Meet Michelle
How it started
Like many of you, I was brought up thinking we had to separate our creative aliveness and meaning from our "real job" that paid the bills. I spent years trying to integrate the them – through trial and a lot of error, navigating fears, doubts, and challenges along the way – until I came up with a creative, emergent way to do that in my own life...and discovered my unique creative emergence process.
I have had the great privilege of making a living doing creative work I love, and I love supporting my clients in that.
I started sharing my integrated approach with friends and colleagues who got great results and started referring me...and Creative Emergence Coaching was born.
That was over 2 decades ago. I have since learned much, and evolved my process and my own way of being within it. After working with thousands of people, I've located certain similar organic patterns embedded in every client's unique emergence process, and I use various creative approaches to engage it, customized for each client.
My sweet spot
Helping you engage what's truly emerging, and birth anything new, authentic and unique is my sweet spot - from a workshop or product to a business or a new way or being. I'll help you birth it, own it, structure and design it, clean it up, create it out, get paid for it, and get it ready for the world. I'm the midwife, not the nanny. I'm there for new births.
Discoveries
A series of transformational experiences led to discoveries I use in my work, along with a strong intuitive ability to sense into what's emerging in coaching sessions. The Creative Emergence process is both a framework and an integrative, evolving approach. Each discovery leads to the next iteration.
TURNING POINT STORIES
My Calling Story
I had an unexpected "awakening" experience that came out of nowhere in my early 20's, which gave me an intimate experience of the creative life force in myself, and the knowing it was in all of us, and in all of creation. It changed how I saw life, and my calling was born.
After that experience, I was on the quest to understand this universal aliveness intelligence and the creative source in each of us and how to integrate it into into my work and life. Something in me was vitalized, and I had no idea at the time what that meant or how it would play out.
My Somatics Story
Around the same time, I broke my jaw in a car accident. I had a few years of TMJ treatment (which made it worse), and eventually two jaw surgeries. The surgeries got it looking back to normal, but left me off balance, with a head tilt, and in chronic pain.
After trying many approaches that didn't work, a friend suggested joining him at a non-conventional bodywork workshop. That changed my life. After 2 hours, I felt better than I had in years.
I started going as a client to see Kay Miller, the founder of Core Somatics. It was there I had my first embodied experience of somatic psychology (which views the body and mind as an integrated whole), when gentle movements unleashed years of stored memories in my body. I went to her monthly for a couple of years, and benefitted so much, that I took her intensive 5-year training program and became a certified Core Somatics Master Practitioner and starting integrated my learnings into my work.
My Improv Story
I used to be terrified of public speaking, but it is part of my work so not doing it was not an option. So I joined Toastmasters, which definitely helped. Then I had a client who told me about a local improv group over 25 years ago. I went there and fell in love with everything about improv - the creativity, freedom, and feeling-the-fear-and-doing-it-anyway in a safely held space.
Improv completely transformed my experience of leading groups, taking me from feeling fearful to feeling to confident to having so much fun when I’m leading them. I started integrating it in to my work with clients, and leading creative facilitation trainings.
Learnings in Layers
Certain paradigm-shifting and healing experiences left me perceiving the world differently. They sparked a deep curiosity, and a sense of wonder and purpose in me. Over the years, I learned to connect more intentionally with the underlying creative life force we all have in us, and help my clients connect with theirs.
Creative Process
In addition to discoveries from embodied experiences, I became a life-long student of creative process at different levels - cognitive, intuitive, somatic, energetic, soul, universal - and its connection with human potential.
Deep Diving Inside and Out
Informing my work is the organic creative process and my focus on emergence with learnings in neuroscience, organizational change, group process work, depth and somatic psychology, integral theory, participatory design, the expressive arts, movement, bodywork, mythology, improv theater, storytelling, spirituality, and the complexity sciences.
Creations
I have developed many original processes products, workshops, train-the trainer programs and love supporting my clients in creating their own original models, services, and products.
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Creative Expression
A lover of creative practices, I performed full-length improvised plays with Precipice Improv for many years, and currently perform Playback Theater with Virginia Playback Theater. I'm an abstract painting artist and a CoreSomatics® Movement and Bodywork Master Practitioner. I also do pole fitness, and recently created my first comedic pole routine.
Community Gathering
I founded and ran the Capitol Creativity Network in DC, and the Applied Creativity Network Meetup, and was a TEDx speaker. I produced Creativity in Business Conferences, and Creativity in Business online summits, with an accompanying ebook, Navigating the New Work Paradigm. My work has been featured on podcasts, television, and in books, was recognized in Fast Company's blog for creative community building.
My book, Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator's Guide for Cultivating Creativity, is available on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3QDbZ65