Confident woman smiling in a professional office setting.

Hi, I'm Monica.

In 2020, I got lost.

My twenty-five-year marriage ended two days before a global pandemic shut the world down. The thing I had feared most in my life had happened. Then everything else stopped too: no routines, no gatherings, no one across the table. It was just me and the question every founder I have worked with knows by heart. Now what?

On paper, I had a plan. I was a full-time psychology professor at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, building programs and teaching the next generation. On the side, I counseled and coached entrepreneurs and founders. I had taken emotional intelligence, the research I

loved most, and shaped it around the pressures they carry: the idea is yours, no one can promise the outcome, and people depend on you to stay steady. I was training my clients in mental and emotional strength.

That spring, I needed it myself.

So I did what I had been asking my clients to do. I stopped only teaching the tools and started using them. I had to see myself clearly, without the story I had been telling for twenty-five years. I had to learn how to be myself again while the ground kept moving. I practiced on my own life what I had been practicing with theirs, and the tools held.

In May of 2020, at a pool party of all places, I met Melissa Vincent, executive director of Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship. I told her about my work with founders. She confirmed what I had been seeing in my own office. The founders in her program had strategy, mentors, and capital. What they were missing was care for the person carrying it all. That relationship started beside a pool and continues today.

By the fall of 2020, I let go of my full-time university role. I became the founder of my own coaching and counseling business, built for entrepreneurs and founders. The year I had feared most became the year I found my work.

Then I learned from the inside what I had only known from across the room. I have faced the anxiety that wakes you before the alarm. I have faced betrayal, co-founder issues, and venture capital concerns. I have dealt with contractors who don't deliver what you paid for,

and with family issues and health issues. You name it. I don't serve founders from a safe distance. I'm one of them.

I never left the classroom, though. I kept a smaller role at the university, teaching emotional intelligence to the next generation of business leaders. Those two tracks are my two loves, and together they are my secret. In the classroom, I meet builders before the pressure arrives. In my practice, I see what the pressure does once it does. Holding both is how I came to understand what mental and emotional strength means for the people who build our communities, our states, our nation, and beyond.

Today my clients range from founders of companies you'd recognize to solo professionals building practices in their hometowns. Technology has stretched my reach across time zones, so some of my days start before the sun comes up. I can't imagine another career.

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.

Find out more

WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT EMPOWERMENT THERAPY?

It is training, not just a therapeutic modality.

EmpowerMe™ 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. EmpowerMe™ 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™

Therapyand Entrepreneurial Emotional Intelligence more than a slogan.

It complements what you are already doing.

EmpowerMe™ 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.

Book A Session

EmpowerMe™ Therapy

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™ Therapy 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