We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael McRay a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

In May 2024, I finished a three-day intensive for a client who did some incredibly brave work to detach her story of self-worth from the toxic opinions of her dysfunctional family system. She is 72 years old and has lived her whole life with debilitating self-criticism, a self-limiting mindset, and a sense of chronic failure. She’d been working in therapy for years and had made great progress, and at the same time, felt she kept hitting a wall. She just felt stuck.

Her therapist recommended she come to me for an in-person experiential coaching intensive. She rented an Airbnb and drove to Nashville for three days. I met her each morning for a full day of experiential creative magic. With my suitcase filled with scarves, art supplies, stuffed animals, assorted photos, figurines, and more, I improvised and facilitated a process for her to help her do three things:

1. Get clear on the story she was telling herself about herself and excavate the origins of that story in her life.
2. Untangle her identity from the stories of shame she’s been carrying.
3. Step into a new story of freedom, empowerment, and purpose.

And wow, did it work! She discovered the truth of who she really is—the goodness that she’s always possessed but couldn’t see because of all the proverbial shame on her mirror. Her transformation was utterly awe-inspiring.

I texted her to ask how she was feeling the morning after, and this is what she texted back:

“Packed, sitting in my car am READY TO ROLL! Was thinking as I packed what the best way to describe the adventure I had of Solo Intensive!!! The first best adventure of my life was when I found out through this intensive that I wanted to walk along and into myself… when I no longer hated/ put up with myself. I came alive, and I have a hope for the rest of my ALIVE DAYS! I began to embrace and accept the person/woman/child, teenager, and 72 year old me! I CANNOT adequately express how much you have so greatly impacted my life. I get the phrase: THERE ARE NO WORDS! Looking forward greatly to diving into the next SOLO INTENSIVE!!!! Onward!!!!”

This is why I do what I do. Because everyone deserves to feel that way—to at last be at peace with who they are.

Michael, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For years, I’ve told people I have a weird job title: a storytelling and conflict resolution consultant. Totally made up, but absolutely real. In the last two years, I’ve turned that into something I love even more. I’m an experiential story coach and facilitator. What does this mean? It means I use experiential, expressive, action-based processes to help people find, engage, and tell the stories of their lives. I created my coaching program, Becoming Restoried, to help people reconcile to their life stories, to re-meet themselves with curiosity and compassion.

In 2012, I was living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, studying conflict resolution for my master’s. I remember sittt in a room with tall windows overlooking the Irish Sea at a place called Corrymeela. I felt about as alive as I’d ever felt because something had clicked for me. I was there doing a five-day residential retreat, as part of a graduate course in conflict transformation. The retreat was designed to get former combatants into open, vulnerable, and honest conversation through the sharing of their life stories. I circled up with classmates from across the globe and followed a beautifully curated process to share and hear the stories of our lives.

When we finished, I went back to my room, opened my journal, and wrote, “This is it. This is what I want to do with my life—facilitate the opportunity for people to encounter themselves and others through true, authentic storytelling.”

Over the last decade, I’ve been fortunate to do that in lots of ways—through in-person programs, online workshops, public storytelling events, corporate trainings, and more. I’ve focused all my professional work in storytelling, covering everything from organizational storytelling, to storytelling for advocacy and social change, to narrative-driven strategy, to storytelling for empathy and connection, to storytelling for entertainment and community cohesion. I’ve worked with all types of organizations—from nonprofits like Narrative 4 and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, to peacebuilding organizations like +Peace and the Taghyeer Change Movement, to musical groups and museums, to corporations like Accenture and VMware, to government entities like NASA, and more.

My story-work has taken me the world over. With over 20 years of visits to Israel and Palestine, I found a deep passion for peacebuilding that has since led me into South Africa, Rwanda, Ireland, and U.S. prisons. Back in September 2013, I founded Tenx9 (“ten by nine) Nashville, a Belfast-originated monthly community storytelling night for the telling of true stories on stage based on a theme. Tenx9 is now Nashville’s longest-running storytelling event, with over 10 years of monthly events and over 1,000 stories told. I’ve loved hosting this event over the last decade.

I’ve come to understand my mission in life has using the transformative power of true storytelling to help people make meaning of their lives, reconcile their relationships, and heal the harm they’ve experienced. It’s what I’ve always needed for myself, and it’s my great joy to bring that to others.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In May 2022, two things happened almost simultaneously. The first: I was invited to give a TEDx Nashville talk in August. The second: I joined a business coaching program.

