If you're looking for highly personalized, customized coaching and support in a confidential and honoring space - you’ve found it.

Sometimes all success takes is having someone on your team who's got your back.

Individuals

One-on-one personalized coaching for executives, business owners and professional coaches.

Organizations

Customized solutions for leaders, employees and teams within your organization

Groups

Focused small group work and mastermind programs for emerging or established professionals.

Our lives are in constant motion toward greater success.

Biography
Speaking
Testimonials

In over fourteen years of coaching executives all around the world, I’ve learned that moving forward requires a sequence of specific steps. First, you have to understand yourself - fully and honestly. Then, you need to set an intention for what you need to change or how you’d like to be different. Only then can you move toward realizing your goal.

And, for the greatest possible success, this approach needs to be customized to you - to how you learn, to who you are, to how you work best.

This is what I do as your coach. This is my life’s work and I’ve been able to do it with people around the world who are now achieving things they never thought they could achieve.

It’s the best feeling ever.

And since I believe in transparency, my packages and offers are laid out clearly and straightforwardly on my Coaching page.

Are you ready to get started? Because I can’t wait to see what we’ll create together!

Circle of 12

Starting January 2020

A small group mentoring program designed specifically for emerging and professional coaches. This program is for you if you want to create a sustainable and growing coaching business on your own terms. For six months, we’ll meet every week in a mentored mastermind, which will be recorded for your later review. Every month you’ll have a one-on-one session with me. We’ll start with a virtual intensive which I’ve created and perfected – it really works!

Learn More

Circle of 12 was a catalytic experience for me and my business. The support I received and the clarity that I gained propelled my business into a whole new level of success. I highly recommend Michele and the community of support that is created through Circle of 12.

– Nona Jordan (www.nonajordan.com)

Powerful Coaching. Powerful Results.

"I first went to Michele out of curiosity. I come back for the results! It is amazing how she knows just which questions to ask to generate a new energy and thought process. When I’m stuck, I call Michele. When I want to test an idea and have someone turn it on its ear, I call Michele. There are lots of people with experience but Michele just has that something extra – wisdom and a Zen-like quality – that helps me put it all together!"

Susan DeFife Askew
Entrepreneur, lifelong student

"Michele is both insightful and articulate. She has a wonderful way of giving and imparting her expertise so that both her clients and her audience come away with goals and a real vision of how they are going to make lasting changes that will serve them well at work and at home."

Fiona Gathright
President and CEO

"Michele has a keen intuition and gentle demeanor which enable her to ask the right questions in the right way, so I feel safe to explore uncomfortable and powerful issues. She is a first rate executive coach that I highly recommend for her creative approach, thoughtful technique and superb listening skills."

Julie M Hodack
Leadership Coach and Educator

Crys Wood

"Michele's eye is forever on the prize, which isn't making the most money, but making the most of your gifts, skills, and potential, and making danged sure you know the value of those things to the people you can best serve. I walked in with one offer and walked out with three, the main idea solidified, a fledgling idea validated, and an idea I never saw coming."

Crys Wood
Consultant

James Minichello

"Michele has a forward thinking approach that was would benefit anyone in pursuit of professional growth. Her capabilities as a coach along with her teaching skills are outstanding."

James Minichello
Association Executive

Denise Canellos

"Michele cut through two years of stuck in just two sessions. She identified the real problem almost immediately, and moved me through it all with compassion. My business is now moving forward, growing and I feel confident and hopeful for the first time in a long while."

Denise Canellos
Business Owner

Erin Yudchitz

"Michele helped me to approach challenges with confidence. Rather than providing answers, she offered perspective and helped me to reframe situations, always empowering me to be in control. With her guidance, I learned new tools for making plans, taking action, and getting results."

Erin Yudchitz
Program Director

Senya Rahmil

Michele is an experienced professional. She understands her customer needs, she listens, and she is smart, articulate, and practical. Michele is a delightful person and an excellent pro."

Senya Rahmil
Vice President

Lisa Dewey Wells, M.Ed.

Working with Michele wasn't just game-changing for my coaching business but for my heart and soul. Michele has an uncanny ability to see the best in people and to bring together people who complement and support each other. Advancing my business to the next stage would have been a messy process - that I may have abandoned - without Michele in my corner cheering and nudging me along.

Lisa Dewey Wells, M.Ed.

Grounded 2 Grow Coaching, Consulting & Wellness

Abbe Jacobson Kopf

Michele Woodward is a warm, wise, intelligent, skilled coach and leader. Michele’s astute observations have helped countless coaches develop and define their own businesses. With Michele’s guidance I have grown to be more calm, grounded and determined as a business owner.

Abbe Jacobson Kopf

Certified Health and Life Coach

Starla Fitch, MD

Michele Woodward is the real deal. She’s the “Coaches’ Coach.” Whether you’re a surgeon like me, an executive, a coach, a leader, she meets you where you are and truly listens to what you have to say — and, more importantly, to what you’re not saying. Michele is wise, thoughtful, and generous. She is amazingly succinct and cuts to the chase — so important in our busy lives. Life is short: working with Michele can help you get where you want to go!

