perspective has been shaped by my own experience and the guests has been shaped by theirs. So I'm really looking forward to your conversation or our conversation today.

Kate Kayaian (02:28)
me too. Me

too. think, you know, deep down, we all just want to be seen and asking these questions and having these conversations is a really great way to do

Matt Gilhooly (02:32)
Mm.

It would be nice to be seen once in a while and not seen other times, because I always think, you know, that superpower that they ask you, what would you like? I would like to be invincible. I mean, invisible, but also invincible. I also want to be able to fly, so I don't have to deal with that, or teleport. So I just want to be a superhero, basically. How about you? What's your, what would you, what would your superpower be?

Kate Kayaian (02:40)
Yes.

Both. I'll take both.

Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen.

You know, this is almost embarrassing to admit, but I used to dream quite frequently that I could fly to the point where one day I had to get to a rehearsal and I realized I was late and I'm fully awake and conscious. I was probably 15 years old at this point. And I, the thought came into my head. I can just fly. I stopped myself. I'm like, you cannot fly Kate. And I was like,

Matt Gilhooly (03:23)
I hope you didn't try. Okay, good.

Kate Kayaian (03:27)
But I knew the sensation of flying because I had flown so much in my dreams. I knew exactly how to get started. I knew how to do it. And I knew that I knew how to do it. And I just had this battle between my conscious and my subconscious self of like, but you fly all the time. You cannot fly.

Matt Gilhooly (03:36)
I love that.

Now, you probably saw

that movie, that TV movie in the 80s, The Boy Who Could Fly, and maybe got a little, yeah, I still remember watching that on VHS, but anyway, we digress. Anyway, can you, well, well, I mean, that's true. Now you can fly, that's wonderful, congrats. In 2026, who is Kate? Like, how do you show up in the world? Like, how do you identify these days?

Kate Kayaian (03:48)
I absolutely did. I absolutely did. Maybe that was it.

Do we? don't know. We'll see. It'll come full circle, I'm sure.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, well, on paper, I am a coach and a speaker and an author and a podcaster myself. And I would say that I focus my work on, or I could say my work focuses on helping people, organizations and communities redefine what their potential is and put steps in place to go pursue that.

Matt Gilhooly (04:36)
That's very kind of you. Do you find fulfillment in it?

Kate Kayaian (04:38)
Well,

so much fulfillment, fulfillment. I think that it's what I've done my entire life in various ways, which we can get into. But in my work as a coach, certainly I love working with people as they discover what they truly want to do in life. And I help them go after it. In my own community, I'm an expat here. I'm an American living on the beautiful island of Bermuda.

And I do a lot of volunteer work here. just feel I'm so grateful to get to live here that I want to give back where I can. And there's a lot of that working with people to define how they want to show up for their community and the types of things that they want to see here and making those happen.

Matt Gilhooly (05:23)
I love that for you and it's probably not a career you thought of as a child, right? I think it's just not something that we were, there were certain things we could do and certain things we couldn't do and we went down those gaps.

Kate Kayaian (05:29)
No. No.

I, yeah,

I mean, I know we're going to get into it. mean, I think my, my childhood career of choice, which is what ended up being my career for most of my life was about my own potential. And that was it. Just me, all me. What can I do? What am I capable of? And I love broadening it. Yeah, sure. We all have to do it. I think that it's great and interesting and fascinating.

Matt Gilhooly (05:54)
I mean, that's good. I mean, it could be seen as good.

Kate Kayaian (06:06)
and important and healthy for us to think about our own potential, but being able to take the broader lens and work with other peoples and expand that version of what does this world look like if we each individually are working towards our own potential and what we truly want that potential to be and doing it as ourselves, as individuals, as organizations, as communities, as countries, as friends.

It's a beautiful thing.

Matt Gilhooly (06:37)
Yeah,

it would be beautiful. And I think I say it just that brief snippet would be nice. Because in my own experience, having lost my mom as a kid, I instantly knew that in my brain, not in real life, but I knew that I had to make sure that my dad saw that I was perfect. And I was doing everything he wanted me to do. So every decision that I made, even like school and topics and

All those things were out of the thought that, okay, if I choose this, that's what my dad is gonna be happy that I chose, not what do I wanna do? You know, like I don't even know. know, so I'm still trying to figure that out here in the 40s, but let's get into your story because I'm really curious about what that version is like. So can you paint the picture of your life leading up to this pivotal moment? And you can go back as far as you need to to kind of give us that before version of Kate.

Kate Kayaian (07:32)
Yeah. Well, I'll, I won't do a year by year analysis, but I will start very early on. And that's that I chose the cello as my instrument when I was four and a half, four and a half. My mom, well, you my mom knew that, you know, learning an instrument from a young age was really good for school, for development, for all of these lovely things. And so we had some family friends. The daughter was my best friend.

Matt Gilhooly (07:36)
Yeah.

four and half, okay?

Kate Kayaian (08:03)
she played the violin and the piano and her older brother played the cello. And he was eight at the time and I was madly in love with him. And I knew as a very wise four and a half year old, I knew that we could only get married if we played the same instrument, right? Everybody knows this, duh. So I chose cello. know, my mom had been told she will choose the sound that she's drawn to, no.

Matt Gilhooly (08:31)
because of a boy.

Kate Kayaian (08:32)
my entire life was dictated by the fact that I had a crush on a boy who played the cello. But I did love it. And I happened to grow up in a very fortunate area north of Chicago where there was a great music school, just your normal community music school happened to have some of the best cello teachers in the world teaching there. So I just kind of lucked into that and

You know, all my friends were there. did the whole thing. He did the normal. Like I hated it between the ages of 11 and 13, because when you're between the ages of 11 and 13, you hate everything your parents are making you do. And so I went down this path. It was everything I did. I did youth orchestras. My summers were spent doing music camps, all of my friends, musicians. Most of my friends, parents were professional musicians. It was my entire.

