By Selena Haynes and Lauren Means • Photos Courtesy Dez Stephens
Some people have their life mapped out from the time they are in elementary school. Some people figure it out along the way. For others, like Dez Stephens, their calling finds them.
Originally from Chicago, Dez says she came from a blue-collar neighborhood. “My family was lower middle class. [It was] a very paycheck to paycheck, penny-pinching, hand-to-mouth existence, but it taught me a lot about the value of hard work and money,” she recalls. She is now a humanitarian coach, a social entrepreneur, a people’s advocate, and a planetary activist.
She moved to Nashville in 1993 and after about a decade of living here, she says a colleague came up to her at work and told her she would make an amazing life coach. “I thought, ‘Really, why me?’ and I was surprised because I wasn’t a great listener. I think she saw in me compassion and resourcefulness. She encouraged me to go to school for it because I would learn how to listen,” recalls Stephens.
Dez explained that when she was younger she knew she wanted to help others but didn’t know what that was going to look like. “I didn’t want to go into education or healthcare or social work or therapy,” she recollects but says, “I knew I wanted to help people.”
Stephens remembers her son being three at the time when her partner asked her if she had considered starting her own business, “He said, ‘you know all that money you make helping your clients make money and become famous — why don’t you start your own company and do that for yourself?’”
She said her first thought when he said that was “Wow, I should start a coach training school because as a coach I’m constantly asked the question like ‘Oh how can I become a coach or what school should I go to?” In April 2012, Dez started a pilot program at Vanderbilt with 22 students. From there, she founded Radiant Coaches Academy, a sister company to her coaching company Radiant Health Institute.
Dez has been a professional coach now for 16 years and for the last 10 years has trained, certified and credentialed nearly 600 coaches in over 15 countries. Coaching has filled her desire to help people.
New Opportunities
The move to expand her coach training internationally started with an invitation to visit Honduras in 2013 from a colleague who worked for the United Nations. “It was the first time I had ever left the country,” Dez says. She knew it was an impoverished country and noticed women there did not seem to have many job opportunities.
She spoke with her colleague who invited her there and asked what she could do to help this situation. Her friend encouraged her to coach-train women there. Stephens began a pilot program in Honduras with 50 women in 2015.
The program thrived and is now open to anyone who wants to be trained. Her company has also donated over two million dollars in full scholarships to Hondurans.
Dez co-founded the Melanie Gissell Foundation in 2017 with four other Honduran coaches. This foundation offers grief recovery coaching and pain recovery coaching in partnership with the United Nations, hospitals, and universities. The foundation has served over three thousand people in Honduras.
Accidental Activism
Dez’s work all stems from personal motivation. Some, like her work with the Tennessee Prison for Women (TPFW), is the result of family experiences. “My little brother went to prison when he was younger. When he got out he did not have the support services he needed in order to stay out and do well,” says Stephens.
For ten years she worked with the TPFW through a program called Inmate Partner for Better Decisions. This is an eight-week program where inmate partners attend class and have one-on-one coaching. This is an effort to help women with better decision-making and self-empowerment. Stephens has also worked doing similar programs with Thistle Farms as a life-skills educator and as a volunteer with the Dismas House in Nashville.
Activism can be done through several different mediums. For example, in 2016 she started the journey to becoming the co-executive producer of the documentary film, “End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock.” Dez says, “A colleague called me up and said she heard that there were water protectors regarding a pipeline in North Dakota at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and asked if I would like to go with her to standing rock and film the footage. I said absolutely and we started filming in April 2016.”
They filmed for over a year and a half and the resulting documentary focused on the women who are the protectors of the water in the Native American tradition and the incredible work they were doing. The time filming these women and their story is part of what she calls accidental activism.
“Sometimes, when you just answer the call to help, you become an activist without realizing it,” explains Stephens. She further says, “I think we all care about something so it’s easy for all of us to do our part. Whether it is being a visible activist or advocate, writing letters to legislators, walking dogs at dog shelters, or rocking babies at hospitals, I encourage people to follow their hearts and follow their passions and whatever they care about to just be active in it.”
It Begins With You
Dez encourages up and coming and existing entrepreneurs alike to practice being ethical entrepreneurs. The example she gives is one of someone who is working at a company but wants to jump off into entrepreneurship. She says, “The logic is typically, ‘I would like to make money on my own doing something I love and when I make a bunch of money I’m going to give back or I’m going to give charity.’ What I say about that is just flip the script of that. Just be of service, in my case it’s coaching pro-bono and this is doing something I love and the money will just logically come. It always does.”
She says being an ethical entrepreneur is also building your business without debt or overhead. “Frankly, to not put stress on yourself as an entrepreneur,” Dez states. She says she loves to talk to people considering entrepreneurship because she’s learned a lot of mistakes working for other people and seeing their growing pains.
For anyone who wants to become involved in something but doesn’t really know where to start, Dez says, “Just ask yourself ‘What do I care about and who do I care about? Who do I want to serve?’” An example of this is her LGBTQ+ youth coaching at the Oasis Center. As a two-spirited person, this representation wasn’t something she had as a teenager.
Dez shared a story from when her son was really little and in the hospital. There was a girl in the room next to him that didn’t have any visitors. “It was some kind of violence case within her family and childhood abuse. I just went in there and brushed her hair, held her hand, and I read to her,” she recollects. She says there are programs at hospitals where you can go read to kids who might not have anyone there.
Dez reiterates the best first step is to find someone or something that you care about and just start being active in it. “It starts with a small simple idea of ‘I want to be of service.’ Then serving a population in need and it trickles out from there,” Dez notes. “The world would be a better place if we all just started caring a lot about ourselves and others.”
For more information on Dez Stephens and Radiant Coaches Academy visit DezStephens.com.
