Dealing with Healing: Healing Trauma Impacts Professional Performance
What if your unspoken past is already in the room with you—at the meeting table, in your relationships, in the way you lead?
About the Book
In Dealing with Healing, Olivia Smith weaves research and leadership insight with powerful true stories from professionals, entrepreneurs, and executives who lived through childhood trauma, abuse, addiction, and loss. Their voices bring to light what statistics alone cannot: how trauma follows us into adulthood, shaping how we trust, work, and lead.
You'll Meet Survivors Who:
- Hid behind overachievement while battling self-doubt.
- Carried silence for decades, believing their stories were “too much” or in some cases “too little” to share.
- Faced burnout while trying to prove their worth through constant productivity.
- Found ways to turn pain into new clarity, leadership, and courage.
Combined with insights from the ACE study, the DISC assessment, neuroscience, and decades of real-world leadership experience, these stories show how trauma undermines performance—and how healing creates steadiness, authenticity, and lasting growth.
Each chapter closes with reflection prompts to help you connect these lessons to your own life and leadership.
Dealing with Healing isn’t about dwelling on the past. It’s about learning from it, reclaiming your story, and leading your future with honesty and purpose.
About Author
Olivia Smith, RN
Olivia Smith is a registered nurse-turned-entrepreneur. She built a multi-million-dollar manufacturing business and also founded Healing Housing, a transitional living facility for women in recovery in Nashville, Tennessee. The spark for founding Healing Housing came from Olivia’s volunteer teaching experience at the Tennessee Prison for Women. Most recently, Olivia founded Write A New Story, a leadership consulting company that offers DISC-based leadership training and workshops to companies and institutions, including Vanderbilt University and the East Carolina University College of Nursing. She has coached executives and entrepreneurs across the United States.
Through leadership consulting and executive coaching, Olivia helps clients strengthen culture, resolve conflict, and lead with authenticity. She offers training that incorporates lessons on the hidden costs of trauma in leadership and workplace culture. Her process combines DISC behavioral assessments, team training, and one-on-one coaching. Olivia also continues to serve on the Board of Healing Housing.