Our Story: 

HPA Academy is led by Marie Kim Williams, an accomplished businesswoman, coach, attorney, and student of human behavior whose career combines psychology, law, business, and more than $350 million in real-estate sales.

But credentials alone do not explain Marie or her approach to coaching.

Marie believes most successful people already know much of WHAT they should be doing. The greater challenge is understanding WHY they want what they say they want and developing the discipline to consistently do the hard work necessary to achieve it.
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Going Beneath the WHAT to Discover the WHY

Marie is more of a question asker than advice giver.

She challenges clients to dig deeper: What do you really want? Why is it important? What are you willing to change to achieve it? Are your daily actions consistent with what you say you want?

Even highly successful people have goals that are not sufficiently specific, detailed, or meaningful enough to drive sustained behavior. Marie helps them develop the clarity necessary to turn good intentions into consistent action.

Hard Work and Accountability

Marie believes strongly that meaningful achievement requires hard work. But simply demanding more from someone rarely creates lasting change. People are more willing to do difficult work when they understand exactly what they are working toward and why it matters.

Marie is willing to confront clients and hold them accountable, but she does so with respect. She is patient without being permissive, compassionate without lowering expectations, and persistent without becoming unnecessarily confrontational.

Her objective is simple: keep the client moving in the right direction.

Marie also recognizes an important boundary. She can question, challenge, encourage, and advise, but ultimately the client must do the work.
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Coaching as an Act of Service

Marie does not give advice casually. Her recommendations are thoughtful and measured because she genuinely cares about the people she works with and the consequences of what she recommends.

Having achieved considerable financial success herself, "getting paid" or financial reward is not what drives her coaching.

For Marie, coaching is fundamentally an act of service.

She often helps clients recognize strengths they already possess rather than trying to make them more like someone else. One client felt overwhelmed by her competition. She discovered through Marie's coaching that her honesty, integrity, and genuine desire to help people were themselves significant competitive advantages. The answer wasn't becoming more like her competition; it was becoming more fully herself.
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From Achievement to Peace of Mind

HPA's roots extend back decades to Jack Studnicky's development of High Payoff Activity concepts. Marie's subsequent work in psychology, goal setting, discipline, and human performance helped develop those ideas into the structured methodology within the "12 Pillars of Persuasion."

That history remains important, but Marie is the HPA story today.

She works personally with already-successful, high-achieving people to apply these principles to their businesses, decisions, habits, and lives.

Ultimately, Marie encourages clients to consider a larger question: What is all this success for?

Marie's objective is not simply to help successful people achieve more. It is to help them understand what their success and use it to create greater fulfillment and long-term Peace of Mind.