Tina Shrader, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, communication strategist, and founder of Empower Family Therapy and Tina Power™, a brand dedicated to building emotionally sustainable people, workplaces, and service careers.
Tina’s work sits at the intersection of communication, psychology, emotional labor, and leadership development. She is known for her signature frameworks The CALM Method™, The 5 Messages Model, and the Black Box of Communication, which help people understand not just what they said, but what the other person heard, felt, and made it mean.
Before building a practice or a team, Tina was a 20-something crisis worker in Chicago, supporting families in their hardest moments. She quickly learned how to stay grounded in chaos, how to bring calm to dysregulated people, and how to help families access logic and connection when emotions were spiraling.
Wanting to create a more sustainable life for herself and a more elevated experience for clients, Tina began offering home-based private-pay therapy. Helping families rebuild communication in the same spaces where conflicts were happening became the foundation of her values: meet people where they are and give them tools they can use in real life.
Known for helping families enjoy each other again, helping parents work as a team, and helping couples reconnect after long periods of strain, Tina is often the therapist couples see after others haven’t worked—bringing steady, unshakeable energy she now trains her team to embody.
Tina realized that no one gets formal communication training, yet those are the skills that make or break marriages, teams, staff retention, leadership, and client relationships—so she decided to bring those tools into the world. Her best-known training is the Hairapist™ Workshop: Self-Regulation for a Sustainable Career Behind the Chair, a workshop rooted in emotional labor, boundaries, regulation, and the “mask” stylists and service workers wear every day. She also speaks on women in leadership, first-generation female business owners, female breadwinners, small business culture, self-regulation, the post-COVID shift in workforce needs, and why communication is the most underdeveloped— yet most critical—career skill.
Tina’s mission today is simple: Make communication skills accessible. Make mental health tools normal. And make emotionally sustainable work the new standard.
Interviewed by Winn Claybaugh, Tina is passionate about working with people in hospitality industries—those who serve others for a living and face customer after customer throughout the day. She believes communication-not technical skill-is the real differentiator in both relationships and careers. The “secret sauce” she shares is self-regulation, which includes how you speak to yourself and how you hold space for others. During this interview, Tina presents a real-life example of the acronym CALM in action, which can be a powerful conversation, training, and exercise for you and your team. You’ll also love her message about why “family time shouldn’t suck.” This interview delivers a beautiful feeling of hope for those who feel tired, burnt out, or emotionally drained.
If you’d like more tools to handle intense client moments, Tina’s free “How to Cancel a Karen” download will walk you through what to say and how to stay regulated when a client is upset (available at tinapower.com).
RELATED LINKS
Website: https://www.tinapower.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinashrader