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 work with high-achieving women who already know what they want and just haven’t acted on it yet.
I’ve sat across from accomplished women who had every reason to feel confident about their next move — and watched them talk themselves out of it in real time.
The hesitation was never about ability. It was about trust. About permission. About whether they were allowed to want what they wanted, and whether they were willing to move on it before someone else handed them the green light.
That gap — between knowing and acting — is where my work lives.
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. That experience became the foundation of how I coach — because I learned that the women I work with aren’t broken. They’re not stuck because they’re unclear. They’re stuck because they’ve been waiting for a version of themselves who doesn’t exist yet. My job is to help them stop waiting for her, and start moving as the woman they already are.
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
I’m not the coach who’s going to push you into action you’re not ready for. I’m also not the one who’s going to let you stay where you are forever.
The women I work with don’t need more information, more ideas, or another framework. They need structure that makes moving inevitable, and accountability that closes the gap between what they said they’d do and what they actually do. So that’s what I build with them.
My approach is honest, paced, and structured. There’s no rush, no pressure to perform, and no fluff. We work on what’s actually in front of you — the move you’ve already been thinking about — and we build the conditions for you to make it. Sometimes that takes one focused hour. Sometimes that takes ninety days. Either way, the work is real.
The Structure Behind How I Work
The women I work with do not need another framework to study. They need a structure that makes moving inevitable. This is mine.
A.L.I.G.N. is how I help you move from a next step you keep circling to one you are actually making. Five stages, and we move through them together.
A — Awareness: We get honest about where you are and name the pattern that has been keeping the move from happening. You hear it from outside your own head, which is hard to do on your own.
L — Liberation: We name the thing that has really been stopping you, the waiting, the fear, the habit of putting everyone else first, and you set it down. This is where you give yourself permission to want the move.
I — Imagine: You define what success looks like for you now, not the version you inherited or outgrew, and you build the picture of the chapter this move opens, across your life and not only your work.
G — Goals: We turn the move into a concrete plan and your first real steps, so the vision becomes something on paper you can follow.
N — Navigate: We move through the resistance that shows up once you start, week after week, so the plan becomes the life you are living. This is where most of the real work happens.