It was my entire existence. I went to a very good music school, New England Conservatory Music in Boston. I was a fellow at the New World Symphony. I got to go to the Tanglewood Summer Festival. mean, everything. It was the best of the best. I was so lucky. I worked my butt off. But also, I was good. I worked for it. And I also had a lot of people.

Matt Gilhooly (09:45)
and you were good.

Kate Kayaian (09:52)
cheering me on and opening doors for me and helping me. I got a lot of scholarships, a lot of financial support. My mom was an elementary school librarian and my dad worked at a hardware store, right? He didn't own the hardware store. He worked at a hardware store. So they didn't have a lot of money. They sacrificed a lot to pay for music lessons for me to do this. I like to my brother, my older brother would have gone on a lot more family vacations if I hadn't played the cello.

Matt Gilhooly (10:22)
Mm.

Kate Kayaian (10:23)
He was a drummer and drumsticks are a lot cheaper than cellos, right? So that went into it, right? Because everybody had sacrificed so much. Everybody had invested so much in me for a couple of decades, know, my twenties, my thirties, I was just so grateful. I got to travel the world. I got to play with the most incredible musicians, classical and non-classical, right? I got to...

I was hired to play with Jay Z and Mary J. Blige. I got to play Nora Jones and John Mayer and Phil Collins. I mean, the list goes on and on. Just incredible experiences that I got to have. And like I said, all of my friends were musicians. That was it.

Matt Gilhooly (11:08)
Yeah, very grateful

for the experience. Was there an underlying feeling about it? Like that you could have chosen something else or did you feel content in what you were doing and moving through the world with?

Kate Kayaian (11:20)
You know, I would joke, you you play a recital and often there's a Q and A afterwards and somebody would always ask, why did you decide to become a classical musician or why did you decide to become a professional cellist? And my answer was always sort of tongue in cheek, ha ha ha. I don't know how to do anything else. And in a way it was true. And everybody, it always got a laugh.

But inside, made me a little sad of like, gosh, I really don't know how to do anything else. Like this has been my entire life. I went to high school. I only went a half day so that I could go home and practice the rest of the afternoon. took all my classes. I started early. I took some independent projects. I didn't have to do gym because I was in a dance group. You know, I made it work so that I could spend my time practicing.

We all had the same schedule. So we all worked every weekend, every Saturday night, every Sunday afternoon. Mondays were our day off, but we all did the same thing. And so it worked. It was fine. And honestly, Matt, there was nowhere in the world I would have preferred to be at 8 PM on a Saturday than on stage performing. Right.

Matt Gilhooly (12:41)
kind

of what kind of feeling was that for you when you were performing? I mean, I think about this is how I'm going to preface this. I think about having done like theater in high school or whatnot. And it's it's a limited run, right? Like you do a show and it's this and then you're like, that was exciting, but it's done. You're doing this like, like I wasn't gonna be in theater professionally, basically was is my story, but you're doing this in and out.

Kate Kayaian (12:48)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Gilhooly (13:10)
Does the feeling come and go? Do you always feel that euphoria type feeling during a performance or like, what is that when you're playing the cello or when you work?

Kate Kayaian (13:19)
Yeah, I mean, some performances go better than others, right? I mean, at a professional level, they all go well, right? You're not, you're not falling apart up there. but whether it was an orchestra or a solo performance or chamber music, if I'm being perfectly honest with you, yeah, there is that rush of excitement after a concert of like, that went really good. A lot of it is ego-based. A lot of it is.

Matt Gilhooly (13:26)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Kate Kayaian (13:45)
the thrill of the audience's reaction, like the applause, the sound of the applause, the standing ovation, the accolades afterwards, the line of people coming to see you and say, that was amazing, that was so great, the dinners afterwards. Eventually I came to see that that was so based around my own ego of like, just made me feel good.

It made me feel like, yeah, I've worked really hard. You know, as a professional musician, you lock yourself away in a room for hours every day by yourself practicing. And then you go out on stage and you hope you're doing it well. You hope they like it. And there's a lot of pressure. And of course it's the best kind of pressure, right? Like it's that performance pressure, but that reward of the applause and like, they like me. They really, really liked me.

Matt Gilhooly (14:42)
It's

okay, Sally.

Kate Kayaian (14:43)
Yeah, thanks. They, I just got kind of sick of it. I just kind of felt like, yeah, sick of the, when I realized the motivation. And then I was pretty close friends with a conductor and he told me a story. It's a very well-known conductor. And he told me a story that he was working with a very famous pianist soloist.

Matt Gilhooly (14:50)
of how you reacted to it?

Kate Kayaian (15:10)
they were doing a concert together and they were backstage and the pianist turned to him and said, you know, sometimes I just feel like a trained monkey. And he walked out on stage and bowed and played the heck out of a Beethoven piano concerto, walked off stage and said, see you tomorrow.

Matt Gilhooly (15:21)
Mm.

Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (15:34)
that really resonated. was like, yeah, everybody out there in the audience is having such a great time. Like it's their Saturday night. They went out for a nice dinner. They got dressed up. They're going out for a night on the town. They get to just sit there and enjoy this music. And I'm out here working and performing for them a little bit like a trained monkey and then so happy that they clap for me. And now, yes.

I loved sharing this incredible music with the audience. I loved that connection, right? It wasn't all bad. It wasn't all narcissistic and one-sided. There were a lot of great reasons I was doing it, but I couldn't shake that idea of maybe I'm doing this for some of the wrong reasons. And maybe there's more I could do that would be less ego-based and more about

helping people and putting something good out in the world. I had no idea what that was.

