I’m Michelle.

As a child I would climb trees and sing to the sky. I believed my voice could shape reality.

My parents put me into theatre arts because it was a more normal way to use my voice. I was sick before every single performance, but then something would take over the moment I was out there. I often felt I was ‘being sung’ rather than singing.

At sixteen I started vocal coaching children. Some of them went on to lead chart-topping girl groups. I started a performing arts school at the Royal Academy of Dance in Battersea with my friend Jane from Miss Saigon, teaching children singing and dancing for confidence. One of them was a little boy called Shadrack, who didn’t speak at all.

He ended up playing the Lion King while his mother sat completely in awe.

That was, and still is, one of the proudest moments of my life. I love witnessing people stepping into full self expression.

I worked backstage at SM:TV and CD:UK, and went on to coach Brit Award winners, West End performers, television and radio presenters.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it I realised I was training the wrong voice, because the outer one only ever travels as far as the inner one will allow.

I presented live TV a few times, but my own inner voice never let me go all the way. I now believe I never looked closely enough at the voices I had inherited.

I got married in 2006 and became a mother for the first time in 2007. Then again in 2010.

Around the same time I moved onto the biggest stage in the world, the internet, but I was still working with voices and self expression, now helping creatives and business owners market themselves authentically online. It was MySpace at the time, then Facebook.

In 2013 I moved to Thailand with my then husband and ran my first thirty day True Reflection Challenge. One question a day, in a carefully curated sequence, asked and answered in a very particular way. I ran it for female business owners who could not make themselves visible, and it worked. Suddenly I had an online business I could run from anywhere.

Even more importantly, I am still connected to many of the women who were part of that first challenge. In 2018 two of them moved mountains to support me in person after I moved to Portugal, following my divorce and the death of my dear friend Millie.

In doing so they taught me how powerful the method is at creating deeply connected relationships, even between people who have only ever met online.

What I had not expected was how often the True Reflection Technique mended something in participants’ families and personal lives at the same time as their businesses.

In 2017 my marriage ended and I flew home a single mother. A month later my friend Millie died, and knowing that her two boys would never hear her voice again broke my heart, and planted the seeds for what I do today. I went to Portugal to grieve in a place where I had no memories, and got ill enough to look properly at my own mortality, with two children who now had only me. I felt so vulnerable, and became determined to find a way never to leave them.

In 2020 I had Phoenix, a few months before my 43rd birthday. The years that followed were a baptism of fire, and like my daughter’s namesake, a new version of me rose out of the ashes left behind by the version of me that burned to the ground.

In 2022 I lost my home, and unknowingly ended up renting a house that had been taken possession of illegally. It was being held in trust for a minor beneficiary. I had to go to court to clear my name.

That same year I watched someone I knew be evicted, because their father had died intestate.

And that year my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I became his carer. He became focused on getting his affairs in order, and as we talked through what he wanted, stories started surfacing that I had never heard in my life.

The conversation about inheritance is what released the stories. Which I now know are the most precious inheritance of all.

I made a journal to catch them, and then a deck of conversation cards, and started preserving my own stories for my children too.

In 2022 I also met Sean, and suddenly understood the phrase ‘the other half’ for the first time in my life. An estate and succession planning specialist for more than fifteen years, he spotted something in my parents’ wills, written decades earlier and never revisited, that would have caused my family real trouble. And he taught me why ninety percent of what families build is gone within three generations. I learned that it almost never fails for legal reasons. It fails because people stop talking, and lose the stories and the connection.

That is when I realised I had spent decades building the solution without knowing what it was for.

Your internal story is how you trust yourself enough to build a business.

Story is how you build a business people trust.

And it is also how you build a family that does not lose what is most valuable.

Story is the strategy for self belief, success and succession. The same mechanism, pointed in different directions.

Today I work with women who are in the prime of their lives, midlife and beyond, often navigating multiple converging challenges as I have. Often caring upwards to parents and downwards to children at the same time as managing demanding careers. I help them step into their power and liberate their time and energy, while helping every generation of their family get what they most need at their stage of life. By joining ContinUnity and becoming the TRUSTorian in their family, they invite their family to join them in collecting, preserving and protecting the stories that make everyone richer in all the ways that matter.

All it takes is five minutes a day, and everyone benefits right away.