🌿Welcome. I’m Michelle Shaw

Sustainable work requires sustainable conditions — for individuals, leaders, and the systems surrounding them.

I’m a lived-experience practitioner, relational advocate, systems strategist, and creative confidence mentor working at the intersection of employment, accessibility, governance, and identity.

My work exists to stabilise people and environments when capacity has been exceeded, systems are under strain, and support structures are no longer sustainable — restoring clarity, containment, and direction before purposeful and sustainable progress can take place.

My story is one of late diagnosis, structural collapse, and rebuilding a life and career that better reflect how I’m designed to function — not how I believed I was expected to.

It required stepping back, re-evaluating everything, and learning how to stabilise both myself and the environments I was working within — without a clear roadmap, and often having to work out each sustainable next step in real time.

Over time, that process became practice.

Today, lived experience sits alongside structured professional practice — shaping how I support individuals, leaders, organisations, and learners through different stages of stabilisation, sustainable growth, and confident expression.

🧭 A Four-Layer Support Ecosystem

My work spans four interconnected areas — each supporting a different layer of need.

Some people enter through one doorway.
Others move between them as life, work, or capacity evolves.

🌉 1️⃣ Advocacy Bridge CIC

Stabilising the individual when systems overwhelm.

Advocacy Bridge exists where formal services taper off.

I support neurodivergent adults and individuals navigating physical and invisible disabilities and related assessments, alongside benefits, employment systems, funding pathways, education, safeguarding concerns, and life transitions — particularly when formal, emotional, and practical support is absent, fragmented, or inaccessible.

This work includes:

Relational advocacy
System and service navigation
Access to Work guidance and preparation
Capacity stabilisation during periods of overwhelm
Consent-led decision support

The focus is stabilisation first — restoring dignity, clarity, and sustainable next steps when systems and entitled support are not functioning as they should, or are inaccessible or delayed.

🧱 2️⃣ Sorted + Supported

Stabilising the leader holding responsibility.

This work supports CIC directors, founders, and self-employed professionals whose responsibility has outgrown their containment.

Often, they’re holding governance, safeguarding, delivery, and decision-making pressure without adequate sounding boards or structural support.

I work relationally as a co-pilot — helping leaders think clearly again.

This includes:

Strategic clarity mapping
Relational co-pilot support
Decision containment
Governance pressure unpacking
Capacity boundary setting

The goal is stability first — so leadership can function sustainably.

🎧 3️⃣ Mischemix Academy

Rebuilding identity, confidence, and expression.

My creative company focuses on confidence, voice, and self-expression through music, movement, and performance.

I deliver inclusive, sensory-aware training designed particularly for neurodivergent adults, late starters, and those rebuilding confidence after burnout or life change.

Programmes include:

Want2DJ
Want2Dance
Want2Speak

For many learners, creativity becomes the bridge back to agency, joy, and self-trust — not performance pressure.

🫀 Lived Experience Meets Structured Practice

Before any of this work became my profession, I had to learn how to stay alive inside the life I’d been given — without a trusted inner circle, and without the language, tools, or scaffolding to connect or experience joy with the family left standing.

That absence is what later shaped the work I now do — creating space to slow everything down, build essential structure, and develop the skills needed to navigate survival with dignity.

Space to think.
Space to feel.
Space to rebuild.

And eventually, to design a life that could help others do the same.

I’ve been the daughter, sister, and auntie who built her life around a parent lost to cancer — a loss that exposed just how empty and unsteady my foundations were, and left me rebuilding from the ground up, completely unprepared for survival without them.

I’ve been the co-habiting business partner, employee, wife, and step-mum — holding responsibility across households, businesses, and clients — until I lost sight of myself and realised I’d been living and working within structures that were never designed to protect my needs.

I’ve been the professional who could support, hold, carry, and lift everyone else — carrying responsibility that was never meant to be held alone — until my own system said no, forcing me to relearn how to function as an adult and recognise just how unsustainable that way of living had become.

I’ve been the heavily masked, over-functioning employee — navigating hierarchy, absorbing pressured expectations, and hiding overwhelm to appear capable while my internal capacity was quietly shrinking — suppressing my needs to keep the peace and keep the job.

I’ve been the heavily masked business owner who, three businesses in and five years deep, lost 19 clients almost overnight — along with her voice, capacity, focus, and direction — after more than 25 years in business.
It exposed just how fragile my professional structure had become, and how much energy it took to keep functioning while quietly collapsing behind the scenes without support.

I’ve always been the creative who could light up rooms — until my body said no and exposed the limits of the structures I’d been living within.

The only reason I pursued an autism and ADHD assessment was because my marriage to the man I had consciously chosen fell apart — exposing dynamics and survival patterns I had never fully understood, and prompting me to learn how to take better care of myself and reconsider how I wanted to show up for my husband, my clients, and the world.

That was the true beginning of my rebuilding — from the inside out and from the ground up.

It was also when the penny began to drop that I had always been heavily masked — adapting, performing, and surviving within environments that never truly accounted for my needs, and where I never felt safe enough to speak up.

Receiving a late diagnosis wasn’t a positive experience.
If anything, it was traumatising and deeply confusing.

Rather than bringing clarity, it made life harder — prompting me to begin unmasking and exposing trauma, survival patterns, and nervous system responses I had never had the space, support, or safety to understand.

It led me to step back from life as I knew it — taking three years away from my work, my businesses, my projects, and my roles to focus on understanding myself openly and honestly, rebuilding my foundations, and learning what sustainable living and working actually meant for me.

That time reshaped not just my life, but the way I now design my work:

Slower.
Capacity-aware.
Trauma-informed.
Dignity-led.
Human first.

🌍 Who I Support

Across my ecosystem, I work with:

Neurodivergent adults navigating transitions
Late-diagnosed professionals
CIC leaders and directors
Self-employed practitioners
Accessibility-minded organisations
Creative learners rebuilding confidence

Many of the people I support are holding layered responsibility without the structures, containment, team support, or relational scaffolding needed to sustain it.

🌱 My Practice Lens

My work is grounded in:

Trauma-informed practice
Neurodiversity-affirming approaches
Capacity-aware delivery
Governance-literate frameworks
Relational support
Structural implementation

I don’t separate people from systems.

Because when systems fail, people burn out.
And when people burn out, systems destabilise.

🔥 Why This Work Exists

Because unsustainable systems don’t just affect output — they affect lives.

When leaders collapse, services destabilise.
When accessibility is overlooked, talent is excluded.
When capacity is ignored, harm follows.

Sustainability isn’t a luxury.

It’s a structural requirement.

🧭 Where Would You Like to Begin — or Go Next?

If you’re here, something likely resonated — you may simply be entering through a different doorway.

Some people need safety first — clarity, containment, and steady ground.

Others are ready for agency — structure, direction, and forward movement.

Both are valid.

Where you begin depends on where you are right now.

If you’re navigating personal systems, employment, or life transitions
→ Advocacy Bridge CIC

If you’re a leader or founder holding responsibility alone
→ Sorted + Supported

If your organisation needs infrastructure, governance, or accessibility embedding
→ Sorted + Resourced

If you’re rebuilding confidence, identity, or creative expression
→ Mischemix Academy

Or, if you’re unsure where you fit — start with a conversation.

You don’t need a five-year plan.
You need five minutes of truth — the right place to begin, and one step that feels possible.

Or simply pause here for a moment.
Breathe.
If you’d like somewhere gentle to begin, you can start here.

→ Email: info@michelleshaw.co.uk
→ Book a no-pressure call

The next step doesn’t have to be big — it just has to be yours.