Designing Your Practice to Fit Your Nervous System

with Michael Shahan, LMFT

This session is a vulnerable and grounded reflection on what happens when the structure of our work no longer fits the shape of our nervous system. Michael Shahan shares his lived experience of chronic stress, financial pressure, and prolonged anxious freeze—and the moment he stopped interpreting those signals as personal failure and began listening to them as information.

Through Enneagram awareness and deep self-honesty, Michael explores what it means to question long-held assumptions about productivity, success, and sustainability, and to ask a different kind of question: What kind of practice can my nervous system actually live inside?

Rather than offering solutions, this talk creates space for reflection, alignment, and courage as we consider how our work might better fit who we really are.

In this session, you’ll:

• Reframe stress, burnout, and nervous-system responses as meaningful signals rather than personal failure

• Explore how Enneagram patterns shape your relationship to work, pressure, and productivity

• Develop language for naming limits with clarity and without shame

• Reflect on what alignment and sustainability truly mean in your own practice

• Consider how to design work that supports long-term wellbeing, not survival mode