She has interviewed hundreds of people. Artists, executives, instructors, staff members, people from different backgrounds and walks of life, each with a story worth hearing. She asks them the questions most workplaces never get around to asking, then captures their stories so others can read them and find something in another person’s journey that speaks to their own.

In more than twenty years of doing this, Tonya Zee has rarely sat on the other side of the table. This is what happens when she does.

The Canadian Who Made a Career of Noticing Canadians

Tonya Zee is the founder of TONYA ZEE, a business education and leadership practice built on more than twenty years of experience. In 2023, she brought her speaking, coaching, and profiling work together under the TONYA ZEE brand. At the heart of that work is something simple: behind every person is a lifetime of experiences, lessons, and wisdom worth discovering.

A Certified Business Professional, Facilitator and coach with a background in business management and public relations, she has spent two decades in classrooms, boardrooms, and workshop circles across the country. What defines her is not the teaching, it is her refusal to let a person’s contribution go unnoticed.

Before the Framework, There Was a Room She Wasn’t Sure She Belonged In

Nothing about her career was handed to her. She built it one step at a time.

She was still finding her own confidence, but one thing was already clear: she wanted to see others succeed.

Early in her career, she joined Avalon Employment Inc. as an employment coach, working one-on-one alongside people who faced real barriers to finding work. She coached them on the job, hearing their stories, understanding the challenges they faced, and seeing firsthand what can happen when someone is given the opportunity and encouragement to show what they are capable of.

Around the same time she was recruiting blood donors for Canadian Blood Services and supporting communications work, including interviewing and profiling staff, through a placement with Eastern Health, plus a federal government role in business management. Different mandates, same underlying thread: connecting with people, hearing their stories, and helping what matters be seen.

Then, in her early twenties, a major hydro and energy corporation asked her to deliver a leadership workshop. She was young, largely untested, and the request arrived before her confidence did.

“My first thoughts included, ‘Am I good enough?’ and ‘What if I fail?’ But I stepped forward anyway.”

She calls it a pivotal moment in her career, and it is the seed of the I CAN™ Mindset Framework she now teaches, a practice she says grew from something she had to learn herself before she could offer it to anyone else. The woman who doubted she belonged in that room has spent twenty years making sure other people know they belong in theirs.

The rest of her career reads like a widening of that same idea. In 2010 she founded Women’s Empowerment Canada Inc. and launched WEC Magazine, profiling remarkable Canadians and hosting events that celebrated Canadian leadership. She taught business management at Reeves College beginning in 2005 and later worked with both Reeves and CDI College in teaching and contract roles, supporting students as they built their skills and careers. A certified PD facilitator who also works as a coach, Zee has facilitated business programs, motivational workshops, and professional development across different sectors.

Teaching, profiling, coaching, celebrating. Four verbs, one belief.

What Happens When a Company Finds Out Who Its People Actually Are

TONYA ZEE empowers leaders, strengthens businesses, and celebrates Canadians. At the heart of that work is The Canadian Spotlight Project, an ongoing effort to honour the stories and contributions of Canadians and Canadian organizations across industries. She has profiled figures including actor JaNae Armogan and artist Allison Prior, along with institutions such as CDI College and Reeves College.

That belief is at the heart of the whole practice. When those stories surface, people are able to see beyond the polished version of success and learn from the real experiences, challenges, and wisdom of others.

The second arm of the business takes the same approach inside organizations. Companies hire her to interview and profile their own staff, and the results have been quietly significant. On one post-secondary engagement, she was brought in to profile employees and document the experiences, obstacles, and accomplishments sitting behind their job descriptions. As the profiles circulated internally, something shifted.

Colleagues began discovering the people behind the positions, creating stronger connections and a greater sense of community.

Recognition, in other words, was not a morale gesture. It was infrastructure. Her stated goal for any team she works with is that they feel seen, heard, and encouraged, on the reasoning that businesses are stronger when their people are.

Ask her for metrics and she does not reach for a dashboard

“The strongest measure of traction has been the work itself: referrals, repeat opportunities and trusted professional relationships that have endured for years, and in some cases, decades.”

Hundreds of Canadians and organizations profiled. More than twenty years facilitating organizations across different sectors. A twenty-year practice built almost entirely on people sending her the next person. She won a FIERCE Award in her category at the FIERCE Women of the Year Awards, a Spirit Award for commitment and compassion toward others, and a Professional Coaching Award in 2025. She has also, fittingly, been the subject of a spotlight feature herself, titled “A Source of Inspiration.”

Her diagnosis of why so much leadership development fails to stick is blunt, and it explains why she keeps returning to other people’s hardest chapters rather than their highlight reels.

The Part of the Success Story Nobody Prints

Which brings the story back to a young woman standing outside a corporate boardroom, asking herself whether she was good enough, and walking in before she had an answer. She chose to take the next step anyway, a moment that would become the heart of her I CAN™ Mindset Framework. Everything she has built since has been a way of reminding others that they can take that next step too. The framework, the magazine, the classrooms, the staff profiles, all of it insists on the same thing: that the person inside the title is the point, and that being seen is not a soft reward but the beginning of the work.

For twenty years she has been giving Canadians their own stories back. It was time somebody handed her hers.