Chelsea Szabo is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and founder of Personal Energy First. She helps high-achieving leaders stop forcing their way through success and start leading with sustainable energy, clarity, and joy.
Her message comes from lived experience. After facing death three times, including beating cancer twice and surviving a serious car accident, Chelsea realized she had spent much of her life fighting rather than living. On paper, things looked good. Behind the scenes, she was unraveling. As she went on to coach hundreds of high performers, she saw the same pattern again and again: talented, driven people who had done everything right and still felt something was missing.
That pattern led Chelsea to a different way of understanding performance. Stress, burnout, and disconnection are often not workload problems, but capacity problems. Personal energy shapes internal capacity, which shapes how people think, respond, connect, and lead. When leaders learn to work with their energy rather than push through it, they stay clear, steady, and connected under pressure, without burning out.
Chelsea spent a decade in the corporate world, in entertainment and advertising, including service on the board of ThinkLA, before becoming an executive coach. In more than 15 years of coaching and training, she has worked with leaders and teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies across a range of industries. Her approach blends traditional coaching with breath- and body-based practices, drawing on nearly a decade of experience in the healing arts, including breathwork, Reiki, and ThetaHealing, with training and practice in multiple countries.
What sets Chelsea apart is her ability to make energy practical. She turns a concept many people find abstract into a learnable skill that even skeptical leaders can use in real situations, from high-stakes meetings to moments of uncertainty. Audiences describe her keynotes as engaging, funny, and deeply moving, and they leave with tools they can put to use right away.
Her signature keynote, A Journey Back to Your Spark: How Energy Can Lead You to Freedom, takes audiences through the story behind her work and the path back to their own aliveness. She also speaks on developing leaders who can lead through anything, improving communication through the energy of connection, and overcoming exhaustion to create energy that lasts. Beyond the stage, she offers one-on-one executive coaching, workshops, and breathwork experiences designed to release stress and reset the nervous system. She also created the Personal Energy Profile, a short assessment that helps people understand how their energy shows up and how it affects their capacity, performance, and wellbeing.
Chelsea has been featured in Entrepreneur, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times, Woman&Home, and The Drum. She is a Certified Executive Coach (iPEC), Breathwork Practitioner, and Reiki Master, and is based in Santa Monica, California.
Talks/Workshops
- How Energy Can Lead You To Freedom
Every life has a moment where it splits in two: before, and after.
Mine came three times. Here’s what I learned.
Think about the last time you got what you were chasing, the job, the relationship, the house, and felt strangely unmoved. Not ungrateful. Just… unmoved. Something still pulled at you, quiet and persistent, even though by every outside measure, you’d made it.
That wasn’t a mood. That was your spark, still waiting.
For most of my life, I thought that pull meant I hadn’t worked hard enough yet. So I worked harder. I got better at managing my emotions, better at pushing through, better at looking like I had it together. It worked, until it didn’t.
I faced death three times before I understood what I’d actually been doing. I wasn’t living. I was fighting.
In this keynote, I’ll take you through the journey I lived and eventually mapped: how we separate from our own aliveness without noticing, what it costs us to keep fighting life instead of trusting it, and the actual path back, not through willpower, but through learning to speak the one language most of us were never taught: energy.
This isn’t a talk about resilience or grit. You already have plenty of both, that’s probably part of the problem. It’s a talk about what’s on the other side of it: the freedom, lightness, and aliveness that become possible the moment you stop forcing your way through life and start trusting it again. You’ll walk out with more than inspiration. You’ll recognize your own fracture, wherever it’s quietly been running your life, and you’ll know exactly what it takes to come back from it.
Key Takeaways:
- The fracture — how and why we quietly separate from our own aliveness, often years before we ever notice it’s happened
- The real cost — what it takes from you to keep fighting life instead of trusting it, even when it looks like success from the outside
- The path back — what actually reconnects you to your own spark as an adult, and why trying harder isn’t it
- What becomes possible — in your leadership, your relationships, and your life, the moment you stop forcing and start trusting
