L. Michael Burt
L. Michael Burt
It started with a life that fell apart twice, in ways that had nothing to do with strategy or effort. Everything he teaches now, he had to live his way back to first.
L. Michael studied organizational communications and Spanish at Western Michigan University, then spent a semester abroad at the University of Alicante, in Spain. That was where he first started figuring out who he actually was, not just what he was good at. A public speaking class back in college had already planted something, a pull toward standing in front of people and saying something real.
After graduation he lived in Europe for six months, then came home and moved into acting. A co-lead role in a film called The Sorority, shot in Atlanta, drew a review calling his performance natural. That was enough to move him to Los Angeles and chase it for real.
He spent years building a life as an actor and producer in Hollywood, network television appearances, a run of independent films, the kind of resume that looks like the dream is underway from the outside. From the inside, something was still unresolved, a search that acting alone was never going to finish.
He got dizzy. Went to the hospital. Found out his kidneys had failed, with no warning signs beforehand. No history that explained it. It just happened.
The stroke began mid-flight. He landed in Atlanta and was met at the airport by both his sister and his brother. He did not recognize either of them. He stopped to get food, then went home, and sat on the couch eating a sandwich. That is the last thing he remembers before he blacked out completely. His sister, Tasha, started calling around, because something in him had stopped making sense.
He woke up cursing, disoriented, convinced he had been kidnapped. He could not speak clearly. He could not walk. The guardrails stayed up on his hospital bed so he would not fall out.
A week or two later, once he had been moved out of the ICU, his brother, who was becoming a pastor under her leadership, brought Pastor Dee into the room and introduced them. He had never met her before that moment. She prayed for him.
Dialysis. A kidney transplant in July, back in Atlanta. That December, he formed The Oriance Group, the holding company that would carry everything he built next. Then a cancer diagnosis. Chemotherapy. Radiation. By the end of that same year, it was gone.
This is not a story about finding himself through the suffering. He did not discover something new in that hospital bed. He recognized something that had always been there, a sense of something greater than the roles he had been playing, that he had carried even before any of this started. The body failed. Twice. What was underneath it did not.
Everything above happened. This is what came out the other side of it.
The human I am is the conduit for the great, Divine I AM to come through into the world.
The coaching, the keynote, the workshop. All of it comes from the same place: what he actually lived through, not a theory he studied.