Go from tired, discouraged and overwhelmed to relaxed and in charge.
Learn new skills, appreciate your signature strengths, develop productivity habits you LOVE, and experience the thrilling feeling of doing your most important work - and doing it well, with ease and joy…
…while escaping the tangled knots of what Nap Ministry founder and thought leader Tricia Hersey calls “grind culture”, and learning to rest deeply and savor your life.
If you’re a college student or an adult and you…
are functioning well, but feel scattered or are under-achieving - by your own definition - whether it’s because of recent stress, old trauma, or a jump in the demands of everyday life
have arrived at an unsatisfying moment in your academic, professional or home life - maybe an old productivity pattern that you just can’t unwind on your own
think of yourself as (or have been called) a gifted underachiever
are wrangling with the significant demands of a particular moment
and you also…
have a sense of humor
enjoy learning new things and are curious about what’s possible for you
want more joy, delight and significance
enjoy the project of self-development
(maybe) appreciate the mystical/spiritual side
have some energetic and financial bandwidth to invest in yourself
and want a mischievous, irreverent, innovative and highly trained coach who’s also absolutely serious about your development - and has a wildly diverse toolkit to help you get where you most want to go…
Megan Pow Sheldon, M.eD, CPCC, PCC
I coach college students and adults who are struggling to meet academic, professional, or emotional demands, who want more ease, joy, delight, and rest - in addition to the achievements that matter most to you.
…I warmly welcome you to work with me to learn how to do the most substantive, satisfying work of your life - and ditch unproductive stress cycles - whether you’re in college or beyond.
Tall order? Yes. And yes you can. I can help.
I offer trauma-informed, ADHD-friendly, therapeutic coaching for ambitious, high-functioning, creative people who want to thrive - on our own terms, and by our own definitions.
This is pleasure-centered, holistic productivity for an exceptionally well-lived life.
I'm a therapeutic coach, professional educator, and consultant focused on holistic, pleasure-centered productivity, academic wellness, and executive function skills with college students and adults. I’m a proud generalist - and also a specialist in academic wellness and productivity coaching for college students with ADHD and attentional-spectrum challenges.
Looking for innovative, integrative, and strengths-based coaching? Here you go. My approach is deliberately inter-disciplinary, therapeutic and holistic, with wide and deep roots. It’s inclusive, integrative, womxnist, fully embodied, trauma-informed, neurodiversity-positive, nature-based, and insistent that thriving - by your own definition - is a worthy primary goal.
What you won’t find here: productivity-shaming, rigid ideas about our gorgeously diverse ways of doing important work, or colluding with the dis-enchanted, consumerist ways that “productivity” gets presented.
We are after something else - a way of being that honors what Oliver Burkeman calls “the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks” - an 80-year human lifespan (Four Thousand Weeks).
I’m deeply committed to accelerating development - in exactly the directions you want, and in a way that deeply meets the needs of your nervous system and mind-body-spirit.
Together, we’re irreverent about conventional success measures. Instead we track the ones that matter to you.
PHOTO BY KYLE GLENN ON UNSPLASH
Define and achieve your goals from a place of sovereign self-regard, deep compassion, and tenacity. More importantly, learn to live a deeply fulfilled, generative life - by your own unapologetic definitions.
Center the joys, delights, and achievements that matter most to you - for your own development and delight, but also for the sake of your relationships, family, community, and our whole shared world. It’s a radically unselfish and life-giving practice, and it can change everything.
The human lifespan is limited. Let’s make the most of it.
About Megan Pow Sheldon, PCC, CPCC, M.Ed
I’m a professional educator, ICF-accredited coach, speaker and facilitator, writer, mischief-maker, community-builder and licensed dance fitness instructor - and a mother, landscape designer, healer, voracious reader and writer, trail runner, and wayfinder. I’m creative, playful, and in touch with the magic. I’m living proof.
I coach individual clients, host and lead workshops, programs and events, lead weekly dance fitness classes, and teach, facilitate, and speak at carefully selected events.
As part of my commitment to college-age productivity coaching, I offer academic coaching part-time through the Academic Support Services department at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, so please feel free to check out my Champlain College profile here. Great news: if you’re a current Champlain College student, academic coaching is included in your tuition and fees!
If you’re intrigued by working together, please explore my website - it’ll give you a pretty good sense of my approach. If it feels like a resonant fit for you, I welcome you to schedule a free Clarity Call, where we will connect and confirm that we’re an amazing match to support you.
Feeling clear already? Amazing! I celebrate your decisiveness - sign up below and let’s get the party started!
COACHING
Depending on your agenda for the coaching - in other words, what you most want to learn, do, or become - we may include:
executive function* skill development,
clarification of your most deeply held values, most significant desires and commitments, and your most ambitious and exciting vision for your life,
aligning your habits and mindsets with personalized daily routines that support your ambitions,
powerful ADHD-friendly productivity tools,
embodied practices to gently bring awareness and address nervous system needs,
and learning conversations about how the nervous system and sensory system could be influencing your productivity outcomes (and options you might explore).
We coach by phone. Zoom fatigue is real, and my clients and I often enjoy walking or sitting outside while we talk.
Most people prefer the steady, supportive rhythm of meeting weekly. Occasionally, people prefer to meet at the same time every-other-week.
