When you ask a 5-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, you expect her to say something like firefighter, doctor, or even astronaut.

You don’t expect her to say she wants to be a motivational speaker.

But Cherry Collier wasn’t just any 5-year-old.

Her mom regularly listened to the late Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, who became famous for his belief in the power of positive thinking. And Collier got hooked.

“When I was in the first grade, I was in class telling everybody about the power of positive thinking and what you have to do to be successful. All of my teachers were like, ‘There’s something not right with her. We just want you to know your numbers,’” Collier MS ’95, PhD ’98 recalls with a laugh.

That drive to help people realize their best selves led Collier first to Spelman College for a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then on to the University of Georgia for master’s and doctoral degrees at the urging of Dr. Hamilton Holmes BS ’63, a father figure in Collier’s life and the first African American man admitted to UGA.

“When people hear ‘psychology,’ they always assume you’re a therapist, but I use my degrees in organizational and social psychology to understand people,” Collier explains.

While she’s not a therapist, per se, she uses her training to get inside the minds of clients. Collier’s goal is to help those working for these organizations to succeed through executive coaching, leadership training, and talent development.

“I started coaching in 1998 with the belief that people had all of the resources they needed inside themselves to be successful,” Collier says. “As you start to help them connect to those resources, then they are going to become true human resources for their organization, their communities, and their families.”

For Collier, it’s not about just creating the perfect worker. It’s about creating the most effective version of oneself.

The best advice I can give to people…