Lori Gradley Believes Change Begins With a Single Choice

"Change your life by changing your thoughts." Lori Gradley has built a career on that line, and she can point to the evidence in her own working life. She is Founder and CEO of Splendid Inspiration, a wellness company offering online courses, books, blogs and mindset and life skill coaching. She is the award-winning author of two books. She has trained teams across North America, and she built and ran a multi-million-dollar property management company in Canada.

The idea took hold during a hard stretch. After a car accident, Gradley faced a long recovery. With time to think, she read widely on personal development and the psychology of thought, and she came away convinced that the mind can be trained, much as you would train a body back into shape.

"During recovery, I had a lot of time to reflect and realized I wasn't happy with the direction of my life. I knew I needed to change to create a more fulfilling future."

Her story starts earlier than that, though, and in a very different place. Long before she had a name for mindset coaching, Gradley was already working in front of an audience.

Presentation Before Purpose

As a schoolgirl, she worked runway, print, film, and TV commercials and choreographed fashion shows in shopping malls on the side, the kind of job that sounds glamorous until you realize it's mostly logistics. Her first real job was at CHCH-TV in Ontario, alongside the director and producer of Tiny Talent Time, a long-running children's program. Later she taught modeling and self-improvement at Miss Canada's Modeling Studio, mentoring teenage girls on poise and confidence years before she had a framework for either.

Easy to write that off as a detour, something before the real story starts. Gradley doesn't. Presentation, to her, was always downstream of something more internal. She just hadn't named it yet and wouldn't until a long recovery slowed her down enough to study what she'd been doing instinctively for years.

The Business Behind the Brand

"Personal development coach" undersells what Gradley's actually done for a living. In her mid-twenties she trained teams across North America for an international personal development company, standing in front of live seminar audiences years before online coaching was even a category people recognized.

"I began training teams across North America, helping countless individuals transform their lives through live seminars and personalized coaching."

At the same time, she built and ran a multi-million-dollar property management company across Canada. Nothing to do with mindset work on paper. Everything to do with it in practice: sales, negotiation, staff management, keeping a business solvent through years that weren't always kind to it.

That's the background she actually brings into a coaching room, not just years of studying human potential but years of running payroll and closing deals too. "Change your life by changing your thoughts" is the line she's built a career on. It lands differently coming from someone who's also had to make rent on a business.

Building Splendid Inspiration

Splendid Inspiration, the wellness company Gradley founded and now runs as CEO, is built around a fairly simple thesis: personal transformation should be measurable, not vague.

"I am the founder and CEO of my wellness company, Splendid Inspiration, offering transformative online wellness courses, books, inspiring blogs, and mindset and life skill coaching."

Her flagship programs, including the Renew & Recharge 30 Day Challenge, Power of Your Thoughts, and Manage Your Life's Stressors, are structured with the same practicality she'd bring to running a business: clear timelines, defined outcomes, and tools people can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon rather than only in a seminar room.

Her first book, How to Think & Succeed by Empowering Your Mind, turned that same philosophy into a roadmap and went on to win the Gold Star Excellence Award from Readers' Favorite in the non-fiction self-help category. Her second, Holistic Self-Care for Women, earned Gold Award Status from the Mom's Choice Awards, a recognized body focused on excellence in products and services for families. Together, the two books map fairly cleanly onto the two audiences she's spent the longest building trust with: professionals looking to lead better and women looking to care for themselves without guilt attached to it.

Taking It Into the Boardroom

Gradley's corporate work treats mindset as an organizational asset rather than a personal indulgence. Working alongside HR leaders, she designs workshops that map professionals' mental habits the way a consultant might map a supply chain, looking for where stress accumulates, where clarity breaks down, and where a small structural fix could prevent a much larger one down the line.

The argument she makes to executive teams is straightforward: burnout isn't a soft-skills problem sitting apart from performance; it's a performance problem with a soft-skills solution. Teams that manage their energy and thinking well, in her framing, are the teams that end up building genuine innovation and mutual respect, not as a nice-to-have culture initiative but as the operational baseline.

Recognition and Reach

In December 2025, Gradley was honored with the Leadership Excellence Award in Personal Development and Women Empowerment at the Global Summit Icon in Dubai, an event that drew professionals from more than twenty-five countries. It's the kind of recognition that tends to follow, rather than precede, the actual work, three decades of coaching, two award-winning books, and a company that has scaled from in-person seminars to a fully digital platform reaching clients across continents.

That digital shift wasn't incidental. As the wellness industry moved from conference rooms to screens, Gradley rebuilt Splendid Inspiration's delivery model around it deliberately, ensuring a professional in Europe or an entrepreneur in Asia could access the same coaching as a client sitting across from her in Ontario. She still tests new courses and digital products on a small scale before rolling them out globally, a habit that reads less like caution and more like the same discipline she once applied to running a property portfolio: prove it works, then scale it.

What Balance Actually Looks Like

Gradley is the mother of a son and a daughter, and she's candid that modelling the balance she teaches is harder in practice than it sounds on a course outline. Nature walks and reading are non-negotiable parts of her routine, not aspirational ones. She meets regularly with her global team to make sure Splendid Inspiration's offerings are still answering real, current problems rather than the problems that were current when a course was first built.

It's a small detail, but a telling one: a coach who tells clients their tools have to be lived daily, not just studied, is choosing to be judged by the same standard she sets for everyone else.

What Comes Next

Gradley's current focus is on bringing real-time mindset coaching to remote teams with tools that don't require someone to be in the same room, or even the same time zone, to get meaningful support. She continues updating her methods against current cognitive science research rather than resting on three decades of accumulated experience, a habit that has kept Splendid Inspiration relevant across a genuinely significant shift in how personal development gets delivered.

"Transformation is not a vague concept. It is a measurable shift that begins with a single choice to think differently."

That belief, worn plainly rather than dressed up, runs through everything Gradley has done, from her early years in front of an audience to the boardrooms she consults in today. She didn't wait for a perfect moment to go looking for her purpose, and she has spent three decades helping other people begin the search for theirs.