By: Natalie Johnson
Having it all was supposed to be the finish line. For a lot of accomplished people, it turns out to be the moment a different question starts: not what did I build, but who was I becoming while I built it.
Christy Belz is a Denver-based transformational coach, author, TEDx speaker, and podcast host who has spent three decades helping accomplished women recognize when the identity that got them here no longer fits. She built her second act, and the practice she now runs as Empowerment Coaching and Consulting, around a conviction she puts in writing more than once.
“Second chances aren’t gifted,” she writes in her own coaching materials. “They’re claimed.”
Belz did not arrive at that belief in a classroom, though the classroom shaped how she sees people. She built an early career in business before training as a social worker, earning both a bachelor’s from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Denver. Social work’s person-in-environment lens, looking at the whole person alongside the systems and relationships that shaped them rather than asking what is wrong with someone, still grounds how she works today.
She stepped away from her not-for-profit practice for a season to raise her son, then started coaching and entered corporate consulting, working with Fortune 500 companies to lead leadership programs that pair emotional intelligence with business results, including an emerging professionals program built for Hewlett Packard and other large organizations. Along the way, she added certifications in Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, The Leadership Circle, HeartMath, and SHIFT Training through Clarity International.
That grounding shows up less as theory and more as a working belief. Most people are not broken, but operating inside patterns, conditioning, and roles they picked up long before they had any say in them, and seeing the system clearly is what makes it possible to stop mistaking it for identity.
That belief became a book, “Oh God of Second Chances, Here I Am Again,” which grew out of a broader journey of loss, self-examination, and transformation. The book led directly to her podcast, “Second Chances with Christy Belz,” where guests share stories of resilience, reflection and renewal.
Belz says the throughline across both is simple. Our past doesn’t define us. It refines us.
She has spent years co-curating TEDxCherryCreekWomen and coaching the women who take that stage, work she has said grew out of her own experience speaking on a TEDx stage for the first time. In 2025, the Girl Scouts of Colorado named her a Woman of Distinction, and the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce recognized her as one of the state’s Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Business. This year, she returned as a co-chair and sponsor of the Women of Distinction event.
UPROOT is not a new idea so much as the place where three decades of that work finally converged. It synthesizes her social work training, her leadership consulting, and years of client work into one framework, with an evergreen, self-paced course as one vehicle for delivering it, relaunching in September 2026. The name is an acronym: Ultimate Potential in Relationships, Organizations, Opportunities and Transformation.
The course leans on a tree as its central image, roots below ground and a canopy above it, an idea she builds in part on The Leadership Circle, a 360-degree leadership assessment she has worked with as a senior consultant since 2008.
Below the surface sit the reactive patterns she asks clients to name first, learned early and reinforced for decades. Above ground sit the creative competencies those same roots can eventually support, among them integrity, authenticity, courage and vision. Belz opens the whole idea with a story about trees, roots and wind, the kind of image that makes it physical before she makes it clinical.
That focus on what’s below the surface matters most for the women Belz works with most closely, generally between 35 and 70, many of them already outwardly successful and still privately unsettled. Divorce, retirement, burnout, or a health scare are common triggers, but the underlying question, one of consciousness and alignment as much as circumstance- tends to be the one Belz has been asking for thirty years.
Not what have you built. Who are you underneath it, separate from the roles, the achievements, and the version of success everyone else already signed off on.
The same question increasingly comes up in Belz’s corporate work. Leaders and talent teams have started bringing her in for a different reason than the polish most executive coaches offer. They want people who can stay grounded and clear-headed inside pressure, not just perform well in front of it, and Belz has built her programs around that same foundation of self-awareness before strategy.
It is the same order of operations she has used with individual clients for years, now scaled into something a team or an organization can walk through together. Long before UPROOT existed as a course, Belz was already running this work in rooms full of executives who assumed the hard part would be strategy, not honesty.
It is not a question with a quick answer, and Belz does not pretend otherwise. What she offers instead, through UPROOT, through her book and through her podcast, is a structure for asking it honestly, one root at a time, without rushing anyone past the parts of the process that actually do the work.
As she puts it, the goal was never a single breakthrough moment, better performance, or resilience for its own sake. It is helping people become conscious of what shaped them, reconnect with who they are beneath it, and lead, live, and relate from that place, one honest truth and one root at a time.
Learn more about Christy Belz and UPROOT at christybelz.com.
