I help high achievers break corporate dependence and build beautiful Portfolio Careers for freedom, family and finances.

I help high achieving professionals BREAK corporate dependence and build Self-Directed Lives.
I believe that to transform our circumstances, we have to BREAK what's not working, on purpose. And do it smartly.

My Career Design Lab is where your golden handcuffs and unfulfilling career go to die, and where we reimagine work aligned with who you want to be, who you want to serve and what legacy you want to leave.

Like you:
I know what it's like to be burned out, unfulfilled and secretly DYING for new opportunities. 
I know what it's like to seek my identity and self worth from a job only to realize the mirage.
I know what it's like to sacrifice my health and family for "achievement."

The difference is I did something about it.

In 2018, work wasn't working for me, so I broke it and methodically designed a new life with intention.
I used my job as an investor in my future. I figured out my advantages and then built a side business that I took to full time corporate exit, then scaled to over $1m in revenue.

I built an entire process to help me figure out my re-invented career and now I use that to help other corporate pros smartly build futures that are Self-Directed, intentional and successful - that is my purpose.

Previous, my career spanned:

Financial Futures and Derivatives Trading
3 Startups
Freelance Consulting
Corporate Innovation

I infuse major lessons from these unique experiences to help you craft a dynamic, portfolio career that is adaptable, intentional, purpose driven and never dependent on the whims of corporate structures.

Michael Gardon

I work with people who have reached the limit of self-override.

They’re functional, capable, and outwardly “fine,” but living at a cost their body can no longer absorb. They’ve spent years pushing through, muting instinct, and adapting themselves to lives, work, and relationships that don’t actually fit. Eventually, the system refuses to keep going that way.

That refusal is not a problem.
It’s an initiation point.

My work begins there.

This is not therapeutic maintenance or personal optimization. It’s initiation-level work that restores access to the body’s intelligence, instinct, and internal authority. As interference clears, sensation returns. The nervous system exits chronic defense. Breath deepens. Choice becomes clean again.

Once people are back in contact with themselves - in how they move, speak, rest, and decide - it becomes very difficult to continue living in ways that require self-betrayal. There is an irreversibility to this work. Not because of belief, but because the body remembers what alignment feels like.

I work by removing what interferes:
internal distortion, inherited scripts, and the inner occupation that teaches people to mistrust their perception and govern themselves from pressure instead of truth.

As that interference dissolves, felt life returns.

People become at home in their own skin. Their yes and no sharpen. Their voice carries. Energy reorganizes. Presence becomes palpable. Radiance and magnetism emerge naturally as coherence. Creativity and desire regain direction instead of leaking through anxiety or collapse.

This work is subtractive and activating at the same time.

People don’t become someone new.
They recover access to themselves - as living systems.

From that place, responsibility arises organically. People relate, create, and lead without sacrificing their aliveness. Their work becomes more honest. Their relationships more direct. Their presence more grounded and consequential. The body remembers how to belong to the living world again - steady, cyclical, responsive, capable of growth.

This is not self-improvement.
It’s not healing for comfort.

It’s embodied self-direction.
The capacity to live from internal authority rather than inherited conditioning.

My work is for people who are no longer willing to waste their vitality.

I offer 1:1 mentorship and small group experiences for those standing at this threshold.
Ready to return fully to themselves and let that reshape how they live, relate, and contribute.

Once you cross it, there’s no going back.

That’s the point.

taplio

The Battle

Michael Gardon

Kristiana Milliken

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