Within a couple of weeks, I’d written the first draft of my TEDx—about how we can dismantle the concept of enemies through proximity, humility, and curiosity—and sent it to the TEDx coach who recruited me. He wrote back and basically said, “It’s fine, but it doesn’t pack a punch. However, those last two paragraphs at the end, about your own story—that part was very compelling. I wonder what an entire talk about that would be like…” What he was referencing was the section of the talk where I said that in some ways, I had become an enemy to myself in my life and have had to use those same steps of proximity, humility, and curiosity to reconcile myself to myself. So off I went to rewrite my talk—how a relentless self-curiosity was helping me heal from trauma.

At this same time, I joined a business coaching program called The Poetics, run by a friend of mine named Harris III. In my first one-on-one coaching call, I vented to him that I’ve had a years-long struggle with productivity. “I feel like I’m only achieving 40% of my potential,” I said. (Hello Enneagram 3!) Without missing a beat, Harris replied, “You don’t have a productivity problem, Michael. You have a creative clarity problem.”

I think I said some expletives from the shock of that revelation.

He was right. I had no idea what I was wanting to build with my career. I had a perfectly successful six-figure consulting business in storytelling and conflict resolution, but it wasn’t fulfilling. I had no vision for where I wanted the business to go. I had nothing I was working toward. No real purpose. I told him, “I’m getting to do what I thought would make me happy—storytelling work—and yet I only feel happy about 10% of the time.”

It was then that I told him about my TEDx. I told him about writing it—the vulnerability and honesty it was requiring to share about my trauma and journey of healing—how meaningful it felt. I said, “This is what I really want to talk about. Not corporate storytelling.” And then I said, “There’s some part of me that really thinks this TEDx talk is going to dramatically shift the focus of my work; I just don’t know how yet.”

Harris asked me what work I’ve done that I loved most. I knew the answer right away: a weekend retreat called Becoming Restoried, where I guided a small group of people through deep storywork. “By far my favorite professional venture,” I told him. “The work I’ve always loved the most is when I am able to accompany people into their most painful stories and be there with them in curiosity and compassion.” And then Harris said, “Well, then that’s what you need to build.”

It had never, until that very moment, occurred to me that Becoming Restoried could be anything other than an occasional weekend retreat. And I certainly had not imagined that I could devote my full-time work to it. And yet, within two hours of ending that Zoom call with Harris, I had designed the entire model of my Becoming Restoried coaching practice.

It was all just sitting there, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for someone to invite me to believe in myself.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

At the beginning of 2023, I launched my experiential story coaching business Becoming Restoried…and I got divorced. There are no words for the pain of that time, night after night crying myself to sleep, alone. I felt sunken, soaked in much guilt, regret, and remorse for the pain I caused.

But I refused to quit on myself. I made a promise not to be worse off one year later. I knew I had to heal what ached inside me.

I did a trauma intensive with an experiential therapist and scraped off a ton of shame in my story. And then I read a book by Jon Kim called Single On Purpose. I created a process for myself based on something he wrote, and then had an incredible realization: I actually like myself.

Many people are surprised to hear this was revelatory to me. But it was. I’ve lived with chronic self-doubt, self-loathing, and self-condemnation since I was a teenager. It’s what led me to break the trust and hearts of the two longest relationships of my life, to attempt suicide in college, and make tons of deeply unhealthy choices.

But this summer, I came into a place of peace with the awakening that I do actually like who I am. And literally every day since, I say aloud the things I know I value about myself, trying to carve new pathways in my brain and heart. I look at a photo of my son at 3 and myself at 3, and tell each I love him. And everything has changed in my life since.

I revolutionized my physical health, dropping 70 pounds and learning to love movement again. I embarked on a season of intentional singleness, the first of my entire life. I learned to enjoy my own company. I built a brand-new coaching business that’s done six figures in the first 18 months.

I genuinely believe that our greatest experiences of pain can become our most powerful catalysts for change. And I’ve used the pain of 2023 to become the healthiest version of myself, someone who is laser-focused on turning my pain into purpose.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michaelmcray.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaeltmcray/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michaeltmcray/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeltmcray
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/1g8EREBbdxY?si=YkCxodmERBNtQZLJ

Image Credits

Two headshots by Jeremy Cowart, 2024.