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About Michelle Leduc Catlin
Welcome, new friend.
Or maybe you’re an old friend, in which case, good to have you back.
If you’ve read the Home page blurb on me, you know the broad strokes of my career. If you want more of my credentials, check out my professional site at michelleleduccatlin.com. If you want to know a bit more about me, I’ll try and make this interesting…
I was born in a small town in northern Quebec, but moved with my mother to Ontario when I was 3. I skipped grade 1 but made up for it later when I failed through most of high school.
I grew up downtown in the first high-rise condominium in Toronto. (Yes, there was a time before condos.) I was a thoroughly urban child, going to daycare, taking the streetcar to school, and wearing a house key on a string around my neck.
I took dance classes and gymnastics at a Ukrainian Hall on Saturdays, and spent much of my summers at camp, where I learned how to make a fire, play Ping-Pong, and kiss a boy, among other useful activities.
I studied Radio & Television Broadcasting in community college. I toured Europe by myself when I was 21. I danced in a televised tour of Ukraine when I was 22. And I got hired at Citytv at the dawn of lifestyle television, producing and directing over 1000 stories before I left.
In 1995, I was introduced to personal growth courses and everything changed.
I overcame debilitating insecurity and started pursuing the career I really wanted. I went to Oxford and studied Shakespearean theatre for a summer, I acted in plays, I made 2 of my own (award-winning) short films, and I wrote and performed a critically-acclaimed one-woman show about my personal transformation, called How to Become A Diva!
It was after a run of that show that the exhaustion hit. It wasn’t like just being tired. It was full-on chronic fatigue, like a magnet holding me to the bed and draining me not just of energy but of drive. I denied that I was sick until I could no longer work.
There was a lot of pain and suffering and loss during those many years, but there was something else. I no longer had a career, a community, or many friends, but I discovered who I am beyond an ego identity. I deepened the spiritual side of my growth, discovering the profound power of journaling. It was there that I found my voice.
After years of writing in other people’s voices, I found my own. I started blogging and teaching others how to journal for their own empowerment. And slowly, I healed. Just when I was well enough, my husband and I moved back to Toronto so I could get back to work. It was April 2020.
I shut down the journaling and coaching parts of Gather Your Wits and rebooted as a Covid health resource. After years of researching health protocols and healing myself, I had access to information that I felt compelled to share. I had no idea that health could be so controversial, or that it would introduce me to a world of rabbit holes that would once again change me forever.
In 2021, I started writing articles about Covid full-time, all of which you can find here in The Great Awakening blog. In 2022, I went to Ottawa to write about the Freedom Convoy and ended up spending months learning about indigenous communities. In 2023, I became the spokesperson for the National Citizens Inquiry and traveled across Canada, hearing the testimony of over 300 witnesses. The work I did during the Covid years was the most rewarding and most costly of my life.
By 2024, I was single, homeless, broke, and exhausted.
And then I discovered Jason Christoff’s Freedom From Self-Sabotage Coaching. With an emphasis on health, personal growth, and helping people to awaken to the real world, I knew I’d come home. I also knew that it was time to put the oxygen mask on myself and build my own 5 pillars of strength that Jason teaches…and I now teach.
So here you are, at the end of my story and at what I hope is the beginning of our story together. In the words of the Hopi Elders, ”We are the ones we’ve been waiting for."
About Gather Your Wits
In 2018, I started Gather Your Wits as a place to share my spiritual insights and contemplation as I began coming out of over a decade of chronic fatigue. The illness had ended my life as I knew it, but had provided unanticipated gifts. Journaling had been one of my greatest tools for healing and understanding, and I wanted to share it.
I started a journaling community here called The Scribblers Club. We met every Sunday online, where I would do a live guided journaling session. It was delicious. It was intimate. And I loved the members and how we created and fulfilled on intentions for our own individual insights every week. My tagline was ”helping people find their inner wisdom."
In 2020, when everything changed, everything changed.
I couldn’t look away from what was happening. I stopped The Scribblers Club. I shut down the website. And in May of 2021, I created Gather Your Wits 2.0 with a commitment to getting true health information out to the public, and sharing without the vitriol I was finding in the understandably angry counter-narrative. My tagline was ”Spiritual Principles, Scientific Evidence, Health Freedom."
I worked full-time for free, researching and writing over 150 Covid articles. I even took an online course in how to read scientific studies. I added a little Donate button to the website that almost no one used. But I still couldn’t look away. Then after almost a year of my all-encompassing commitment to the National Citizens Inquiry, I was done.
It was clear to me that information alone was insufficient to counter an agenda much bigger and darker than I could ever have imagine. I needed to take time to look from a birds eye view — what is wanted and needed in the world? And what is my role?
When I discovered the work of Jason Christoff, I came full circle. Here was a way to awaken people to the truth, help make sense of the senseless, and empower people to build the 5 pillars of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and financial strength. I could join his international team of coaches, and I could bring back my previous tools with a whole new context.
Based on Jason’s work, I created an easily accessible half-day seminar called Unleashing Your Potential: The Power of Programming Your Mind for Success. An eye-opening event to empower anyone, regardless of where they are in their awakening. And as of October 2024, I am now offering customized 1-on-1 coaching as a Christoff Certified Self-Sabotage Coach.
There is opportunity in all adversity. And this turning point in history is challenging us to rise up and be our greatest selves. The solutions are not external. No one is coming to save us. To paraphrase the Hopi Elders, ”You are the one you’ve been waiting for."
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