Matt Gilhooly (16:42)
Right, because you also

have that fear of like, this is all I know how to do, that probably irrational thought, but also at the same time, this is all I've done for so long. perhaps it is the only thing I know how to do.

Kate Kayaian (16:57)
Right. It was all I had done. And so I started just giving myself permission to follow little pieces of curiosity. I was doing some, some work at a very nice, very fancy private school outside of Boston. And I was, they asked, I lived close by. was an easy commute. said, can you just work with these string students do a little like string orchestra? yeah. Okay. Meet them a couple of days a week. Easy.

And then I thought, well, you know, I think the school has a lot of potential here. There's that word again. And I think that they could have a much bigger group. They want, they have a lot of smart kids. They attract smart kids and smart kids often are in the arts as well. The smartest kids are usually athletes and in the arts and do really well in school.

And so I started hanging out in the admissions office, looking to see who was applying. And eventually the admissions office, the Dean of admissions just said, Kate, like, we're just going to hire you. We'll give you a nice office. You can hang out here with us all day long and you bring in those smart, talented students to this school. We're going to pay you to do that. And I said, yeah, that sounds great. And the headmaster called me into his office immediately. He was like, what?

What are you doing? He said, you have a full-time performing career and you're here doing the nice little conducting thing, which is, know, we're very grateful that you're doing anything here. Why on earth would you want to spend any of your time working in admissions? And I said, I don't know. I just have a hunch it's going to help me someday. And one of the first things I did during COVID

was I heard that summer festivals were gonna be, like summer camps were gonna be canceled. And I knew that summer classical music festivals would be canceled. This is what, you know, all super talented high school and college kids spend six to eight weeks at a festival somewhere, work with teachers. It's very intensive and it's a really important part of their development. I knew they were gonna get canceled. And I thought, well, I know how to create a website.

I've been teaching online for years because I was already traveling back and forth between Boston and Bermuda. know where I can source microphones and the stuff that I need, and I have experience working in admissions. I know the software. I know everything I need. I know how to work yield numbers. I had the confidence that I knew what I needed to do, that I had a specific set of skills for doing that.

And part of it was because I followed my curiosity and worked at an admissions office while also being a full-time cellist. I also was curious about marketing. So I took some marketing classes. I took some business classes. I learned everything I could. listened to a ton of podcasts. I read a ton of books and I didn't have a specific thing. It's not like at any point I woke up and said, I don't want to be a cellist anymore. I quit. going to, I mean, there was that moment, but

Matt Gilhooly (20:08)
Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (20:10)
It wasn't a clear like, I'm going to quit shallow and I'm going to start this business doing X. Right. I mean, I had a friend who early on, like she was a brilliant cellist and she's like, I want to be a neurosurgeon. So she went to medical school, right? That was a clear, like, I know what I want to do. I didn't have that. I just knew I wanted to do something else, something bigger, couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I just allowed myself to figure it out.

Matt Gilhooly (20:16)
You're going to be an accountant. Yeah.

You were curious.

Kate Kayaian (20:40)
And then eventually I hit that point where...

the first COVID lockdown hit and it had been announced here in Bermuda. I actually had a concert on March 13th here at home. I mean, not my home, but on the island. And I was about to go on a big tour of the West coast of the U S in April. And I knew that that was going to get canceled. And in fact, there were, you know, a nice, they sold a decent amount of tickets to my little recital cello and piano recital.

but there was a big rock concert happening that got canceled that night because it was like, you can't have more than 50 people. Okay. So that got canceled. Everybody came to my recital instead. So the room is packed. We played a great recital and I got up on that stage and I talked about how the lockdown was starting the next morning. And I said, you know, this is going to be the last time we can all gather like this for a long time. It's the last time that.

we can share music live together in this way. And people remember that I was a little emotional. Like my voice was a little shaky and they could tell I was, you know, feeling a little emotional about that moment. And what they don't know is that I wasn't sad. I was feeling immense relief. And it was that moment that I knew

Matt Gilhooly (22:05)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Kayaian (22:10)
that I was so grateful that for the foreseeable future, I didn't have to be a cellist.

Matt Gilhooly (22:18)
That's a hard one.

Kate Kayaian (22:20)
Yeah, I remember driving home with my husband that night in complete silence.

Matt Gilhooly (22:27)
Did he know?

Kate Kayaian (22:31)
He knew that I was thinking about maybe performing less. He knew that I had had some conversations with trusted colleagues about wanting to step back from performing, all of whom said, you can't, you're not allowed to do that. That's not how this industry works. You're too good. All very nice flattering things, right? My ego was thrilled and my heart was like, please tell me I can just stop.

There was no book out there, no resource, nothing that I could find, certainly no examples of other classical musicians who had stopped, not because some sort of crisis or traumatic event had forced them to stop, which often is the case, but just because they decided in a moment that they were done.

And I had to allow myself for that to be okay.

Matt Gilhooly (23:28)
Yeah, you gave yourself permission.

Kate Kayaian (23:33)
I gave myself permission, and I would like to think that I would have given myself that permission eventually no matter what. But the fact that my entire concert and performance calendar was wiped clear in a moment, it gave me an opportunity to say, good, because that's what I want. And that was the first.

Matt Gilhooly (23:41)
COVID.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (24:00)
I think I was really able to articulate that and admit it to myself. Before it was just like, I don't know, I'm thinking about this and I have a feeling maybe I want to do that. And this was like, no, good. Thank God. Thank you, universe, because this is really what I want.