In support of a rhythmic cadence of learning, we take occasional pre-planned, purposeful weeks off, which you’ll elect to use to Digest+Rest or Implement+Assess.
*What’s executive function again? One basic framework is this: executive function describes how our brains organize time, space, and tasks, and one of the places where we self-regulate our impulses and emotions.
It’s a complex system of skills, habits and default behaviors that develop along a continuum, and can be learned and developed through your entire life. For every single human being, there are specific components of this system that tend to be easier, and specific ones that tend to be more difficult.
Yes, there are some (lucky!) people whose executive functioning is globally very strong - think of the people you know who seem to be naturally highly-organized and on time for everything, who can effortlessly plan and execute on complex long-term projects and immediately know the implications and domino effects of any decision they make. I am extremely jealous of those people, because that looks AWESOME, and seems way, way easier than how it is for me and most of my clients. Also, I imagine their closets and basements are tidier than mine, which would be fantastic.
But there’s good news! First of all, being highly organized isn’t everything. There, I said it. And meant it.
Secondly, if you feel persistently “disorganized” or “scattered”, there are simple, elegant and self-honoring ways to improve your performance, make developmental gains, and enhance your well-being. Once you know how, and begin to try it out, life can get better - fast.
Let me teach you - in a de-shaming, 100% holistic way that honors your goals, your strengths, your creativity and resourcefulness, and your vision.
Our decision-making around working together is egalitarian, shared, and zero-pressure. I only work with clients when there’s a mutually-nourishing fit, and I believe in both sacred timing and your ability to make a grounded, visionary decision for yourself - whether that means working with me or not.
Speaking, Teaching, and Consulting
I consult, teach, and present on the catalyzing potential of working at the intersection of productivity theory, executive function skill development, self-honoring life design, and ADHD-friendly, values-aligned, self-authoring life design.
My travels in the land of college academia include coaching students, and coaching and consulting with faculty, staff, administrators and fellow coaches. With students, the work is usually focused on on developing skills, habits and mindsets that will powerfully support their academic success - as defined by them. After all, student success goals are as individual as our students.
With faculty and staff, we work toward the goal of deep learning and academic wellness for all - especially those of us who identify or present as neuro-spicy (an inclusive and irreverent term that’s sometimes used in place of neuro-divergent). Elements might include 1:1 coaching, communities of practice, workshop series, professional learning/book study, and speaking at professional development events.
If you’d like to invite me to speak at your event or organization, or to provide workplace productivity coaching with members of your team, I invite you to schedule a Scoping Call using the link below. Please email me first with the details of your proposal, ideal desired outcomes, and any relevant dates, then schedule a Scoping Call using the link below.
I’m thrilled to collaborate with carefully selected co-conspirators on projects that are fun, intriguing, within my scope of practice, and good for the world!
Dance Fitness For Liberation
For the past 11 years, I’ve happily taught irreverent, pleasure-centered, trauma-informed multi-generational dance fitness as an embodied practice of individual and collective liberation, attunement, healing and delight - and a stone in the foundation of a joyful, well-lived life.
There was a time when I thought of my dance fitness life as separate from my coaching, but not any more. Now I see them as two ways of embodying the same thing.
Wait. What do productivity and dance fitness have to do with each other?
Everything.
The kind of pleasure-centered, self-defined, generative, thrilling and satisfying productivity I coach is animated by precisely the same irreverent, rigorous, internally wild and free spirit as the dance fitness classes I teach.
Sure, our weekly dance fitness classes are amazing, inclusive multi-generational workouts, it’s true.
But they’re also a low-cost form of collective non-verbal therapeutic coaching, where together we practice the radically counter-cultural stance that healing is natural and we are powerful beyond measure.
(dance fitness nerd alert!)
Through the delightful ritual of meeting every Saturday morning at 9 am on the dance floor (even if it’s through the Zoom screen), we become connected to each other via good beats, goodwill, and synchronized rhythmic movement.
(I know - if someone had said this to me before I tried it, I’d have heard the record scratch in the background and gone, What?)
But it’s true - by dancing together with abandon, using predictable, repetitive and beginner-friendly choreography, we affirm that the human bodies we inhabit are perfect and gorgeous exactly as we are, in our delightful variability. We release what needs releasing and invite in what we want.
We free ourselves to experiment, learn, and delight in the music, the movements, the laughter and the booty-shaking.
The dance floor can be a place of powerful liberation.
Join the fun! Connect to your own desires. Live in radical self-approval.
Maximize and appreciate your strengths, and get in the zone of your particular genius.
Dare to love who you really are, become exactly who you’re meant to become, and live in perpetual, unbreakable appreciation of exactly what is - while un-building the things that urgently need it, and co-creating a world we all want to live in.
Yes you can.
Photo by Federico Baccari on Unsplash
“Working with Megan gave me the tools, perspectives, and tethers that I needed to find joy and liberation in my work life. Megan’s sense of humor, use of magical realism, and affirming inquiry helped me to meet the parts of myself that were holding me back (with good reason!) from a present and whole life. In addition her bottomless inventory of super helpful frameworks and tools, Megan is incredibly easy to talk to and work with, knowing exactly when and where to hold or to push to help me meet my goals. I’ll be back for more coaching with Megan as soon as the time calls for it!”
- Claire Wheeler, Owner/Facilitator/Consultant, RE:WORK LLC