Michelle Ward, aka The When I Grow Up Coach,  uses a dose of empathy, a shot of butt-kickin’, a wagon full of enthusiasm, and a crapload of inspiration to help creative types devise the career they think they can’t have – or discover it to begin with! Michelle lives in Brooklyn, New Yawk with her hubby Luke & their Roomba, Jeeves. She starts every morning with a dose of Judge Judy justice,  still considers Punky Brewster her fashion idol, and appeared as half of Team Awesome on Renovation Realities.

Since I was a little girl of 6 years old, I always wanted to be an actress. Being on stage is where I belonged, and it took me places. It took me to New York City, where I majored in musical theater at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. It took me on a cruise ship around North America where I sang my heart out for a year. It took me to Studio 8A in Rockefeller Plaza, where I got to be on “Saturday Night Live”. It even took me to The-Closest-Movie- Theater-Is-An-Hour-Away, PA and The-Town-With-A-Gas-Station,-a- Consignment-Shop,-a-Pizzeria,-and-a-Gun-Store, New Hampshire.

And all of a sudden, the life I was pursuing for 20 years wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I didn’t want to leave my home in New York City, where I built an incredible life for myself. I didn’t want to spend my “days off” sitting at auditions to sing 8 bars of a song and wonder where the day went. I didn’t want to get a job and have to pick up my life with one day’s (or one week’s) notice. I didn’t want to be a 35 year old waitress/ hostess/ temp/office manager. I wanted my days to mean something, to be valuable, to matter.

So I got a real job. And another one. And another. I went through seven jobs in four years, constantly trying to find “the perfect fit”. I’d get restless easily and fairly despondent, thinking that there was nothing else out there for me that I could devote myself to passionately and enthusiastically. One day I declared, “Enough! I refuse to accept that there is nothing else out there that I’m going to love doing!” I decided to put some chutzpah into my search. I was going to find My Perfect Career.

I enrolled in a Career Change Workshop at NYU, and through a series of personality tests, exercises, and conversations with my classmates, I realized that I wanted to help others find their own path, especially “creative types” that thought they wanted one thing their whole life and now have to rewrite their plans. I wanted to help them figure out what they wanted to be When They Grow Up.

But I didn’t want to limit myself to Career Coaching. I wanted to help people along with all their life challenges, but not in a Hippy-Dippy or a Tell-Me-What-Your-Parents-Did-When-You-Were-Five way. I wanted to be their springboard, their partner, their confidante, their cheerleader.

I WANTED TO BE THEIR LIFE COACH!

I wanted to start my passionate, grown-up career right away, but I knew that was the fastest route to FallingOnMyFaceLand. Instead of enrolling in my life coach certification right away, I decided to get out of my current job – the one with expected 24/7 BlackBerry access, pointless travel, and the verbally abusive boss who made me so psychosomatic I actually dry heaved into a trash can at the Union Square stop one morning (of course, I felt fine as soon as I turned around. Gross, but true) – and find one without, well, all of that. Within a month or two I landed a cushy gig as an Executive Assistant at a financial consulting company. I know it might seem counterintuitive, but having that consistent paycheck, no Blackberry/overtime/travel, and a boss who didn’t make me dry heave into anything allowed me to keep my nights/weekends to myself, get certified, and build my business.

I started that job in August of 2007, which was the very same month I enrolled at the International Coach Academy. It took almost two years (I got engaged and married in that time on top of my full-time corporate gig!) but I graduated in June of 2009 with high marks for my 60 coaching hours, 120 classroom hours, & term paper! With that under my belt, I set my sights on building my business with a kick-ass website (it didn’t always look like this!), a few months of severance in the bank (yes, I was planning to pay myself my full-time salary until I knew Plan B had to kick in), and enough consultation calls coming in that made me think people out there knew that I existed.

March 19, 2010 was my last day in Corporate America, and I have been a Woman of the World (my phrase for “full-time entrepreneur”) ever since. I’ve served as an expert source and contributor for such outlets as Newsweek, Forbes, and Psychology Today; led workshops and seminars at SXSW 2011, the Macauley Honors College at City University of New York and the sold-out Etsy Success Symposium; co-created the kick-ass e-course/workbook/workshop The Declaration of You; signed with a literary agent to pitch a book proposal I’m writing; made the same base salary in my first full year as a Woman of the World that I made in corporate America; and coached over 150 creative types to devise the career they think they can’t have, or discover it begin with.

I’ve been training my whole life to be a coach. My communication skills, my enthusiasm and sense of humor, my desire to help people find their passion, and my people-loving-personality makes this the role that I was born to play.