Matt Gilhooly (24:18)
Was there an element of not stepping back before because perhaps you might let others down or, okay. Yeah. So you just continue on and eventually it's three years later and you're still doing the same thing.

Kate Kayaian (24:26)
100%.

Yeah, I mean, going back to how not only my parents, but scholarship committees and schools, and like, I could not have paid for my education. There's no way. And my parents were like, we don't take out loans. You pay for it, you get it paid for, or you don't go. So all of those people who had poured money and time and care,

into me and I just had to say it's okay.

Matt Gilhooly (25:05)
Yeah. I mean, what is that payback period though? I mean, it feels like you.

Kate Kayaian (25:09)
Yeah. I mean, my father had passed and I had finally, so I did it in stages, right? I stopped performing. I had like, I kept one or I accepted one gig exactly a year later because I figured it was here again in Bermuda. was music that I loved. It was people that I really liked. So I knew like, even if I don't want to go back to it, this is an easy lift. It'll be fun. It'll be fine.

And if I don't want to go back, I'll know. All right. I'm not taking any more. So there was that one. And then the second step was to stop teaching. Cause I was still teaching for the first few years. and when I stopped teaching, that meant I really didn't have to open my cello case. I didn't have to practice.

I could grow my nails long, could wear long dangly earrings, could like, you know, the whole list of things you can't do as a cellist, which seems silly. But it was around that point where my mother was at the end. And I sat literally on her deathbed and asked if she was upset that I had quit. And she looked at me, she's like, what do I care? It's your life.

Matt Gilhooly (26:26)
Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (26:28)
you're alive.

Matt Gilhooly (26:30)
Yeah, I think I mean, there's there's these odd parallels between your story and my story in in the way that I just assumed my dad was going to leave if I wasn't perfect because my mom had left. And as an eight year old, you know, you think a death is abandonment. But here you are attached to your parents put so much into this for you. You have to keep doing this, whether it's to make yourself proud or probably somewhat. The accolades help.

Kate Kayaian (26:43)
Yum.

Matt Gilhooly (26:59)
make them proud of you and all the things that come along with that. But now all the have to's in this version become or give you the opportunity to want to or not want to right or does it because you said I don't have to play I don't have to practice I don't have to open my case but were there moments where you wanted to? Oh wow.

Kate Kayaian (27:20)
Yeah. No, not once,

not once. And that's what everybody said. They're like, you know, you'll always play and like, you know, you never lose it. You're like, you still have your cello. Like you can, people assume I have this conversation with people all the time, colleagues and not colleagues. they say, like, they just sort of assume that I'll just get up in the morning and just take my cello and play some box sweets. Like that's what cellists do. We sit there in the sunshine and play box sweets.

Matt Gilhooly (27:48)
Yeah.

In the breeze. Yeah. Beautiful curtains flowing in the breeze. Yeah, that's what happens.

Kate Kayaian (27:50)
No. Yeah.

I mean, it's what I did

for every day of my life from the age of four and a half until, you know, 47. Every day. I don't think single day went by. Maybe my wedding day I didn't practice, right? Like, it's an everyday thing and just no desire, no need, and not a hatred. That's the other thing. People are like, oh, are you so burnt out? Like, just don't. No, there's no, I'm filled with gratitude for all of the amazing things I got to do.

Matt Gilhooly (27:59)
Yeah.

So no resentment or...

Okay.

Kate Kayaian (28:26)
And it's like when you read a really great book and the ending is really satisfying.

and you put it down, you finish it and you put it down in your bedside table. Maybe the next night, like before you're going to bed, you kind of like think about reaching for the book, but you're like, no, I finished it. I know how it ends. And that's it.

Matt Gilhooly (28:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

What was the final nudge to stop teaching and that final close the case kind of thing for you? Why? When were you finally ready to let go, I guess?

Kate Kayaian (29:02)
started teaching, started coaching. So I'd started my coaching practice, which was growing a lot. And I absolutely loved it. I was writing my book. I hadn't started the podcast yet, but it was a blog at the time. And starting to do some speaking and I just felt like...

Matt Gilhooly (29:12)
Okay.

Kate Kayaian (29:27)
I can't do this part of my life to the fullest extent that I want to and have the time and focus for my cello students. And I can't be enough of a cello teacher I have to do all of this other work. And it just got to the point where I couldn't do both.

Well, and I had to make a choice and this one out, was really, I even then, and I had been for a couple of years just letting my students graduate. So I primarily worked with older, more advanced students. So they graduate high school, graduate college, and I just wouldn't replace them. So my studio was shrinking. I was doing some teaching at the Bermuda school of music, which is a phenomenal place. And I loved it. I loved those students.

And that was probably the biggest decision where I had to just say, no, I'm not coming back. And then it happened. So I made that decision in the spring, April, May. And by that summer, my mom really started declining. And I ended up needing to be in Chicago for most of the fall and winter. There was no way I could have been teaching that time.

Matt Gilhooly (30:47)
Yeah. So, well, I'm sorry that it seems like you've lost your mom since. Okay.

Kate Kayaian (30:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

she passed away that November.

Matt Gilhooly (30:57)
I know what that feels like, but I bet the time that it gave you to spend with her and do those things without the burden, if you will, of a schedule of performing and teaching and all those things. Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (31:08)
Absolutely. Absolutely. was a gift. It was

a gift. Not everybody has that time. I had it with both of my parents at the ends of their lives. Most people don't get to have that. So I don't take it lightly. And like you said, not having the burden of, what am I leaving behind or what am I neglecting in the rest of my life? Like, of course you'd still make that decision, but it was nice just to be free. We're like, okay, I'm going to fly to Chicago these weeks. I'll be there.

Matt Gilhooly (31:38)
Yeah. What was the freest

moment that you felt in your life as it relates to the cello or letting go of the cello?

