About Dr. Kisha
If you’ve already heard my story, this is the longer version. For women who want to know more about how I got here — and how I work.
The Work I Do, and Who It’s For
I help accomplished professional women who have achieved what they set out to do but are realizing success does not feel the way they expected.
Through ASCEND, I help women develop the clarity, confidence, and command to redefine success on their own terms and create a life that feels as good as it looks.
How I Got Here
I spent years in small towns doing everything I was supposed to do — and quietly knowing I needed to make a bigger move. I had the credentials. I had the experience. I had every external signal that I was doing fine. Internally, I’d been turning the same decision over for years, finding reasons not to make it.
When I finally made the move, the financial outcome was significant — well beyond what I’d been telling myself was possible. But the real result wasn’t the move itself. It was learning that the clarity I’d been waiting for was never going to come from more thinking. It was always going to come from moving.
Around that same period, life events forced me to look honestly at the gap between the life I was building and the life I actually wanted. What I learned is that creating a fulfilling life takes more than following a path that looks successful on paper.
It requires understanding what matters to you, trusting yourself to make different choices, and giving yourself permission to define success on your own terms.
That experience continues to shape how I approach my work with women today.
Professor and Executive Coach
I’m a Management Professor at Florida International University, where I teach Wellness Management, Managing Diversity, Recruitment and Staffing, and Human Resource Analytics. My research focuses on how identity impacts career entry, choice, and retention. Before FIU, I was on the faculty at Penn State University.
I am also an executive coach, and my practice has grown alongside that academic work, not as a backup plan or an exit strategy, but as a separate calling I have chosen to build deliberately. I bring my Industrial/Organizational Psychology training into how I coach: the same evidence-based understanding of motivation, behavior change, goal-setting, and what actually moves people from intention to action. But the work itself is human, not clinical. Women come to me because they want both — someone who understands the research and someone who understands the bind of trying to build something on your own terms while still showing up everywhere else in your life.
If you’re a woman building something while also holding down a serious career, I get it. I’m doing it too.
Background
- Ph.D., Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- B.S., Psychology (minor in Business Administration), Howard University
- Management Professor, Florida International University
- Former faculty, Penn State University
- Certified Coach, Association for Coaching
- Member, Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology
- Member, Academy of Management
- Executive Coach and Founder, KS Jones Solutions LLC
How I Work
My work combines psychological insight with practical coaching to help women change their relationship with achievement.
We explore the expectations, beliefs, and patterns that have shaped how you define success. Then we turn that awareness into intentional action so you can begin creating a different experience of your life.
The goal is to build three essential capacities: clarity about what you want, confidence in your ability to pursue it, and command over the decisions that shape your life.
The Structure Behind How I Work
My coaching is guided by ASCEND, a structured approach to creating meaningful personal change.
We begin with awareness of the patterns shaping your experience. Then we use intentional small moves to build new evidence, strengthen your capabilities, expand what feels possible, and integrate those changes into everyday life.
Through this process, you develop greater clarity, confidence, and command over your choices and your definition of success.
ASCEND is not about pursuing more achievements to feel successful. It is about changing how you experience the success you already have while making room for what comes next.