How I Got Here · Unfolding Community

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How I Got Here

I was intrigued by the word entrepreneur long before I ever knew what it really meant. Looking back, the mindset was there early in middle school and high school dreaming up backyard businesses like a makeshift putt-putt course, selling pencils or erasers, or mowing lawns to earn what I wanted. With a tiny allowance that barely moved the needle (a quarter a week toward a $16 video game will do that), I learned quickly that if I wanted something, I had to create it myself. By high school, I was running a small landscaping business, mowing over 20 lawns a week, and by college that work funded a large portion of my education. That was my first real shift from kid to creator.

In college, despite internships and traditional career paths, the nine-to-five office model never really fit. What did fit was my lifelong connection to team sports. I leaned further into that world playing intramural football, then playing and coaching for a semi-professional football team, despite never having played organized football before. During and after college, I coached middle school and high school athletes and found real meaning in helping young men and women grow into who they were capable of becoming, not just in skill, but in how they showed up on the field of play. That period marked another turning point in how I learned to support real change, both in myself and others.

Even while coaching, my entrepreneurial drive never slowed down. I was investing in real estate on the side buying, fixing, and renting homes, constantly problem-solving how to create income while balancing a modest coach’s salary. Eventually, I found my way back into landscaping through an opportunity with a property manager. It almost fell into my lap. I started the company with $700 and a cheap old truck and got rolling. Before long, I had built it into a business with 27 employees. Each stage required me to become a different version of myself, operator, leader, decision-maker, not just do different tasks. I was constantly reinventing who I was.

It was through this experience that I first began creating processes and methods to improve how the business ran. I was always creating, shifting, planning cycling through that loop again and again to get better. After selling that company, I started a new one in a water-related testing field. At the same time, I launched a car rental business to support my income. Throughout all of this, I was constantly learning and growing. Eventually, I reached a point where improvement no longer came from better systems, more effort, or tighter execution, I had become the bottleneck. What was required wasn’t another tactic or system, but a fundamental change in how I was leading and relating to pressure. Something was always breaking, and I was tired of it.

That’s what led me into coaching school, almost as if I was being invited into the space by both life and other coaches. Here, I learned formal approaches to identity change. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. The methods were imperfect and inconsistent, and much of the real progress came from outside those frameworks. I continued studying different ways of understanding human development, how identities form, and how we can deepen beyond them into more fundamental ways of being.

Over the years, I worked with multiple coaches from around the world, taking this work as deep as we could together. Each layer asked me to let go of an old way of being and stabilize something new, not to perfect myself, but to meet life and leadership from a different center. This work wasn’t theoretical. It was lived, tested, and integrated in real moments that mattered.

Over the last eight years, I’ve coached individuals across a wide range of fields entrepreneurs navigating business inflection points, tech leaders looking for new ways to grow and lead, and leaders in manufacturing, engineering, finance, photography, oil and gas, and more. I’ve worked with directors, CEOs, coaches, and operators across the globe. While their industries differ, they arrive at the same threshold: they want something they do not have, the realization that the way they’ve been operating can no longer carry what’s being asked of them. They aren’t looking for better strategies they’re ready for something deeper.

Over time, I’ve melded together practices from many disciplines integral theory, psycho-spiritual development, unfolding, meditation, identity work, breathwork, somatic work, focusing, parts work, and more. Rather than teaching these as separate tools, I integrate what has actually worked into a single, cohesive approach. I’m now creating my own system based not on theory, but on what reliably supports real change under real pressure.

At a certain point, it became clear that this wasn’t just something I was doing for myself or a handful of clients. I wanted to share this way of working more openly to support others who sense they’re at an edge where something old no longer fits. This is the work that changed me and now, it’s the work I’m here to do with you. Life invites us to constantly reinvent who we are and who we show up in those moments. Are we listening and open to creating in those moments?

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