Kate Kayaian (31:47)
Yeah, which one?

Matt Gilhooly (31:48)
Yeah, what is the free, which one did you feel the freest?

Kate Kayaian (31:55)
I remember the feeling of, and it's interesting. God, nobody's ever asked me that, Matt. I love it. They're very similar. I remember the first day I woke up in my apartment in Boston after I had finished my schooling at New England Conservatory. I had finished my fellowship in Miami with the New World Symphony and I had moved back to Boston to start my career.

And you know, busy summer at Tanglewood and moving in and all of this stuff. And that first moment that I woke up in the morning and my schedule was my own. And I got to figure out who I was gonna be as a professional cellist. That was the most free moment. And likewise...

Again, I didn't quite have that feeling the fall where I was not only not performing but not teaching until sort of January after my mother had passed away. But I do remember a similar thing of like, okay, who am I gonna be? Who am I? What is my life gonna look like? How am I gonna design this?

Matt Gilhooly (33:12)
and you looked at that with a positive eye. That's, I would say that there's a lot of people probably including myself that would look at that as an overwhelm. You you would see, now I to figure this out. Whereas before I knew what was going on and now I have to figure this out. I, there, I, it's probably the cynic in me.

Kate Kayaian (33:15)
absolutely.

Right. I think in both cases,

listen, the unknown is really terrifying, right? Isn't there a new book that's just come out? Like I think two days ago it came out. It's called like how to know the unknown, something like that. and it's about dealing with uncertainty because nobody likes it. think in both cases I had enough, right? Like when I moved to Boston, it's not like I didn't have any gigs.

Matt Gilhooly (33:39)
Yeah, it can be.

Kate Kayaian (33:59)
So I wasn't worried of like, my God, how am I gonna pay my rent? Yeah, I knew I was gonna make money. I knew I was gonna have a career. I had enough people helping me. But it was more that like, huh, do I wanna be somebody who gets up at six and practices until 10, or do I wanna be one of those musicians who sleeps in until 10 and doesn't get going till noon?

Matt Gilhooly (34:04)
You knew the parameters.

Kate Kayaian (34:25)
how do I wanna work this? What do I want my schedule to be? And that was like, this is amazing. It really was just a matter of designing my habits, designing my life the way I wanted to. And the freedom to do it. Yeah, the freedom to do that.

Matt Gilhooly (34:36)
and the freedom to do it.

But on the flip

side, you had already started something. So letting go of the other thing probably wasn't like a blank slate, but rather I can embrace this fully more.

Kate Kayaian (34:56)
You know, when I was teaching...

I think because concerts came back so slowly after COVID and I was teaching through that whole period and doing other projects, but I was still a cellist. I still was moving around with a cello, driving around with a cello, teaching cello. It was still part of my daily life, even though I didn't consider myself a professional performer anymore. But I couldn't help but still identify as a cellist.

Matt Gilhooly (35:19)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Kayaian (35:30)
I would be rude to tell my students that they were not taking cello lessons with a cellist, right? And so for me, the most difficult part of that process was in figuring out my new identity. And I think that this is something that I hear a lot in the conversations you have on your podcast with people, whatever the circumstances of their before and after of like, who am I?

without this person in my physical presence? Who am I now with this physical reality in my life? And I felt that of, like I said, I started when I was four and a half.

Matt Gilhooly (36:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. It's all you knew, basically.

Kate Kayaian (36:16)
It's

all I knew. It's all any everybody. mean, this is my friend Katie. She's a cellist. This is my daughter, Kate. She's a cellist. This is my wife, Kate. She's a cellist. It was how everybody, it was the first thing people learned about me, whether I said it or not. It was the first thing people asked about me when they saw me after a while. How's the cello? How are the concerts? How's your career? Like, where have you played? We played with anybody interesting lately.

Matt Gilhooly (36:41)
Right?

Kate Kayaian (36:45)
And not having that, having to meet people, they say, oh, know, nice to meet you. Like, so what do you do? Which of course is a very American greeting, right? Like they don't do that in the rest of the world. But here in the States, like, well, what do you do? It's a perfectly innocent question not always knowing how to answer that, right? Like, well, I'm an author. I don't have, my book hasn't come out yet.

Matt Gilhooly (37:12)
Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (37:13)
I'm a coach. Oh, who do you work with? Well, I can't really tell you. We do have confidentiality agreements in place, right? You know, everything felt a little bit on the surface because, you know, when all of a sudden done, what does it matter how you introduce yourself? But on the deeper level, really answering that question, who am I now?

Matt Gilhooly (37:36)
Yeah. But who you are

is not what you do.

Kate Kayaian (37:42)
except when what you do is, permeates everything about who you are. It was who my friends are. My friends were all my colleagues. I went to work with my best friends. I went to work every day, went to rehearsals with the people that I had grown up with, going to orchestra with, had gone to music festivals with, had gone to music conservatory with.

Matt Gilhooly (37:44)
who you are.

No, I know, I know. But that's...

Kate Kayaian (38:08)
You know, we had all known each other our entire lives and every conversation you would already know 10 people in common when you met somebody for the first time. You'd been to the same festivals or the same schools. And so you, or you studied with the same teacher. Like there were so many connections that meeting people as a, we call them civilians, right?

Suddenly I'm a civilian and I'm just meeting people and we have what nothing in common like or nothing obvious in common. That was, that was a, I'm not gonna, it wasn't, it was a culture shock. Yeah. I was going to say challenging isn't the right word and scary wasn't the right word. It was just like a whole new world. When I'm in my late forties, 50 years old, like navigating all of that for the first time.

Matt Gilhooly (38:44)
It's like a culture shock.

