“Stop acting like you get to live twice.” Kristine Travis doesn’t remember which website she was on three years ago when she saw this quote for the first time, but she does remember the feeling she had. The words ignited something inside her. They motivated her to turn years of unfulfilling jobs, family trauma and detachment into a life of purpose. ç
Kristine Travis is defined by her undeniable charm and a friendly disposition that makes strangers feel that they’ve known her for many years. She admits that she sometimes carries around the sadness that can accompany those with a powerful personality, but it does not consume her. “She’s really a positive person, no matter what’s going on,” said Stephanie Sperry, her friend of eight years. “She’s always given me really good advice. That’s her natural talent.” As is the case with her business, her personality is also a direct result of her past. Travis, now 46, was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, as Kristine Bender. The oldest of three siblings, she had first dibs at her parents’ best attributes. Her father’s allure (in his case, more of a guile) and her mother’s intensely loving nature exude from Kristine today, despite the absence of both in her life – for very different reasons.
After Travis first saw this quote, she made wholesale changes in her everyday life. She started saying “now” instead of “next time.” She decided to work for herself following her true passion: helping others. It started with general life coaching, but over the course of three years her career has evolved into a business defined by her life experiences. Travis founded 1Life Strategy, an homage to her favorite quote, in 2018 and now uses her experiences as a child of divorce and a divorced parent herself to help others. Her business counsels couples on how to maintain peace and cooperation throughout and after a divorce – she calls it “divorcing nicely” – with the ultimate goal of co-parenting in a way that is not at all disruptive to children. “I never want my kids to worry about seating charts,” she said. “Whether it’s high school graduations, weddings, whatever it is, my kids will never have to worry about where they put their parents.” Travis says she wouldn’t be where she is today, self- employed in a career that gives her purpose for the first time in her life, without the guidance of the Knowledge Business
When Travis was a kid, her parents’ relationship was far from copacetic. There was no abuse in her family, but her parents separated and got back together many times, she said. Their arguments rumbled through the house for her and her siblings to hear. In an attempt to calm the storms, as only kids can, the children wrote notes pleading for peace, turned them into paper airplanes and tossed them across the open floorplan toward their arguing parents. Travis and her siblings didn’t stop there to combat the disruption of their family. After their parents fought, the Bender kids would deeply clean whichever room of the house in which the argument occurred. Travis says this was a chance, in their young minds, to start fresh – an attempt to undo what ultimately could not be undone. Following many years of continual disagreement, her parents divorced when Travis was in her 20s. Her father went on to marry another woman within six months, and eventually divorced and remarried a number of times. Her mother never remarried.
Blueprint (KBB). The KBB course allowed Travis to connect her past to her present and showed her that she should focus on divorce counseling. KBB pulled her story out of her and infused it into her business. “Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins speak my energy,” she said. “These are my people, but I didn’t even know these guys existed. I had heard of Tony, but it’s different when you see them getting after it. “I was like, ‘Oh, I want that.”
At the time of the divorce, Travis was waiting tables at a local Spokane restaurant called The Onion. Because of her wit and charm, Travis was a natural in her waitressing role, which she held for much of her 20s while living in Washington and later in California. A career-placement test in high school indicated to Travis that she’d be proficient following any path, a result that was far less helpful than it was confusing. Though she excelled in the restaurant, she has spent most of her adult life unsure of her true purpose. This lack of direction led to jobs that included organizing a celebrity golf tournament – “These weren’t A- or B-list celebrities; these were D and F-listers” – working as a leasing agent, a live-in nanny and at a child development center.
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