Pathwise began the way most real discoveries do: by accident, in the gap between two worlds that were never supposed to intersect. Chad Hattrup spent the early part of his career in corporate America, working in sales and operations before moving into leadership and organizational consulting roles. But the longer he worked with people inside organizations, the more he noticed a pattern: the hardest problems leaders faced were never really about strategy or execution. They were psychological, and no one around him had the language for it.

At the same time, Chad was pursuing his PhD in psychology. What started as two separate pursuits became something closer to a revelation. In his graduate studies, deep in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, he kept encountering the exact concepts missing from the leadership conversations around him. The knowledge leaders needed most had never left the academic and clinical world where it was born. It just never made the crossing into the rooms where leaders actually needed it.

Founded in 2006 by Todd Hollow-Bist, MA, PsyD, and Chad Hattrup, PhD, Pathwise was built to make that crossing. What began as an experiment, bringing graduate-level psychology directly to working leaders, became a two-decade practice, refined across thousands of leaders and hundreds of organizations. The premise has never changed: the psychology was always there, sitting just beneath the surface of leadership, the whole time. It just needed a way in.