About Laura

Laura Shope, MFA, PCC, is the Founder and Creative Director of The BlueFire Institute, a sustainable life services organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan that provides coaching, consulting and experiential programs and services.

Over the past 15 years, Laura has helped many people identify what they want in their life and how to effectively implement those visions. She works with individuals, couples, groups and organizations to promote optimal individual, business and community growth and longevity through the physical and energetic alignment of body/mind/spirit, spaces and systems. Laura creates programs and services that integrate sustainability, creativity and personal transformation.

Laura consistently provides powerful, insightful facilitation and coaching. She is adept at creating a safe, nurturing and challenging space for clients to explore and stretch into more of themselves. As a coach, Laura is both rigorous and compassionate, committed to the vision of each and every one of her clients. Her clients experience greater clarity, freedom and courage as they move forward and manifest the results they have chosen in their lives and organizations and create permanent lasting change.

While personal growth and transformation have always been at the core of everything she does, Laura’s experience draws from diverse fields including: coaching, personal growth & human development, art & creativity, sustainability studies, career counseling, community college and university teaching, corporate training, human resources, sales & marketing, spiritual exploration and outdoor experiential education. In addition to becoming a Clarity-Trained Coach through Clarity International in 2003, Laura earned her Professional Coach Certification from the Academy for Coach Training (accredited by the International Coach Federation) in Bellevue, Washington in 2001 and her Master’s in Fine Art from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1994. She also recently completed her White Belt training in the Nia Technique.

Laura’s work in the world is directed toward making real the transformation of people’s relationship to the planet to a more spiritual one of connection and relatedness. Always with a focus on ecology – the relationship of individuals and the environments they inhabit - along with the creative process and the connectedness of individual and human systems, her intention is to increase awareness and assist the evolution of consciousness through creative and transformative processes.