Starla Fitch, MD

John Haeckel

I have found coaching to be among the most important components of evolving my career in a more fulfilling and rewarding direction. Though skeptical at first, once I embraced Michele’s approach and process, it not only opened new pathways forward, but I also found it so powerful that I encouraged my business partner to engage Michele and brought her into our company to help us.

John Haeckel

President and CEO

	Thrive Global 3 Ways Managers Can Make Delegation Less Stressful and More Effective. Delegating isn’t lazy. In fact, it can be a learning opportunity for you and your team. Executive coach Michele Woodward talks with Thrive Global writer Jessica Hicks about successful leadership and the art of delegation.
	The Wall Street Journal Why Forgetfulness Might Actually Help You. Executive coach Michele Woodward talks with WSJ writer Sue Shellenbarger about absent-minded moments and what they may really mean.
	HLN How To Stick To Your New Year’s Resolutions CNN Headline News “Weekend Express” anchor Lynn Smith talks to Michele about making – and sticking to – your resolutions. Televised nationally on Tuesday, January 2nd.
	WNYC Knocking Out the Office Bully. Bullies don’t exist just on the playground. They also exist in the workplace as well. So what’s the best way to deal with your local office thug? Jenna Kagel interviews Michele Woodward on WNYC Public Radio.
	Dice Your Workplace Transition Survival Guide by Yael Grauer. Whether you’ve decided to take the plunge into startup land after years in a big corporation, or chosen to move from a tiny startup to an enterprise position, there may be a few bumps along the way as you learn how to work with your new boss and team. Here are a few tips to help you find success in your new role.

More Media Mentions

Becoming UnBusy

Filed Under: Authenticity, Blog, Career Coaching, Happier Living, Managing Change

Last week my coaching sessions with various clients covered these topics:

Navigating office politics
Creating and shaping critical work relationships
Managing competing priorities
Recovering from disappointment and frustration
Career planning
Owning and claiming success
Making a plan for the future

Know what the solution to each of these things is?

It’s having the time and space to step back, reflect, understand and plan.

Know what else? Everyone in the world thinks they are too busy to step back, even for a moment, to reflect, understand and plan.

I guess that’s why coaching was invented, amIright?

The Cult of Busyness has billions of adherents. Members drink the Kool-Aid, which is flavored with a heavy dose of If-I’m-Not-Busy-I-Don’t-Matter (which tastes a little like Mylanta, if you were wondering).

Busyness is too many meetings where nothing gets done.

Busyness is where nothing gets done because there are too many meetings.

Busyness is exhaustion.

Busyness is snapping at others because you’re exhausted.

Busyness is the illusion that you matter, that what you do matters, that you’re making a difference – but only if you’re busy enough.

But you really aren’t sure because you’re often too busy to assess whether or not what you’re doing is actually working.

The famous theologian Henri Nouwen wrote:

“Why are people so busy? Perhaps they want to have success in their life or they want to be popular or they want to have some influence. If you want to be successful, you have to do a lot of things; if you want to be popular, you have to meet a lot of people; if you want to have influence, you have to make a lot of connections. The problem is that your identity is hooked up with your busyness: ‘I am what I do; I am what people say about me; I am what influence I have.’ As soon as you fail, you get depressed; as soon as people start talking negatively about you, or as soon as you feel you have no influence whatsoever, you feel low…

“Solitude is listening to the voice who calls you the beloved. It is being alone with the One who says, ‘You are my beloved, I want to be with you. Don’t go running around, don’t start to prove to everybody that you are beloved. You are already beloved.’ That is what God says to us. Solitude is the place where we go to hear the truth about ourselves.”

Becoming UnBusy is hard work. Because it requires solitude. And solitude requires boundaries.

You have to have limits, and limits are hard to establish and harder to enforce. We live in a world where having boundaries and standards seems counter-cultural and weird.

A couple of clients asked me this week about my work and my boundaries. “How,” they asked, “do you do it?” The “Miss Smarty Pants” part was fully implied.

Here are some of the ways I do what I do:

I only attend meetings or events if my presence makes a difference
I only attend meetings where something gets done
I always know who’s accountable for what
I know I’m a morning person so I front-load my day – meaning, I don’t work after sundown
I also don’t look at my phone after 9pm
I have a maximum of five client sessions a day
I create systems and procedures and stick to them
I go to sleep at the same time-ish every night and wake about the same time-ish every morning
I honor my priorities around my health, my need for learning, and my desire to be connected with my closest loved ones – these things I attend to first

What does these boundaries do for me? Why, each of these things allow me to have the time and space to reflect, to understand, to plan.

To be UnBusy.

To be strong, effective, focused, balanced and unstressed. To have time to do things other than work.

To live a life fully – fully engaged, fully curious, fully in love.

Being UnBusy, though, does make it difficult at social occasions where everyone says “Gosh, I’m so busy!”, and I say, “I’m not! I’m totally engaged with my work and having a blast!”

You should see the expressions on their faces.

Who could have known that disruption was this much fun?