Confident woman smiling in a professional office setting.

Meet Monica

Monica Michael Smith is The Empowerment Therapist. She is the founder and creator of EmpowerMe™, a model that integrates emotional intelligence science with 20+ evidence based therapeutic approaches to build mental and emotional strength in founders, entrepreneurs, and high performing leaders.

She serves as the Founders Therapist for Pipeline Entrepreneurs and is a key contributor to entrepreneur organizations worldwide.

She also coined the term Entrepreneurial Emotional Intelligence, or EEI, to name something generic EQ training and traditional therapy were never built for: the trainable capacity to notice, regulate, and act on your own emotional state in real time, and to read and work with the emotional states of others, under the specific and sustained uncertainty of building a business.

That thinking comes out of two rooms, not one. Monica spent years as a professor at OKWU Chesapeake School of Business, teaching and writing from her background in psychology. She still teaches and writes curriculum there today, and much of what becomes EmpowerMe™ gets tested in that classroom before it ever reaches a client.

She does not approach this work as an academic studying you from a distance. She is a guide who has walked the terrain herself, through her hardest version of it, and a teacher who has spent years helping founders build the self their venture depends on.

Let's Talk

You do not need another framework to read. You need a room where the work actually happens, whether that is one on one, on your stage, or alongside other founders who understand this pursuit from the inside. Book a session and bring the specific thing you are carrying. Invite me to speak, and I will bring tools your people can use the following Monday. Or join the community and do the work at your own pace, surrounded by others building through the same pressure you are.

Wherever you start, this is the room. Let's talk about what you need.

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WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT EMPOWERMENT THERAPY?

It is training, not just a therapeutic modality.

Empowerment Therapy is a structured mental and emotional strength training program. The same way physical fitness requires consistent, intentional work, not just understanding how muscles function but actually using them, mental and emotional strength requires the same. Insight is the starting point. Building the capacity to live differently is the work.

It follows a deliberate sequence, because sequence matters.

Traditional therapy largely follows the client's lead. Empowerment Therapy moves through a specific arc: See Yourself, Be Yourself, See Others, Be With Others. Each phase builds on the one before it. You cannot genuinely manage yourself until you have seen yourself clearly. You cannot see others accurately until you have developed the capacity to regulate. You cannot build real connection until you have built the self that genuine connection requires.

It works across all four arenas of life simultaneously.

Most approaches focus on a presenting problem: a relationship in crisis, anxiety at work, a specific loss. Empowerment Therapy holds a different premise: how you show up in your relationships, your health, your work, and your finances is not four separate problems. It is one self, operating the same way across four arenas. Build the self, and all four arenas begin to shift.

It closes the gap between knowing and doing.

Every session includes a framework, a reflection, and a micro practice, one specific real-world action to carry into the week ahead. Insight without application does not create change. Reading about strength training does not build muscle. The practice is not optional. It is the whole point.

The guide has walked the path, and taught it.

This methodology was not designed in a research lab or borrowed from someone else's framework. It was built by someone who needed it before she could teach it, and who now teaches it formally, in a university classroom, in addition to a client chair. That dual grounding, lived experience and academic rigor, is what makes EmpowerMe™ and Entrepreneurial Emotional Intelligence more than a slogan.

It complements what you are already doing.

Empowerment Therapy is not asking you to choose. If you are in therapy, this deepens it. If you have done therapy and feel ready for the next layer of work, this is that layer. The workbook, the coaching, and the organizational programs are all designed to work alongside professional mental health support, not in place of it.

Ways to EmpowerMe™

One-on-One Coaching

You are the product of your venture, so this work meets you as the whole person building it, not just the problem in front of you this week. Depending on what the moment calls for, Monica walks alongside you wearing whichever hat the work requires: the counseling hat, when what you are carrying needs to be processed before it can be solved. The coaching hat, when you already know the answer and need help building the discipline to live it. The consultant hat, when the venture itself needs a clear, outside read. Most founders need all three at different points in the same year, sometimes in the same conversation. This is the full spectrum, in one room, with one person who already understands the terrain.

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EmpowerMe™ Entrepreneurs

Not every founder needs a room of their own yet. Some need to know they are not the only one white-knuckling it through a hard quarter. EmpowerMe™ Entrepreneurs is a community built for exactly that: a place to move through the same framework private clients use, at a fraction of the cost, alongside other founders who get it without you having to explain it first. Membership includes ongoing resources tied to the EmpowerMe™ model, a live monthly group session with Monica, and a community that is doing the work in real time, not just talking about doing it.

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EmpowerMe™ Workshops

Sometimes the fastest way to shift a team is not another meeting about culture; it is an hour that actually changes how people see themselves and each other. Monica brings EmpowerMe™ into your organization as a lunch-and-learn or a full-team experience, tailored to your people and the specific pressure they are under. Teams walk away with a shared language for how they operate under stress, where they see themselves clearly and where they do not, and practical tools they can use with each other the same week, not just a framework they nod along to and forget by Friday. This is not a generic culture workshop borrowed from a slide deck. It is EmpowerMe™, built for founders and high performers, brought into the room with your team.

Keynote Speaking

Monica brings the research and the lived experience to the stage, translating Entrepreneurial Emotional Intelligence and the EmpowerMe™ model into a talk your audience can actually use, not just applaud. Every keynote is shaped around your event and your people, drawing on the same frameworks she teaches founders one-on-one and in the classroom at OKWU Chesapeake School of Business, and every audience leaves with language for what they are carrying and at least one tool they can put to work that week.

Topics include:

Entrepreneurial Emotional Intelligence: the emotional skill set built for the pressure of building something, not for a stable nine-to-five
The Emotional Surfer: staying upright when the wave of your own success starts to move faster than you
Wired for Building, Not Burnout: recognizing your entrepreneurial wiring before it runs you into the ground
The Plates Are Still Spinning: leading and grieving at the same time, and why high achievers rarely get to choose just one
See Yourself, Be Yourself: the self work founders skip on the way to scaling
Building Teams That Can Hear Hard Things: EmpowerMe™ and DiSC for founders and leadership teams
Anticipatory Resilience: preparing for the hit before it lands, without living braced for impact

Let's Make It Happen