About Michele

I started taking singing lessons at 14. Studied privately with vocal coaches until I was 32. Earned my degree in Mass Communications with a Theatre and Vocal minor. I was in theatre productions, a solo artist, a backup singer, a demo singer, a lead singer in a band, and a vocal coach for 19 years. While I was building my singing career, I was also building my music industry career, not instead of it, but alongside it. Contracts Specialist in the legal departments at BMI, Warner Bros., Gibson Guitar, Baldwin Piano. Managing artist endorsement deals. Living both sides of that equation at the same time, in the same body, for 25 years.

Then, in May of 2010, a flood hit Nashville that they said only happens once every thousand years. Over a hundred thousand people were affected. Our home was destroyed, and it would take more than a year to rebuild it.

Rebuilding a house requires money, and my music industry job wasn't going to provide enough of it. So I made the practical choice. I left and took a job in healthcare that could fund the rebuild.

And when the rebuild was over, I didn't go back. Not because I chose to stay, but because I hadn't yet realized I'd left myself behind. That awareness came later, slowly, the way those things do. In the growing wrongness. In the office politics. In the moments I'd speak truth about something and be told to be quiet and stop causing trouble.

I had abandoned myself so gradually that I didn't even notice... until it got so painful that I did.

But before that awareness fully arrived, the flood had already cracked something open in me. With four feet of water in my home and everything stripped back to what mattered, I found my way back to the manifesting work I'd always known. I reopened what I'd been quietly closing. I started listening again to the voice I'd been told to quiet.

I tried to go back to normal. I couldn't. Normal didn't fit anymore.

So in 2016, while still working full time in the legal department of a healthcare company, I went back to school for my coaching certification. I was doing it all at once, the corporate job, the coursework, the clinical hours, and on the last day of my classes, my employer called. I had the PTO. I had every right to be where I was. They told me that if I didn't come in, I wouldn't get paid.

I said: I understand, and I'll take the unpaid day. I chose me and my calling.

Within a month I finished my clinical hours and received my certification. The founder of the school told me no one she'd ever worked with had certified that fast.

I got my certificate and hung out my coaching shingle.

I switched to a second healthcare company that August, and for two more years I lived both lives at once, corporate job by day, coaching and teaching manifesting on the side, woo-preneur with crystals on my desk and a soul that was done shrinking. But the gap between who I was in that office and who I knew myself to be had become impossible to live in. I could not keep going against my own truth. I could not keep choosing the job over my integrity. And when the moment came that made that undeniable, I was done.

Thirty days later, I resigned.

I had a plan. I had a coach. I had been doing the inner work, healing things, reconnecting with my own voice, rebuilding the self-trust I'd slowly handed over to jobs that were never going to honor it. I had already been coaching and teaching manifesting on the side, and I knew... I knew... I could do this.

So I leaped. And I haven't looked back since.

Here's what I know after all of it:

The thing that keeps you stuck isn't a strategy problem. It isn't a skill problem or a timing problem or a money problem. It's how you lose yourself over time, so gradually, so quietly, that you don't even know it's happening. Until one day you wake up and wonder how you got here. And how on earth you find your way back.

It's the self abandonment we convince ourselves is necessary, to fit in, to keep the peace, to do the things we think we have to do. And from the outside everything can look perfect and why would we not be happy? The good job. The benefits. The three bedroom house in the right zip code with the two German cars in the driveway. And you go home at night and stare at the ceiling fan or pour yourself another glass of wine and wonder what your escape plan is. And then the paycheck hits and you push it all back down for another two weeks.

After a while you start to realize the pain of staying where you are outweighs the fear of leaving the stability. And something in you knows you were meant to listen to that still small voice that's been silenced for too long, because there is something more inspiring for you out there. And this sure as heck ain't it.

But here's what I know: there was never anything wrong with you. The voice that got quiet? It's still there. The knowing that got buried? It's still yours. You didn't lose it. You just became disconnected from it.

I know what it's like to live two lives in one body. To have crystals on your desk and a soul that's screaming and a calendar full of meetings that have nothing to do with who you actually are. I know what it's like to speak truth and be told to stop. To feel the gap between the life you're living and the life that belongs to you grow wider every year, until one day something breaks, and you have to decide what to do with the breaking.

I know because I lived it. In the office, at the keyboard, in the water up to my knees in my own home, and in the places inside myself where none of those roles could follow.

That's where I work. That's where Rosaria worked. That's where the aunts walked in and that little girl got up and went outside to play.