In this intimate episode recorded from my deck in Southern Colorado, I pull an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book, Not Managed, Fully Lived. I open up about my personal journey through the summer of 2022—a season marked by deep grief, a mountain move, long COVID, severe insomnia, and the disorienting arrival of perimenopause. 

I also break down why high-achieving, neurodivergent women cannot simply willpower or top-down reframe their way through hormonal and metabolic shifts. I share how personalized genetic testing (slow COMT, MAO, MTHFR) helped me decode my body's stress chemistry, why "healthy" foods were triggering adrenaline spikes, and how listening to my body’s signals—rather than overriding them—led to true physical and emotional sovereignty. 

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• The Perimenopause & ADHD Shift: Why your usual coping strategies and self-care habits stop working during hormonal transitions. 
• Symptoms as Signals: How brain fog, vertigo, and insomnia are biological communications asking to be heard, not deficits to suppress. 
• Genetics & Stress Chemistry: How slow COMT and MAO variants impair your ability to clear adrenaline, and why certain healthy foods increase histamine and anxiety. 
• Releasing the Shame of Burnout: Michele’s candid experience with executive burnout, taking a medical leave, and allowing her nervous system to discharge chronic activation. 
• The 3-Step Signal Evaluation: A practical framework (Check Your State, Watch for Repetition, Isolate One Variable) to discern real biological signals from temporary anxiety spirals. 

Ready to stop overriding your body's signals and build true capacity? If your brain or body has been sending you signals—whether through brain fog, fatigue, or stress overload—you don't have to navigate it alone. Book a complimentary Capacity Consultation with me. Together, we will look at where you're standing, evaluate what your system is communicating, and map out your next steps toward biological and emotional sovereignty.

Book a free Capacity Consultation: https://link.flowi.io/widget/booking/UvsQ3VCK5GmeAYlW7Rhe

With you,

Michele

The questions people ask out loud aren't always the real ones. After three days of live training, here's what actually came up, in the chat, the Q&A, the DMs. 

If you're neurodivergent, nervous system agility is the only way to turn everything you've already learned into the life you want, not just manage your way through it. 

In this episode:

0:00 — Intro 

0:40 — Disclaimer

0:59 — Welcome & Overview 

2:41 — What Is The Portal Method

13:41 — Round One: Practical Questions 

36:34 — Round Two: The Real Fear 

40:28 — Close & Call to Action

Ready to go deeper?

The Portal Method is open now. Sixteen weeks, live, built on nervous system regulation first, then whole-person wellbeing, then optimization, not another productivity system stacked on top of exhaustion.

Enroll in The Portal Method

Not ready to commit yet? Book a free Capacity Consultation and we'll map out your specific terrain together before you decide anything.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

With you,

Michele

Something has been showing up in my DMs lately, and I could not stop thinking about it. Seven-figure founders. Women running real companies, carrying real revenue, who look, from the outside, like they have it all together. And underneath it, they are hitting an edge they cannot fully name.

In this solo episode, I walk through why. I talk about the two boxes we get handed as women, the girl boss hustle and the trad wife domesticity, and why I never fit into either one, not in high school and not now. I get into the actual biology, the difference between a body that resets every 24 hours and one that moves in a longer, four-week rhythm, and why building a life on the wrong clock has a cost. And I introduce Sloane, the archetype I use with my own clients to describe the go-go-crash cycle, and why that cycle gets rewarded right up until it does not.

Your neurodivergent nervous system is the missing piece that turns everything you have already learned into a life you can actually live. Not managed. Fully lived. 

That belief is the whole reason this episode exists, and it is the whole reason I am opening a free, live three-day training on Zoom, August 27th, then September 1st and 3rd, 10am Mountain time. 

"How to Finally Live the Life You Already Build, Not Just Manage It"

Day one, we name the wall you keep hitting. 

Day two, we do the regulation work together, live. 

Day three, we turn it into something you can actually carry.

Save your seat for this free training, link below and on my Instagram. You are not here to cope. You are here to build something that lasts.

FREE 3-Day, Live Training

Follow @souljourncoach on Instagram

With you,

Michele

My guest today is Christopher Barber, an ADHD and AuDHD coach and a fellow high performer who spent years rebuilding his nervous system from the inside out. We talk about what actually broke down for him after decades on medication, what it took to rebuild through lab work and lifestyle change, and how he and his wife built structure into their home so the whole family can regulate together.

We get into reactivity, the moment his children became the mirror for old patterns he didn't know he was carrying, and the small daily disciplines that turned into lasting change. We close on the three words he now organizes his life around: restoration, sovereignty, community.

Follow along for more conversations at the intersection of ADHD, trauma, and the nervous system.

Find Christopher here: 

https://www.instagram.com/adhd.coach.christopher/

 website: Awakened-Divergence.com

With you,

Michele

Regulation is not calm. It's agility, responsiveness, and fluidity. It's the capacity to hold and move with what life throws at you, and that distinction changes everything about how you approach healing.

Titration and pendulation, the two body-based skills nobody explains: how much activation your nervous system can actually take in at once, and how to move between activation and ease instead of chasing stillness.

The real story behind the three pillars Michele now teaches every client, built from what she did alone in the backcountry after her world fell apart in 2020.

Why bottom-up work has to come before any top-down strategy, and why your planners and productivity systems keep failing until this piece is in place.

The 80 percent: the biological terrain underneath every strategy you've ever tried, and why almost nobody in the ADHD space is talking about it.

This episode is the overview. Each pillar, nervous system regulation, whole person wellbeing, and community, gets its own deep dive in the episodes ahead.

Warmly,

Michele

Welcome to the first episode of Not Managed, Fully Lived. Before we get into the work, I wanted you to know the woman behind it.

This episode is my own origin story. Not the polished version. The real one. We go back to 2008, a new baby, a market crash, and a body that was already running on adrenaline long before anyone had a name for it. We move through a university coaching program that grew from a beta test into a full department, and the same month I received a 40 Under 40 award, I got a thyroid diagnosis. That was my first burnout.

Then we get to 2020. Grief. Isolation. A hike that took ninety minutes just to feel like I was back in my own body.

This is the story of how I found the 80 percent, the biological terrain, the somatic truth, the layer under the layer that no productivity system or planner ever touched. If you have done all the work, tried all the strategies, and still hit a ceiling you cannot explain, this episode is for you.

You are not broken. You are under-restored. And there is a profound difference between the two.

Find me on Instagram and Substack at @Souljourncoach I read every comment and every DM.

Warmly,

Michele