My Voice
A very interesting thing happens at the threshold of collapse and reconstruction in the lives of high-achieving men: it gets very quiet. And that is where I speak up.
Collapse is what happens when a man’s life outgrows his capacity to hold it all.
What I Speak About
What would a man’s life look like if his core were constructed in a way that gave him the capacity to hold what is being asked of him with unwavering presence?
A man’s nucleus: the center point that resides in his inner wilderness. His life force, his leadership, his nervous system, his emotional capacity, and how he holds himself as he moves through the world.
For high-profile and high-achieving men, the collapse means a crisis behind the public image. Oftentimes it is the reckoning that achievement eventually asks for. My intention is to bring what these men carry, and what they have looked away from, to the surface, where it can finally be looked at. Not to accuse them or judge them, but to liberate them.
I draw on my own collapse: I went from a high-level collegiate athlete, and then a successful commercial real estate broker, to the depths of substance abuse. All told, nearly thirty years inside this work, on both sides of it. Fifteen years of a steady, then precipitous, collapse, and then fourteen years of reconstructing myself and my life, and now thriving.
My work has taken me inside Google, LinkedIn, Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Keller Williams, and Amazon, with their top executives and their teams.
If you’re having real conversations about addiction, leadership, relationships, capacity, and staying power, let’s talk. I speak to the part of those conversations most people avoid.
The Deeper Work
By the time a man reaches me, he has usually already made the discovery: what he looked away from for too long has become what he can no longer ignore. Achievement was a good strategy, until the desire for more became the strategy and started running the show.
Capacity does not get built out of doing more. It gets built out of being more: presence, purpose, and the ability to fully show up for the life you already have. And yes, there is an aspect of this work that is spiritual, in the most concrete sense the word can carry. Who are you when life gets real and something asks for your deepest attention. Who is the man the people closest to you actually get.
Men at the highest levels are having these conversations now. They are seeking deeper meaning, truth, and knowledge of themselves.
Expert Topics
Why the crisis is only the presenting problem
Most high-achieving men arrive at the moment of collapse believing the crisis is a fire to put out, and that once it is handled they can get back to business as usual. The crisis is evidence of a current reality they built, one small avoidance at a time. The way through it is excavating where it came from.
The double life: what every high-performing man knows and no one says
Every high-performing man who feels his grip on his life eroding knows the gap between the man he presents and the man he is. He has lived inside that gap for years, often in isolation. What is rarely talked about in rooms of leaders is the cost of continuing to perform.
Reconstruction is not addiction recovery: the difference and why it matters
Traditional recovery models manage symptoms. Fixers manage optics. Reconstruction rebuilds the man from his core, getting to the root of the conditions that produced the collapse so that they are no longer a threat.
Reconstruction: building the man your life now requires
A man arrives at this work because he cannot return to who he was. The way he was holding his life stopped working, even if no one outside has noticed yet. His task is to build himself into the man his life now requires.
Emotional capacity: the architecture high-performing men were never trained for
High-performing men are trained in nearly everything: strategy, finance, conditioning, decision-making. The architecture they were rarely trained in is emotional capacity. It is built slowly, and it determines what a man can hold when his life asks more from him.
These are the rooms these conversations belong in: executive teams, athletic organizations, family offices, and invitation-only masterminds and retreats.
Some of these conversations are written down: Field Notes
Speaking Inquiries
Bring the perspective the conversation is missing.
I take a small number of engagements, by invitation, where the room is ready for the real conversation. I am also available, selectively, as a podcast guest for hosts willing to have the deeper conversations.
I never speak about clients, publicly or privately, to media or to anyone else. No client is named, described, or alluded to, on stage or off.
Reach out for speaking or podcast invitations at the address below.