What if your worst fear became your greatest catalyst? Monica Smith shares with Michi Lantz how divorce and a pandemic sparked her emotional strength training business. Learn how brilliant overachievers can build resilience without losing themselves.

Monica Smith knows what it costs a person to lose connection with themselves, not from the outside, but from the inside.

In her thirties, she founded a nonprofit serving children of divorce, creating curriculum to help young people feel seen, safe, and strong amid family disruption. That organization was later acquired by a larger nonprofit in Dallas, where her programs continue today. She also authored two children’s books, helping young readers move from feeling defined by circumstance to reclaiming their own voice. She built all of that because she understood early what happens when someone spends years overriding themselves. She understands it now from a different angle, too.

Today, Monica works with entrepreneurs, executives, and high-capacity individuals – intelligent, compassionate people doing meaningful work in the world who have also spent years absorbing criticism that wasn’t theirs to keep, staying in rooms and relationships that cost them more than anyone around them could see. They know their patterns. They’ve done the work. And something still hasn’t closed. That gap between understanding yourself and actually living differently is exactly where she works.

Her framework, The Path of Empowerment Therapy, moves through four phases: See Yourself, Be Yourself, See Others, and Be With Others – building the kind of self-awareness, regulation, and relational courage that makes lasting change possible.

Monica holds a Master’s degree in Counseling and is a Certified Professional Life Coach. She serves as an adjunct professor of Emotional Intelligence at the Chesapeake School of Business, where she developed and teaches the university’s EI curriculum. She works with individuals, organizations, and broader audiences through coaching, her workbook, keynotes, and her culture development program, Empower Leaders.

Her message hasn’t changed in twenty years: success is not empowerment if it costs you yourself. Learn more at empowermecc.com.

Connect with Monica Smith
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/monicamichaelsmith
Website: https://EmpowerMeCC.com

Resources or websites mentioned in this episode:
Mirasee

Credits:
Host: Michi Lantz
Editor: Marvin Del Rosario
Executive Producer: Danny Iny

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