Yeah.

But I think many people are conditioned that we are what we do, maybe not so ingrained as you were. But at the same time, even then you were more than a cellist. Like you were a human who had, you know, there were other parts of you that we can lead with, but we're not trained that way.

Kate Kayaian (39:24)
We're not trained that way. And especially when literally all anybody talks to you about is you being a cellist. It's like if, if, know, somebody was an NFL football player and had been playing football their entire life and suddenly they're not a football player anymore.

Matt Gilhooly (39:42)
Now they're

I mean, yep.

Kate Kayaian (39:47)
Now they are a commentator.

Yeah. But if they don't do that, if they just decide they want to get out of football altogether, they have to decide like, who am I without this sport? And that's really exciting.

Matt Gilhooly (40:03)
so it's not scary.

Kate Kayaian (40:07)
Discombobulating. Discombobulating.

Matt Gilhooly (40:07)
for you? Okay. How did you

how were you able to come to? don't want this sounds bad come to terms with who you are and who you want to be like, what was that process like for you?

Kate Kayaian (40:22)
I came across this book and like a paper source, you know, a gift shop, they have those like, you know, little journals or books, gift books, and it was called 52 lists. And each week it asked a question and you had to answer the question with a list and it was seasonal. So it was like, you know, third week of December. What are your 10 favorite Christmas movies? Thanksgiving week.

Matt Gilhooly (40:28)
Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (40:51)
What are your favorite family food traditions? Things like that. July, what were your favorite summer activities as a kid?

And it was really interesting to me how many times I had to talk myself out of writing the cellist version. Like your favorite movies. well, as a cellist, of course, they're going to be very sophisticated French and German films and everything. I'm like, no, you know what? I loved, there's something about Mary and...

a good

old merchant ivory rom-com. You know, it's okay. Like this is who I really am deep down. And summer activities. Now I had spent every summer of my life at music camp and I really had to dig deep and be like, you know what? There's always one day I would be home and we'd have a big block party in the alleyway. And I love that. Or, know, oh.

When I was home in between summer camps, we would go to my aunt and uncle's farm and they had peach trees. And we would take a big bag of peaches and we would make peach ice cream at home. Just sort of reconnecting to the non-music parts of my life was a really great exercise for me. And it really helped me connect to who I was at my court. I was always that person.

Matt Gilhooly (42:09)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. That's what I said.

Kate Kayaian (42:24)
I was always that person,

but I was just so completely disconnected from them. So completely like, no, no. The peach things don't worry because I'm just like, I'm already thinking about my next music camp. Right. And then going back years later and saying like, no, I actually really did like that. I like those peaches. That was cool.

Matt Gilhooly (42:28)
Yeah. Yeah.

That's a quite an endeavor, a digging did did did anything come up that you were like, I definitely buried that one. Or anything like in a in a sense of, I guess I say this from my perspective of all the random trauma or grief that I buried, just avoiding losing my mom at such a young age, that in my 30s, when I started to uncover yeah, I

I I forced myself to forget that. Did you uncover things that you were like, wow, I didn't realize or remember that that happened to me? Not to ask for specifics, but just wondering if that came up too.

Kate Kayaian (43:20)
Yeah,

nothing out of the, mean, nothing traumatic, nothing like that. Little things of like, we were having a conversation about like, you know, what we did on weekends as a kid. And I was like, I was at the music center, you know, from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. I was at the music center. And my brother was like,

Matt Gilhooly (43:24)
Okay.

Okay,

Kate Kayaian (43:43)
Dad would drop Katie off at the music center and then he would stop at Benison's bakery and he would bring home a bunch of like danishes and donuts and stuff. And he's like, I would watch cartoons and mom and dad and I would have pastries and, and I was like, wait, what?

Matt Gilhooly (44:03)
There's like a family life that you missed.

Kate Kayaian (44:05)
there was a whole family life that I just was never a part of. And like, he talked about like what they did during the summer. I'm like, yeah, I was so self-absorbed, right? Because I was exactly where I wanted to be with all of my friends, living my dream. I was like, and I don't think we ever reconciled that. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (44:08)
Mm.

Yeah.

That's hard because I'm sure at the same time, your family thought the same of you, like you were out living the dreams and the things that you wanted to do and you were doing so well and they were so proud of you and they probably missed you as part of the family things that they were doing, which is

Kate Kayaian (44:38)
So proud, yeah.

Right,

of course. And I think we always think of them one at a time. Like, you know, it's too bad that Katie's not here. There were some random things that my mother insisted. There was a really big, very important cello congress. I remember it was in Tempe, Arizona. like all of the world's top cellists were going. We were invited to go and play master classes and meet with these. I mean, it was incredible. And it fell on the date of my brother's high school graduation.

Matt Gilhooly (44:46)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Kayaian (45:11)
possibly even like junior high. No, I think it was his high school graduation. My mom was like, no, you can't go to Arizona because you have to be here for your brother's graduation. And I was like, why do I have to be there to watch him? So to her, that was important. And in hindsight, I would say that was not important for me to be there. And she kept saying, nobody's going to be talking about Tempe, Arizona. like,

you know, a few years ago, right before she passed away, a bunch of us were in Chicago and they're talking about Tempe, Arizona. And I just looked at her. I'm like, mm-hmm. You see? But you know, after she passed, one of the, one of the gifts she did, she had cancer. she, you know, she, she knew end was coming. And so she digitized all of the family photo albums. She had tons.

Matt Gilhooly (45:45)
Yeah.

