About
About
Hi, I'm Melissa, The Frame Master
Author, speaker, and mentor. Expert in how we choose, and what’s quietly choosing for us.
The Plot Twist That Burnt the Script
At 31, I learned a family secret and everything I thought I knew about myself was challenged. In the span of 30 seconds, I felt every emotion a person can hold. My dad wasn’t my dad. Wow.
That discovery forced the deepest kind of self-reflection. It cracked open everything I believed about identity, belonging, and truth, and it showed me how much of my story I had been living without ever choosing it.
It was messy and it was painful, and it handed me the question I’ve been asking ever since, of myself and of everyone I work with: which parts of this story did I actually choose? DNA is a fact. Identity is a choice. I learned that one the hard way.
Decades of Building What Works
I started out as a businesswoman at the age of 10, running a babysitting business. Years later I was crafting massage tables out of sawhorses, and eventually I gave more than 18,000 trauma and emotional release massage sessions. Somewhere along the way I learned to read the body like a map. The knots people carried lived in their shoulders and backs, and they lived in the stories they kept repeating, too.
Two decades ago, I decided I wanted to marry two modalities, talk therapy and body therapy. I earned my master’s in applied behavioral science, opened a counseling practice, and spent more than 12 years in equine therapy, working with special needs kids and adults. I’ve watched breakthroughs happen in counseling rooms and in arenas, and the horses were my best co-facilitators. They taught me everything about presence, truth, and power. Horses don’t tolerate masks. Neither do I.
What I Know for Sure
Every life is lived inside a frame. Most of it is built from conclusions we reached so long ago that we forgot we decided them: what success looks like, who we’re supposed to be, how much we’re allowed to want. Those conclusions can work beautifully for years. Success can even make them stronger, because they keep producing results.
The body usually knows first when a frame has stopped fitting. It cooperates with a story for a while, and then it tells the truth: the tight jaw, the held breath, the yes that comes out before you’ve decided. Every thought has a physical address.
When you know a truth and don’t act on it, you pay for it. I call that the Legacy Tax, the emotional and energetic interest on a truth you already know. It compounds quietly, and the person paying it usually looks like she’s doing just fine.
Your past is evidence. It is not a prophecy. The script you’re living is unfinished, and you’re the one holding the pen.
The Frame Master
Totally BS | Bold & Sexy
From Insights to Impact
My life lessons eventually led me to write my first book, Hearts’ Tales: What’s Your Story?, which became an Amazon bestseller in personal transformation.
It’s a raw book, written close to the bone, and that’s its gift: proof that someone else stood where you’re standing and made it through to the other side.
Writing it taught me something I carry into every room I walk into. Information changes very little until you live it. An insight becomes yours the day you act on it.
Love, Later and Greater
At level 50, after years of being told I was “too much,” “too old,” or “too late,” I found the love of my life. Yes, through online dating. And yes, the wait was worth it.
Like Frances says in Under the Tuscan Sun: “Unthinkably good things can happen, even late in the game. It’s such a surprise.”
Finding love reminded me of something I now say on every stage and in every conversation: timing matters, and courage matters more. A call to adventure can arrive at any age, and it rarely waits for you to feel ready.
How I Work
People usually bring me what they believe is the problem. I get curious about the assumption that made it a problem in the first place. “I need more confidence before I go for it” becomes a very different conversation once we ask who decided confidence has to come first.
Whether you’re in a keynote audience, on a retreat, or in a private coaching session, the work moves the same way:
- We find the stories and rules you’ve been living by, including the ones you never consciously chose
- We look at what each one has given you and what it’s costing you now
- We build the self-trust to act on what you find, with S.I.C. (Self-Trust, Intentional Action, Commitment to Depth) as the working tool
My job is to bring what’s quietly choosing for you into view. Staying can be a choice. Leaving can be a choice. What matters to me is that the choice is finally yours.
Ready to Pick Up the Pen?
If you’re still reading, my guess is something in you already knows. That’s often how a call to adventure sounds when nothing is technically wrong: a quiet question that keeps coming back, no matter how good things look from the outside.
Choosing your own life is your birthright, and nobody has to earn it, through success, age, money, or by hiring me. If you’d like a thinking partner while you look at what’s been choosing for you, start with a free 30-minute Truth & Clarity Call. We’ll get clear on where you are, what you want, and what may be shaping the space between the two.
It’s your life. Pick up the pen.