FOUNDER
Nichole Michelson
LPC · PCC · ELI-MP · Enneagram Practitioner
Nichole Michelson is the founder of SOMA and a rare hybrid in the leadership development space: a licensed therapist, professional certified coach, and former corporate finance professional who spent more than a decade inside high-performance environments. She understands the pressures of achievement culture not as an observer, but as someone who lived it firsthand.
Today, Nichole helps executives, leaders, and high-performing professionals uncover the patterns beneath their success. The beliefs, protective strategies, and unconscious drivers that shape how they lead, work, and live. Her work blends psychological insight, coaching methodology, somatic awareness, and real-world business experience to create lasting transformation from the inside out.
Clients seek Nichole when they are no longer looking for another productivity strategy or leadership framework. They come when they are ready to lead with greater clarity, resilience, authenticity, and self-mastery.
THE STORY BEHIND SOMA
She didn't leave corporate America to escape it. She left to build something better.
SOMA was born from a question Nichole couldn't ignore:
Why do so many successful people feel disconnected from themselves?
After more than a decade in corporate finance, she experienced firsthand the hidden costs of high performance. The chronic stress, constant striving, over-functioning, and growing gap between external achievement and internal fulfillment. Like many high achievers, she spent years pursuing the next milestone believing it would finally create the sense of satisfaction she was seeking. Instead, she discovered that external success and internal alignment are not the same thing.
What she found was that many leaders spend years building impressive careers while becoming increasingly disconnected from the very parts of themselves that create meaning, presence, creativity, vitality, and genuine well-being.
SOMA was created to bridge that gap.
More than a leadership development company, SOMA helps people return to themselves. Through a blend of leadership coaching, psychological insight, somatic practices, and personal development, Nichole guides clients beyond performance optimization toward deeper alignment between who they are, how they lead, and how they experience their lives.
Because sustainable leadership isn't about becoming someone else. It's about returning to yourself.
Nichole is also the host of Beneath the Title, a podcast exploring the stories, identities, and experiences that shape who we become beyond our roles and achievements. She is currently writing her first book, Fueling the Return to Self, which examines how high-performing individuals can move beyond achievement-driven living and reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose, fulfillment, and authenticity.
"I saw a gap: women were achieving at high levels externally, but internally feeling misaligned, reactive, or exhausted. SOMA is the work of closing that gap."
NICHOLE MICHELSON, FOUNDER
THE STORY BEHIND SOMA
Training that spans clinical psychology, coaching, and human development.
Each credential shapes how Nichole works and together, they're what makes SOMA different from traditional leadership development.
LPC
Licensed Professional Counselor
Allows Nichole to work safely with the deeper emotional material that shows up in leadership the patterns formed early, the beliefs running quietly beneath behavior, the nervous system responses that no amount of strategy can override.
ELI-MP
Energy Leadership Master Practitioner
Adds a lens for understanding how energy, stress response, and perception shape how leaders show up and what it takes to shift it in real time, not just in reflection.
PCC
Professional Certified Coach
Keeps the work oriented toward action and real-world application. Insight without movement isn't transformation. Nichole bridges both the depth of clinical training with the forward motion of professional coaching.
ENNEAGRAM
Enneagram Practitioner
Brings depth to the pattern work at the heart of SOMA, surfacing the motivations, blind spots, and adaptive strategies that drive leadership behavior beneath awareness the layer most coaching never reaches.
BEYOND THE WORK
A writer exploring the shift from expectation to embodiment
Nichole writes regularly on the SOMA Reflections blog and is currently at work on her first book. She is based in Georgia and works with clients nationally."
IN PROGRESS
Beneath the Title
The Inner Architecture of a Woman's Leadership
A framework-driven guide for high-achieving women ready to understand the hidden patterns shaping how they lead and step into something steadier, more embodied, and fully their own.