Looking for a little credibility from the person leading your weekend creativity workshop? Michelle Chappel's got you covered.

Chappel, who leads such a workshop on Saturday at the Louden Nelson Center in Santa Cruz, can come at you from opposite directions. Left brain/right brain, thinking/feeling, book learning/street smarts, Obama/Clinton "" whatever duality you want to use, Chappel can play both sides of the street.

It's tempting to say that Chappel is leading a double life "" she's a veteran singer/songwriter with an international following who writes pop songs laced with messages of personal fulfilment; and she's an academic in cognitive psychology with a Ph.D. from Princeton who has served on the faculty of Santa Clara University and UC Santa Cruz. Heck, you could make it a triple life "" Chappel is also a consultant in Silicon Valley and has worked with Yahoo, Google and TiVo.

Michelle Chappel doesn't see her life as bifurcated. To her, the various paths she's taken lead one place.

"When I was at Santa Clara as a professor, I'd have this long line of students who wanted to talk to me, always asking me 'What should I do with my life? Where should I go to graduate school?'"

While parents and other professors offered specific advice, Chappel went with an approach that would seem obvious to lots of folks in Santa Cruz, but was a revelation among the high-achieving subset of college students at Santa Clara University.

"I told them, 'Just follow your heart.' And they would always look so relieved."

Chappel's following her own heart has led her most recently to record a song and create a video called "You're An Original," which she is dedicating to Santa Cruz "" the video can be seen on YouTube. The song features a few references that Santa Cruzans will recognize and the video features a couple of faces of prominent locals, most notably Gourd Music founder and director Neal Hellman, to whom the song was originally written and dedicated.

The video is Chappel's way to declare that her solidarity with the ephemeral spirit of self-invention that is part of the air in Santa Cruz.

In the video of "You're An Original," various characters are milling about with signs around their necks. On the signs are the various societal and family roles that, Chappel contends, people carry around with them that hamper them from finding happiness "" roles such as "invisible girl" and "black sheep."

For years, the sign around Chappel's neck was "smart girl," a role she fulfilled at the expense of her desire to become a musician. It was while counseling students at Santa Clara that it occurred to her that "follow your heart" was something she preached, but didn't practice.

"One day, I thought, 'Uh oh. I'm not following my own advice here.' I'd been loving music since I was a little kid but I just never took it seriously because I was very smart and everyone was encouraging me to go to Ivy League schools and get the degrees and be a professor."

It was at that point, in the early 1990s, that Chappel broke out of her mold and, while maintaining her academic career, she embarked on a career as a singer/songwriter.

As a child, she was accomplished at school, but nursed a secret love of performing music. "I secretly played the piano. I don't know how I knew how to play. Everybody but my family noticed that I could sing and play, but they just didn't see that in me."

The love for music was set aside. Chappel earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown and a doctorate from Princeton in the field of psychology that dealt with memory, perception, language and problem solving. The musical inclination didn't surface until Chappel was in her mid-20s and pursuing her Ph.D.

"I was at Princeton and engaged at the time. We broke it off. I was very depressed and I needed to do something besides write my dissertation to make me happy. I've got this stupid guitar that I drag around all the time. So I signed up for this after-school community guitar class, secretly hoping that I would meet a man.

"And I walk in the first day, and the room was full of nuns."

The nuns gave her what she had never gotten before, external validation for her talent at singing. She started writing songs, partly as a way to deal with the stress of her job.

Later, working in Santa Clara, Chappel started a band and began to playing gigs and recording her songs. A marriage to a native South African followed and Chappel moved to South Africa with her new husband and not only received a measure of career success as a singer/songwriter, but saw a metaphor for change play out before her eyes in the tumultuous days when South Africa moved from apartheid to the election of Nelson Mandela as president.

She signed with Polygram and began hearing her songs played on the radio in South Africa. While her fame increased, the country was going through political turmoil.

"I was touring the country, going to different radio stations, talking to DJs. And their whole country was changing before my eyes."

Her husband insisted she leave the country just prior to Election Day in the belief that the country might slide into civil war. "My music career was happening. So I was watching it transform at the same time I'm watching this country transform."

The South Africa experience taught Chappel that radical change "" even from a system of belief that looks so deeply entrenched as apartheid "" could happen and happen quickly. She took that to heart on an individual level and began leading workshops for people looking for their own personal transformation.

She has used her personal story and her academic training to help people find the source of their personal fulfillment. Today, Chappel is planning for the release of her latest CD and is trying to get "You're An Original" a higher profile. She's taking time off from her academic career and her consulting work to concentrate on her music. And she's also leading workshops to help people make changes in their lives.

"You teach what you need to learn, I think. I know it because teaching it helps me to remember it. I see people following all the 'shoulds' and they're not fulfilled, they're not happy and they're not using their creativity. "

And it's in Santa Cruz where she feels the people are most open to making the courage choices that leads to the pursuit of happiness.

"People here in Santa Cruz are giving themselves permission to be who they are."