Kate Kayaian (46:02)
dozens and dozens and dozens of photo family albums and she digitized everything. And so, for various reasons, you know, I was just going through them, choosing some photos for something throughout the years. And I was like, I'm not in most of them.

so many family events, because of course, you I'm older, so it wasn't like everybody had their cell phone and taking selfies. Like, it was just only photos of like the get togethers or friends visiting or some event, and I was usually not there. And so that was, you know, sad to see and also made me realize like, yeah, well, this is why I made this choice, because I felt like I was missing out on so much of life.

Especially after I got married, my husband was here. He's not a musician. Our friends aren't musicians. And so, you he'd be like, you know, so and so's invited us to, they're having a dinner party and I'm like, no, I have a concert in New York that weekend. Okay. I realized I didn't want to go to New York. I want to go to a dinner party. Like I want to spend time with my friends and my, and my husband. and I think just, you know, that juxtaposition was pretty jarring.

Matt Gilhooly (47:13)
I mean, I love that the universe kind of pushed you in this direction. It's like you put in your dues and your time and you enjoyed that part of your life. But now you get to create a new version that you can enjoy in a different way that, you know, and it's, it's kind of like living like two lives and, and, and fully embracing both of them. Cause it seems like you did that for the first part. So do you feel like you're fully embracing this, this part of life?

Kate Kayaian (47:29)
Absolutely.

yeah, I love

it. I'm having the time of my life again.

Matt Gilhooly (47:43)
What's

the biggest difference between you now and you before? It seems like just different focus.

Kate Kayaian (47:53)
Yeah, I think I've

always been somebody who, for whom it was important to be in the driver's seat of my career, right? I never wanted to hand over my performance calendar to a management company. I always wanted to design my life in a certain way within the parameters of like, well, concerts are on Saturday nights, But.

I think what's different now is that I have a deeper trust in my ability to figure things out.

I have been, I have started new things, done scary things, dealt with my imposter syndrome. You know, as an adult, when as a cellist, I had been doing it my whole life. I knew how it going to go. I felt comfortable. I knew what I knew. I knew what I didn't know. Right. It was all, it was all the way it was supposed to be. And at the midpoint in my life, starting new projects, starting a new career, I didn't know.

I didn't have that background. wasn't an expert in any of that yet. And I had to just put myself out there and show up with courage and try things and be willing to fail and be willing to learn. And that's what I say to everybody. just, you you've got to, it's courage before confidence. You only get the confidence when you've showed up four or five, six times to do something and, and hasn't killed you yet. You know?

Matt Gilhooly (49:20)
Yeah, no, I

agree. Yeah. I mean, I love your, your approach or your, your vibe, I guess, to, living that I feel, not necessarily in the words that you say, but the way it feels like you live your life feels very like freeing in a way it feels I don't know how to describe what you're putting out there. I love it though.

Kate Kayaian (49:43)
we only

get one and so far we only get one. I part of, you know, I opened my book Beyond Potential with this scenario that if were to die and go to heaven and the first person you meet there is the version of you who has done all of the things that you wanna do.

Matt Gilhooly (49:46)
so far that we know.

I don't know.

Kate Kayaian (50:06)
They've done it. They've run that marathon. They're wearing the medal for the marathon that you keep talking about wanting to do, but you haven't started training for it yet. They speak the language that you keep telling yourself, someday I'm going to speak Italian fluently or French fluently, right? They have gone fishing in Montana. have whatever it is that you've been telling yourself you want to do, what you're,

version of your dream life that in the back of your head, maybe that you know how to fly. don't know, whatever it is. that person's done it. And I asked the reader to just sort of look at that gap of who is that version of you? Cause it was in your head. You imagined it. Nobody told you who that should be. And the number of people that I have taken through this exercise, they never imagine a person who has done the things that other people have told them they should do.

Matt Gilhooly (51:00)
Well,

Kate Kayaian (51:01)
Right? It's never like, yeah, they finally went to law school. Cause my dad has always wanted me to go to law No, it's what you want to do. It's naturally how it works. And then ask yourself why, why is that gap there? Why aren't you doing those things? Why haven't you started learning Italian? Why haven't you started running? Why haven't you, whatever it is. And those are the stories that you need to break through to design the life that, that you want to be living.

And I think that was one of the things that I learned, you know, post-cellist. So, you your podcast is about the before and the after, that life shift. And it was from 100 % of my personality and my identity revolved around being a cellist and then figuring out who I wanted to be and what I wanted my life to look like when I wasn't a cellist, as a not cellist.

Matt Gilhooly (51:58)
So what does your life revolve around now? If before it was being a cellist.

Kate Kayaian (52:04)
living life to its fullest. And that generally means something different every day. I think it is a little bit about one of my younger clients jokingly called it potential maxing, right? Maxing out your potential. So if that's, know, it's taking the time to have lunch with my girlfriends, taking, you know, even if I'm tired going for a walk,

Matt Gilhooly (52:17)
Yes. Right.

Kate Kayaian (52:28)
with my husband and the dog after dinner, cooking good food, growing food, just living, living, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (52:34)
Living.

And

should we all be so brave? Right? I mean...

Kate Kayaian (52:41)
It would be

nice. I think the world would be a much nicer place to live in.

Matt Gilhooly (52:45)
I agree. I agree. And a lot of us are product of the societies that we grew up in and what were prescribed for us that we bought into and we owned. And some of us take a little longer to shake those off. But, you know, we're all trying to do the best we can, hopefully, in this world.

Kate Kayaian (53:01)
Yeah. And,

you know, and just to add to that, I think it's not always things that have been placed on us, right? Nobody ever forced me to be a cellist. My parents forced me to be a, to practice when I was a kid. But when I announced that I wanted to be a professional musician, they were both like, huh. okay. I guess Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist. She could be like him, right? But

Matt Gilhooly (53:12)
Mm-hmm.

