Michelle Johnson

I attribute my success to listening to myself and trusting myself, even when facing challenges and intrusive thoughts. When I was working toward my certification as a nationally registered certified medical assistant, I almost thought of giving up many times. But I listened to myself and said, you invested, you had goals, you have lives that are looking at you as inspiration right now. You have to finish. It's not only for you, but for your children. So I told myself to do what I needed to do - cry, sweat, whatever - but finish. When I walked across that line and received my diploma, I was like, you did it. You stood 10 toes down, you did it! Even now, I still feel the walls of being a spiritual life coach, listening to the enemy tell me things like 'you're not good enough' or 'how are you gonna do this when you've been through that?' These intrusive thoughts come, but what I do is I recognize what they are. I hear them, but I don't feed them. Because once we begin to believe them, we're feeding the fear.

The biggest challenge I see in my field right now is that so many women are still in that challenging season of life, operating in survival mode for so long. When you operate in survival mode for so long, you build within your body systems high cortisone levels. Being a perimenopausal woman right now, within my findings and things that I'm learning, even in my own health journey, I want to be able to teach and educate and empower women before they reach this season about the effects that being in survival mode and high stress levels contribute to. The opportunity is really getting my ministry started where I am seeing clients - single women and professional women who are in their season of overwhelm - and teaching them to thrive in simplicity of life, bringing them out of survival mode.

The most important values to me are listening to yourself, trusting yourself, loving yourself, and honoring yourself. I believe you are unique in your own special way, and you shouldn't seek external validation. You are cared for, you are safe. I also value organization and creating systems to make life easier. I implement my own thrive method to my personal life by simplifying my systems, whether it be using the Trello board to keep my life aligned systematically and intentional in regards to my nervous system and healing my nervous system. If you have systems aligned, you wouldn't be so stressed out. Faith is also central to everything I do - I believe in moving forward with faith even when you're afraid, doing it shaking in your boots, having faith that you're going to get there even when you don't know how.