"Perspective guides joy, daily growth matters, and success thrives on strong systems."
Maria Maldonado Smith is the Chief Empowerment Officer of MMS Consulting Firm and creator of the Executive Vision Imagery program.
After 18 years of award-winning success in the corporate space, working as a sales leader for Fortune 500 companies across three different industries, Maria brings her unparalleled combination of experience to her proprietary process and interactive training, helping companies understand the science and benefits of goal-setting for their employees.
She equips leaders, employees and organizations to clearly define goals and create a roadmap to achieving them, which allows for better alignment with corporate culture, leading to increased productivity and profitability.
Maria has served numerous national and international clients, including US House of Representatives, Johnson & Johnson, Disney and Paramount Studios. Growing up as the daughter of an immigrant parent, goal-setting has always been a way of life for Maria.
At age 9, she set goals to become the first college graduate in her family and to earn the title of Miss Kentucky. Maria graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in Political Science, won the title of Miss Kentucky and competed in Miss America in 2005. Her proprietary process has been an essential practice in achieving these goals and many more throughout her career and personal life.
Maria has performed twice at Carnegie Hall and sang the National Anthem for an audience of over 120,000. She and her husband of 18.5 years raise their three children in a loving and encouraging environment where anything is possible when you set a goal and create a vision for it.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Maria Smith: I’ve been a dreamer and a visionary my whole life. My superpower is connecting with people and my passion is helping them step into their power and become their most authentic self. My company was born out of a desire – and a literal moment that occurred on a bridge in Scotland – to fulfill my own purpose and why.
After spending almost 18 years in the corporate sales environment, 11 of those years in a leadership capacity, I left to start my own people and leadership development company, MMS Consulting Firm.
My program, Executive Vision Imagery™, uses the neuroscience of goal setting and the power of vision imagery to build team cohesion, increase employee retention, enhance employee engagement, and create more focused, aligned, and dedicated team members.
My process immerses individual contributors, mid-level managers, and executives in their personal and professional goals while guiding them to create the vision™ for their life so they show up in both spaces as their most authentic and purpose-driven self.
When employees know their ‘why’ and are in complete alignment with their core values, mission, vision, and purpose – then their personal and professional goals become a piece of who they are, the fabric with which they’re woven.
I wholeheartedly believe that when we know who we are, to our core, we show up for ourselves and our people in the best and most wonderful way.
It has been my honor and privilege to work with teams across the globe that include the likes of, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Constellation Brands, Disney, Paramount, and the United States House of Representatives.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Maria Smith: I would start by thanking him for writing his book, Tap Dancing to Work, because it was the catalyst for my own epiphany and ah-ha moment in realizing that my corporate role and organization was no longer serving me.
It gave me the courage to face what had been placed on my heart several years prior that I chose to ignore, out of fear that I would not succeed.
I would describe my company as, ‘the resource I wish I’d had when I was growing in my leadership development journey.’
I would describe my program, Executive Vision Imagery™ as, ‘a one-of-a-kind, only one in its class program that takes the neuroscience of goal setting and combines it with the power of vision imagery.’
At the end of my initial day-long process and results-driven workshop, participants take what they have written in their 85-page workbook and create a vision board that serves as the visual representation for the goals, habits, concepts, values, and mission they’re working to live out and fulfill.
It’s not your average vision board and most certainly not a craft in the sense that people often associate vision boarding with.
We impart the science of how to get the results – and wow.
My company is about creative thinking, thought-leadership, innovation, and radical candor that propels people forward in life and forces them to ask these questions: ‘what do I want?’, ‘what is my why?’, and ‘who do I want to become?’
We get to evolve and grow each day. My program creates action-driven responses in its participants and they learn to evaluate their relationship with the goals they’re not setting or going after – and the ‘why’ behind they’re not doing so.
They are given time. In a space dedicated to allowing them to think deeply and intentionally about what it is they want, what their why is, and who they want to become, time is provided, because ‘time’ is so often used as our scapegoat to not facing or putting into action what we desire.
I’m fulfilling my life’s purpose whenever I work with a group of people and engage with them in this way. It’s what I was meant to do – and for that, I can only own what I know to be my purpose and mission in this life: to change the world, one vision board at a time.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, are an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle to keep talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued, and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are you adapting to the current shift we see?
