Today we’d like to introduce you to Merrill Wood & Ashley Emmons.
Hi Merrill Wood &, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
The journey to becoming a workplace wellbeing consultant started at about 8:40am on the interstate, commuting into my own job, and coaching myself down from impending anxiety and dread. I viscerally remember how deeply distracting and exhausting it was to try to navigate an unsustainable workplace culture. I knew the world of work had to feel better than this, and wanted to make a change.
It kicked off a series of career shifts, where I became immersed in learning about organizational development, confidence, employee experience, and what makes corporate teams and cultures truly effective. I learned that Americans spend about one third of their lives at work, and about 84% of employees struggle with workplace wellness. I also learned that there’s absolutely no reason work should be defined by stress, burnout, or dissatisfaction. With the right data-driven design changes, we can fundamentally reshape our work cultures into environments where people feel confident, excited about taking initiative, energized, and fueled by ambition instead of dread. We specialize now in empowering women in leadership to experience true confidence. If you are ready for freedom through embodied confidence, our next cohort launches this fall and you can reach us at www.mondaywellness.com or follow us on instagram.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I hold a healthy amount of skepticism for anyone claiming to experience a smooth road in business. I think we all struggle with the common challenges of business ownership. We universally have to learn how to navigate self-doubt, build momentum through consistent effort, and maintain an empowered mindset regardless of results.
There’s an old joke that entrepreneurs quit their 9-to-5 jobs so that they can go work 24/7. It’s funny, because it’s true that nothing teaches you the realities of the demands of leading or managing a business like living through it. Our own first hand lived experience has become one of our greatest assets; we’ve had to strategically evaluate ROI under pressure, articulate differentiators even when they felt blurry to us, navigate skill gaps and resource constraints, and address the creeping fear of underperformance. Real life experience has been what led us to deeply understand that “fake it until you make it” isn’t enough, that confidence isn’t the same as being loud or extroverted, and that true confidence doesn’t come from being praised or validated for success. These real life experiences give us the ability to say with full confidence that we are absolutely certain we can strengthen your company culture.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Monday Wellness creates workplace wellbeing solutions for founders, leaders, creatives, and managers, so that their vision doesn’t have to rest on their shoulders alone. We collaborate with impact driven organizations to reimagine how teams show up, work together, and move forward, in order to empower people and transform culture.
We’ve found that what gets in the way of success for most people isn’t a lack of strategy. It’s the deeper, unspoken dynamics of ineffective communication, lack of confidence, fear of judgment, and the quiet avoidance of accountability. That’s why our signature program, Confidence Cohorts, is designed for high-achieving women to build sustainable, values-driven confidence through a neuroscience-informed, 3-month training experience. Grounded in self-leadership and nervous system literacy, women learn how to show up fully while leading with clarity. They start experiencing success as effort and progress instead of performance and perfection. This allows them to lead from alignment, instead of anxiety.
Our model doesn’t wait for problems to arise, or outsource management to an unfamiliar system or EAP. Instead, we proactively collaborate with your team to build the foundational skills that most workplace culture programs miss. What sets us apart is our long-term commitment, our relational depth, and our belief that healthy workplaces don’t happen by accident—they’re designed. That’s why our method targets key areas of organizational growth – ranging from confidence and leadership to delegation and managing bandwidth – and uses a neuroscience lens with real-world integration to create long-term impact, not just short-term momentum.
We’re also proud to be a women-owned business that champions other women. If you care deeply about your team and you’ve read all the books about leadership and culture, but feel overwhelmed by the time, bandwidth, or resources needed to put that knowledge into action, you’re our ideal client.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I think luck is the word we use to name or acknowledge all the elements of life that are out of our control. In that sense, luck has played an incredible role for us in both life and business. There are an almost infinite number of difficult things that could have happened to us but didn’t, and just as many miracles that did.
When we think about luck, it’s easy to focus on the big breaks; the moments of outrageous fortune, chances with the odds of one-in-a-million, or events that seem to change everything at once. In actuality, the luckiest thing we did was to meet each other and realize the opportunity for collaboration. The luckiest things that have happened to us are the opportunities for consistent effort, quiet relationships, meaningful projects, and client aspirations that we’ve gotten a chance to be a part of. It’s never been a single event, but always been about crossing paths with the brilliant, insightful, and kind-hearted leaders at the conferences and community events that shape the city of Raleigh. We’re lucky enough to collaborate with people who care deeply about social innovation, agency, confidence, and cultural change. That’s not just fortune, but I can’t imagine anything luckier.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mondaywellness.com
- Instagram: _mondaywellness_
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrillwood/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyemmonslcmhc/
