Dana Theus of InPower Coaching: Your Power Starts Within!

Most of us were taught that power comes from the outside: a title, a number in the bank, or a house that says you made it. But every high performer I have met eventually hits the same wall.

I got to sit down with Dana Theus of InPower Coaching on LUXEtalk, and she named that wall better than anyone I have interviewed. Dana built her coaching practice after twenty-five years across Fortune 50 companies and startups, and what she shares here changed how I think about success.

Here’s a preview of that episode:

Why I Had This Conversation

I have talked to a lot of successful people on my show, and I keep noticing the same pattern. Somebody has every external marker of success and still feels one bad day away from falling apart.

That is the gap Dana has spent her career closing. She spent decades in marketing before she noticed something. Founders were not really struggling with their brands. They were struggling with themselves.

Watch the full episode here:

Dana is a former university instructor in the Washington, D.C. area who now helps leaders build authentic leadership from the inside out, and our conversation gave me a new framework for what that means.

What Nobody Tells You About Outer Power and Inner Power

Outer power is the stuff we can point to, like money, title, authority, and the ability to make things happen. For Dana, inner power is something else entirely.

She has watched clients with enormous authority burn out because the inside never caught up to the outside. That mismatch is not a character flaw. It is a design flaw in how most of us were taught to succeed.

“But if we don’t have the internal power to have the confidence to use that external power, it isn’t that we’re not successful. It’s that it’s stressful and it takes a huge toll on us. And the way I think about this is our outside power doesn’t scale unless our inside power does, too.”

That line changed something for me. I have watched clients build beautiful careers and still feel shaky the moment things get hard. Inner power, as Dana defines it, comes from four things you can practice: choice, intention, positivity, and wholeness.

None of those four things can be taken from you by circumstance. You can lose a job, a client, or a market. You cannot lose your ability to choose how you respond to it.

Why Toxic Positivity Isn’t the Answer to Staying Positive

Here is where Dana pushed back on something I expected her to embrace. She is not talking about ignoring reality when things are hard. She refers to that as Pollyanna positivity, and she draws a hard line around it.

Real positivity, in her framework, means looking straight at the hard thing and choosing where you put your energy anyway. You do not pretend the market is not tight. You name it honestly, then decide what is actually in your control.

That distinction matters if you work with clients for a living. Acknowledging a rough situation and still steering toward a next step is exactly the credibility people remember. It is far more sustainable than forced cheerfulness.

Two Simple Strategies That Rescue You When Overwhelm Hits

Dana shared two tools for managing overwhelm, and neither one requires overhauling your schedule.

The first is daily centering. A fixed point you return to, even for ten or thirty minutes, so you have somewhere to come back to when the day pulls you in twelve directions.

“Because when we get overwhelmed, we don’t have a place to flow back to, right? So think of yourself as a puddle, your nice, calm puddle, and then someone runs through you and your energy is all over the place… if you kind of put a little fence around your puddle once a day and say, all right, nobody gets to run through me right now… then you have a place to come back to and a place to flow back to.”

The second strategy is for the moment overwhelm actually hits. Pick one small, doable task and finish it. That single completed thing interrupts the spiral and hands you back a sense of control, even if the to do list has not moved.

If reclaiming your power starts anywhere, it starts with that small, deliberate act of putting a fence around your own puddle. Not by accident, but on purpose, every day.

For anyone weighing whether their current living situation still fits the life they are trying to build, selling your home can be its own act of reclaiming control over your time and your energy.

Why Taking Credit Feels So Uncomfortable and How to Fix It

I asked Dana why accepting a compliment can feel so hard, and her answer went deeper than I expected. Her fix starts small. Stop voicing the powerless response. Say “thank you” instead, even while the old story is loud in your head.

The real work happens underneath that. Dana breaks the discomfort into three layers to work through separately: the intellectual story, the emotional fear underneath it, and the physical tension that shows up in your shoulders or stomach.

Skipping straight to the polite response without doing that deeper work is a mistake she sees constantly, especially with women taught that humility means deflecting every bit of credit. Leaders and agents ready to go deeper on this rewiring process can find more in InPower’s resources built for women in leadership.

What Changed for Me After This Conversation

I left our conversation thinking about how much of what we call humility is actually just an old script we never questioned. Dana calls it the difference between being socially authored and being self-authored.

“When we’re socially authored, it’s what we do as children. We’re told how to be… Well, when you get to be mature, part of the maturation process is saying, well, yeah, I do want to be humble, but I also want to take credit. What does that look like for me? And so when we start to make those choices for ourselves is when our true authenticity begins to blossom because we’re deciding who we want to be.”

That is self-authored authenticity, and it is the piece of our conversation I keep coming back to days later. Authenticity is not saying whatever comes to mind. It is deciding who you want to be and choosing that on purpose, even when it feels uncomfortable.

That single idea from Dana Theus of InPower Coaching is worth sitting with long after the episode ends.

Want to hear my full conversation with Dana on reclaiming your inner power?

Frequently Asked Questions

What does inner power mean according to Dana Theus of InPower Coaching?

Dana defines inner power as the internal confidence to actually use whatever external power you have, built through choice, intention, positivity, and wholeness rather than titles or achievements.

How can I stop feeling overwhelmed using Dana’s centering strategy?

Set aside a fixed daily block, even just ten to thirty minutes, for something that fully centers you, then treat that as your return point. In the moment overwhelm hits, pick one small task you can finish and complete it before touching anything else.

Why do people struggle to accept compliments and credit?

Dana points to social conditioning around humility, plus a stronger pattern in women toward deflecting credit entirely. The fix starts with consciously saying thank you instead of deflecting, even before the discomfort fully resolves.

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Every guest on my show alters how I think about building a purposeful, intentional life. What Dana and I both learned is that lasting confidence is built quietly, one honest choice at a time.

If you have insights on leadership, luxury, or living well that our audience needs to hear, I would love to have you on my show!