What did we do?

Kate Kayaian (53:29)
You know, if we ever heard of like, this guy, you I was a lawyer because my dad made me be a lawyer. And we think, God, this poor guy is like miserable because, you know, somebody made him be a lawyer. And we want him to not be a lawyer anymore. Right? We want him to change his life. And yet sometimes it's ourselves. Sometimes it's a younger version of ourselves.

that had us go down a career path that no longer fits. And we can have the same reaction of like, younger Kate wanted to be a cellist, but 2026 Kate doesn't wanna be a cellist, so she doesn't need to be one anymore, and that's okay. And so I just want anybody listening to this who's feeling like they're on the verge of a shift like that, I just wanna give you permission.

to go, even if it was your choice, you can evolve and pick something else.

Matt Gilhooly (54:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think

there's so much permission that we can get from hearing other people's and seeing how things play out. And then we choose what we want to do. And I think that's what's lovely, but also scary, you know, in some cases, but sometimes you won't know until you try, right? And so you have to, but I also can understand how people can go years and years being too scared to.

Kate Kayaian (54:53)
You gotta try.

Matt Gilhooly (55:02)
But eventually there'll be that little light that breaks through where they're like, today's the day. I'm going to try it. And it's maybe it's not anything big. Maybe it's not like, I'm going to sell everything today and move across the country. But maybe it's like, well, maybe I'll just start looking at things in a different place and little the snowball effect, right? Like things just kind of kind of grow. Like you said, you have to try things four or five, six times before you get that confidence that you can.

of move forward with it. that's what I love about your story is like, I'm sure you had some people like, why would you ever quit that? Because you've met x, y, z person and you've played with, you know, whatever and you've made such a career of it, but also like kudos to you for choosing you again, in a different way, when things aren't serving you in the way that you wanted them to be. think there's so much that we can all take from that is that it's really like, this is so cheesy, but like,

It's never too late to do something new and try something new, right? if maybe when we were younger, right? Well, I mean, I'm mid 40s. When I was a kid, mid 40s sounded really old. That was like retirement, right? And now I'm like,

Kate Kayaian (56:04)
Yeah, I'm an old dog. I learned lots of new tricks.

Yeah, basically.

No, you're basically a teenager, Matt.

Matt Gilhooly (56:16)
No, it

feels so different.

Kate Kayaian (56:21)
But also we do live, we tend to live longer lives now. We tend to be a little bit healthier now. We know how to stay healthier longer, right? Barring unfortunate diseases and accidents and things, but like we know that we shouldn't smoke per se, right? And so, yeah, I think that there's a lot, there are more and more examples of people

Matt Gilhooly (56:25)
Yeah, fair.

Kate Kayaian (56:46)
taking a, having a second life, having a second career. And I just think that that's great. Just go for it. And if, for anybody listening who isn't sure what they want that to be, just use my example, just follow whatever curiosity pops up, allow yourself to just be like, I don't know why that sounds interesting, but it does. Whether it's a class at a local community school or an online course at Stanford, or just volunteering for an organization that just, you know,

Why would you do that? I don't know, curiosity. Follow it.

Matt Gilhooly (57:16)
curiosity. I love it.

Yeah. So if in interest of time, we'll wrap this up. But I'm wondering if someone is like, my God, I love her vibe. I love what she's doing. I want to hear more from her. Read more from her connect with her. I don't know, maybe get coached by her. Like, what's the best way to find you not literally at your house, but find you on the internet interwebs.

Kate Kayaian (57:43)
I will have a coffee. You'll meet my

dog. It'll be great. No, am. Thank you. I am at KateKIN.com and you find everything there. Information about coaching with me. My book, Beyond Potential, is a great guide that I, it's the book that I needed when I was starting this journey and it didn't exist. you know, they said we always write the book that we needed to read.

Matt Gilhooly (57:46)
and reach out to you.

Okay.

Kate Kayaian (58:08)
at those pivotal moments. And so that's what that book is for. And of course I'm on Instagram, so you can hang out with me there.

Matt Gilhooly (58:14)
Yeah, I really encourage people that are listening that resonate with a part of your story or something you said struck a nerve in a good or bad way to to reach out and share their story or share how it affected them because there are a lot of people out there as listeners that haven't shared something out loud before they've you know, they felt you know, maybe something you said validated.

Kate Kayaian (58:27)
Please.

Matt Gilhooly (58:40)
something the way they felt and before was always like, my God, I can't believe I feel this way. And now Kate said it. So now I'm like, not weird, right? Because now I'm a human.

Kate Kayaian (58:51)
please send me a DM or an email. I do check my non follower DMS on Instagram. and people do write me there and just say, Hey, I heard you on life shift podcast. I just would like to say this out loud to somebody. And I would be honored to be that person. I'm sure Matt would too.

Matt Gilhooly (58:58)
Great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah, for sure. This is the whole point of this show is to really be able to one, share in conversation someone's story that I've never met you before. And now I feel like I really know you and understand you in different ways. And other people can hear that and maybe be encouraged to talk to other people in their circles in the same way and just have these really open dialogues because I know it sounds cheesy, but there are so much more that we have in common.

even if our stories are wildly different, because the way that we feel about things in certain moments are very similar, because we're human. So, thank you for going down whatever roads we went down today to share your story.

Kate Kayaian (59:39)
Yep.

Yeah, amen to that, amen to that.

Well, Matt, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for your awesome questions. It was good to think about these things in whole new ways.

Matt Gilhooly (1:00:00)
I appreciate that and I also appreciate everyone listening. And so with that, I'll be back next week with a brand new episode, actually in a couple days, because I'm doing two a week now. So thanks again, Kate.