We were lucky to catch up with Monique Davis recently and have shared our conversation below.

Monique, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been one of the most interesting investments you’ve made – and did you win or lose? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

The best investment I have made was into myself by joining a mastermind group and hiring a one on one coach. I had been going through a 8 year divorce by this point. I had been a single mom for all 8 of those years as my ex-husband wasn’t participating in parenting. I had finished nursing school during our long time divorce and was now working in the ER. Working was great, however being a single parent had me needing to be available at various times for cheer comps or wrestling matches. The most important thing for me was always being around for my children. Which meant I needed to find a way to financially support my family while also having the freedom to make my own schedule. At that point I started to dive into learning everything I could learn about real estate. I wanted to use real estate as a supplemental source of income with the goal of that allowing me to only work in nursing when I felt called to do so. I bought 2 houses that I was using as airbnb rentals, but couldn’t figure out how to scale that business. It was about this time that I found a mastermind group called the Lions Den. I joined without really knowing why I was joining or what I was hoping to get out of it. I just knew I needed help in scaling my side business. After being in the Lions Den for a couple of months, I hired a one on one real estate coach. I learned quickly how to scale my real estate business, but what was more important was learning how to be seen in life. I had fear of judgment my entire life, through this mastermind group and some of the challenges posed I found out how to share my life without fear of judgment. I learned how to be seen. Through allowing my mess to become my message I found how my mission in life which is serving teens and parents. If I had not ever invested in myself and joined that mastermind group I would not be where I am today.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I am a mother of 4 adult children. I spent most of my childrens young years as a stay at home mom. When faced with divorce I decided to go to nursing school to get my bachelors in nursing. Upon graduating I went directly into the emergency department where I have worked now for 8 years. While being a stay at home mom I had many children and teenagers come into my home from troubled homes. Sometimes these children stayed a couple of days and sometimes for a couple of years. Throughout the years of many kids and teens living in my home I learned how to build trust and deep connection. I seen how communication, consistency, choice and connection with these kids are what would lead to the behaviors they displayed and how successful or unsuccessful life would be for them. When I started working in the hospital I wasn’t able to have kids in my home full time anymore and my role became more of a safe spot to come when needed. I also started to focus heavily in the ER in the mental health area. I have seen so many teens and families come in really struggling and not really getting their needs met.
Seeing the needs of so many families I decided to design a program to help these families and fill in the holes left by the healthcare system. I took my years of experience working with teens and dove deep into the needs and solutions that could be offered aside from the emergency room and rotating door of short term stays in psychiatric hospitals.
Through all of my years in working with teens what I discovered is that it doesn’t matter how much work you do with the teen if the environment they are coming from doesn’t change as well. You can dive into traumas, self esteem, self worth, goals, behavior modification and everything in between. You can get the teen into a whole new way of thinking, and if you send them back to the same environment they will eventually go back to the same behaviors. Those behaviors are learned coping skills, oftentimes not good ones but regardless its what they know.
In these discoveries I decided that my program would need to encompass the whole family. It would be about teaching the whole family the 4 C’s as I call them ( Communication, Choice, Consistency, and Connection). My program is designed to work 1:1 with the teen and 1:1 with the parents separately but at the same time. This allows for me to see both sides safely and decipher where the challenges are. Eventually the whole family is brought together when the communication skills and trust have been built enough for both parties to feel safe in communicating honestly to each other. The results of this type of coaching have far out-weighted even what I could have imagined. For the teen they come away feeling seen and heard. Through the feeling of being seen and heard they are able to communicate effectively rather than acting out. For the parents they have peace back in their home and find that deep connection that oftentimes feels lost during the teenager years.
I also designed a program for the families with teens that are in full crisis. This program is for the families that are ready to send their kids into a boot camp, behavioral rehab, or boarding school. This is for the family that feel like they don’t know what else to do. They have tried everything in their toolbox and nothing has worked. This program is intensive crisis intervention. This is designed to keep the teen in the home and requires a team of resources that are available for the family 24/7 during the crisis phase, which typically only lasts about 2 weeks. After the crisis period the family is left with a plan going forward and is encouraged to start the coaching for the extra support and resources.
With both of these programs the thing that brings me the most joy is watching families that were coming apart at the seams, that felt completely hopeless and lost come back together. When I receive pictures of the families doing things together smiling and feeling joyful that is what lights up my life. Once upon a time these kids came to me for a safe place. They came to me to heal and feel seen, heard and loved. Now I get to facilitate the parents being the hero of their families. I get to facilitate these teens being enveloped in their families. That is healing families and that is what I do.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In 2011 I was told by therapist that the escalation with my ex-husband had reached a point of being dangerous. My therapist looked at me and told me “you need to take the kids in the middle of the night and move away, he is going to kill you”. At this time I had 5 kids at home and was just starting my second semester of nursing school. I had no idea how I was supposed to do that, but figure it out I did. By this time Jake had been living with us for 6 years, for all intents and purposes he was my son. Jake was my youngest son’s bestfriend that he brought home to spend the night one day in second grade and ended up a part of our family. Jake came from a tough background. His mom left when he was 2 and his dad struggled with addiction most of his life. When Jake first came to stay the night I had found out all I needed to know about his situation and decided to try very hard to give this little boy the family he needed. It took a while of gaining trust with his dad and working with him to allow me to keep Jake and make sure he went to school. His dad came over to the house all the time and was also welcomed in as part of the family. The situation worked well because Jake lived with us but we were close enough to his dad that he could come and see Jake easily whenever he wanted and Jake could go home whenever he wanted. When the whole move came up I spoke to his father about my plans as I would need permission to take Jake with us. His father decided at the time that he didn’t want Jake to go that far away from him and wouldn’t let me take him with me. We decided together that I would move and still come and get Jake every weekend and break from school and see how that went. My hope was that eventually his dad would see that it would be best to allow him to come and live with us full time again. But that never happened. 2011 and most of 2012 Jake still came to visit every weekend and holidays. By the end of 2012 Jake started to have excuses for why he couldn’t come. He was coming less and less. in 2013 he pretty much stopped coming all together and wouldn’t return calls or texts. I continued to speak to his dad who had assured me everything was fine, Jake was doing great. Being as I had no legal rights to him I had to take his dads word for it. Towards the end of 2013 life changed and we decided to move back up to our town near Jake. We moved back end of Nov that year and were super excited to see Jake and get him back into our lives. We were calling, texting and going by his house but he was still finding tons of excuses not to see us. He would tell us that he would come over one day and then never show up. That went on until Jan 24,2014 when I received a call from my youngest son telling me that Jake took his own life that morning. After picking myself up off the floor, I realized that I was going to have to be strong for all of my kids who just lost their brother. To tell you the feeling of watching your child be wheeled out of the house in a body bag is impossible and one that I still relive daily.
After the initial shock of that day and the coming days of memorials and the funeral I seen so many teenagers lost, confused and hurt. That is when I turned my house into a sanctuary for these kids. I had 6-10 kids at my house at any given time over the next several months. I felt like I needed to keep them together for fear of one of them not being able to deal with the pain and choosing to take the same path that Jake took. We all healed together. We spoke of him all the time. We spoke of how he got there and about life choices going forward. We grieved together.
And while I put on a brave face for all of my “littles” I was in the throes of guilt like I had never known and likely will never know again. How could I not have known what was going on with him. How could I have not fought his dad harder to let me take him. How could I have taken his excuses for not seeing us. On top of all of the whys.
I dug into his life for the previous year that he was absent. I found out every single thing I could find out. From that information I became obsessed with helping teenagers.
I could have given up. I could have thrown in the towel and quit on life after losing my son. I chose to use his death and the reasons behind it to become an advocate for teenagers for many years and then eventually for family healing as a whole.