Maria Smith: People want to feel value, seen, and heard. They want to know they’re understood – and that what they bring to the table is going to be acknowledged.
It’s really that simple.
In my work, I have found that we are not developing our leaders properly. We’re identifying high performers and making the assumption that translates well into leadership and management.
What keeps employees happy? Pouring into them. Elevating them when they’ve done a great job. Engaging them in continuous conversations about their personal and professional development, future, and the goals they want to achieve. It’s having the necessary conversations to acknowledge their contributions and say, ‘thank you.’
It’s people. And while people are complex, dynamic, and nuanced – at the end of the day, they’re human. If we’re not creating better connections with our people, then we’re not creating spaces where people want to be, so they leave.
We help organizations adapt to this shift by taking their people through my program – and by doing pre-work to identify their unique personalty type via the Enneagram test. We then coach and develop to this program and process, aligning their personal and professional goals with how their personality best sets them up for success in achieving them.
Here is a two-fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Maria Smith: My answer is the same for both. Atomic Habits by James Clear.
I read this book in 2019 and I have read it every year since. It’s as if James was inside my head and took the words right out of it in order to write his book.
I put out into the universe quite often that one day, I will collaborate with him on a project or movement. Here I am – putting it out there again!
Life lessons I learned: perspective, enjoying the day-to-day and the process-driven aspects of continuously improving – getting 1% better each day, and that we – and most importantly – our goals, are only as strong as the systems and processes we have in place to achieve them.
I have gifted over 100 copies of his book to clients, workshop participants, and to people I mentor. It is truly a life-giving book that has changed so many lives.
Christopher Hitchens, an American journalist, is quoted as saying that “everyone has a book in them” Have you written a book? If so, please share with us details about it. If you haven’t, what book would you like to write and how would you like it to benefit the readers?
Maria Smith: I’m going to write a book. It is in the works and I am moving closer and closer to making it a reality.
My book will inspire, motivate, and bring out the visionary in us all. We’re the cultivators, innovators, and visionaries of our own life – at least we should be. I’m all about Creating Visionaries™.
The benefit it will provide is a realistic and real, vulnerable and raw, approach to setting goals that are intentional and meaningful to us.
Through my own story of wins and losses, rejection and God’s protection, to the jungle of life, my goal is to inspire and motivate folks to take charge of their own life.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Maria Smith: That we do it alone.
We see every company’s and entrepreneur’s highlight reel.
But, it is the behind-the scenes grind, the day-to-day functions of the business, and even the functions of the family life, that are completely underestimated and underrepresented when we share ‘how we got there’ or ‘how we’re successful.’
I’m a mom – of 3 kids aged 16, 14, and 7. We are constantly on-the-go and our time is managed to within an inch of its life. I run a company and I have a husband who is an Executive Leader of a corporate organization. We’re like ships in the night sometimes, passing with as little as a half-assed wave because we’re exhausted and running.
We have help. We have since our oldest was born. My mother-in-law made every corporate relocation with us and has helped us raise our kids. We couldn’t have done it without her. We still can’t!
We have a house cleaner, lawn-care specialist, handymen, and our pool keeper that allow us to run our lives more efficiently. I have an Operations Manager that keeps me on task and on top of all of my appointments, meetings, and collaborations.
When we get real with each other, especially as women business owners and entrepreneurs, it opens up the conversation to the vulnerable aspects of what it truly looks like when you’re growing and scaling something. These are the kinds of conversations we need to be having – often and consistently – and continuously.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Maria Smith: Being a good mom, raising good humans, spending more quality time with my husband, and working with as many clients and companies as I can!
Every January 1st we sit down as a family and create the vision for our year. We talk about our personal goals, my husband and I share our professional goals, and our children detail their academic goals. We then challenge ourselves to one BIG goal that we call our, ‘Do the Dang Goal’ and we put it on a board with other family-oriented and focused goals. We each define our Word of the Year and those words go on our family board.
We meet monthly to discuss these goals and to track our progress consistently throughout each month.
The vision we are creating as a family is replicated in the vision I am building as a business owner and entrepreneur. I lead my life with purpose, intention, focus, determination, dedication, a passion for helping others, and a commitment to empowering those around me to create the vision™ for their lives.
To live life this way is what success is all about, to me.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Maria Smith for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Maria Smith or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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