How did you build your audience on social media?

4 years ago I joined a mastermind group called the Lions Den. I had no real idea what a mastermind group was or why I needed to be in one. I just jumped in because I really liked the guy that ran it and what he had to say. I was searching at this time for growth in my life. I was looking to scale my just starting real estate investing business and this seemed to be the right avenue at the time. What I didn’t know at the time of joining this group was the impact it would have on my life in so many other areas. The biggest one I would say is facing fear of judgment. The coach and founder of this group spoke so often about your mess being your message. He spoke about sharing your truth as a way to set you free. He spoke about being a lighthouse and how when you share your life and your mess others see it and can avoid the rocks. It all sounded great to me however I was paralyzingly afraid of judgment or being seen. I was the one at the parties standing in the corner hoping that nobody noticed me. One week the coach presented a challenge. The challenge was to do 7 days of videos on your facebook page. He gave a question to answer for each day of the week. You needed the videos to be public so everyone could see them and you needed to go deep in answering. In other words be vulnerable and honest. This challenge absolutely MORTIFIED me. And I knew that if I wanted to grow I needed to get uncomfortable.
I decided to take the challenge. I recorded my first ever in my life video. It was recorded and done, but I literally couldn’t push post on facebook. I was shaking, sweating and felt like I couldn’t breathe. I know I would have never posted that video if my then 16 year old daughter who was also battling social anxiety hadn’t been sitting with me. She is really the only reason I was brave enough to post that video.
My audience on social media has been built solely on sharing my truth. The people that resonate and see my light follow. Over the years I have had so many people reach out and tell me how I made them not feel so alone in what they were going through, how I inspired them, or gave them strength. Every one of my clients has come from social media. I have run no ads or email marketing campaigns. It has all come from authentic connection to me as a person.
My suggestion if you are just starting out, is don’t sell a product. Share who you are vulnerably. Share your life. All of it. The messy parts are where people connect to you. And be consistent. I don’t have a ton of followers, but I have a lot of engagement and tons of people that reach out via DM

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gladiatrixcoaching.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Monique_c_davis
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/monique.davis.969/

Image Credits
These images are of my life in regards to teens and kids in general. That is my brand and my life however I am not sure if you want to use them