Most of us are running on programming we never chose.
We pick it up from the day we're born, and most of it is about limits. What you can't do. Who you're supposed to be. How much you're allowed to want. I coach because I found out you can put it down.
Life is chaos. That's the good news.
The order we build on top of it makes us feel grounded, and I get why. But the shortest path to freedom I've found is letting go into the chaos. Dropping the limits, the doubts, the anxiety that isn't rooted in anything true.
I didn't feel that fully until my mom passed. It was 2020, the first lockdowns. She had a hard fight with cancer. I'd never considered what life would be like without my mom up to that point. I couldn't imagine feeling any worse, so I put it all down. The worry. The fear. The need to prove anything to anyone. It faded.
I'm not anyone's spiritual guru. But feeling sure of yourself, light on your feet, doing work you love, finding your people. All of that started for me when I stopped running the program I'd been handed and wrote my own.
You get to write yours. You're the one living it. Don't hand that to anyone else.
She asked me a question I hadn't let myself ask.
I've had a lot of coaches. The one who changed things was Suzie Sharpe, a coach in the UK. First call, she asked me questions I'd never considered, because I'd been measuring myself by everything I didn't have yet.
Being challenged to think differently opened something in me. I stopped deciding in advance what was possible, and it's the conversation I try to have with every client now.
You got the title. The certainty didn't come with it.
You took a bigger role and the ground moved. You're hitting your numbers and still half-waiting for someone to notice you're figuring it out as you go.
That's who I coach. People who already have what it takes to lead and have never stopped long enough to see it. I've been on both sides of it: winning by every measure and feeling hollow inside it, and starting over from zero with no title to hide behind.
Then 2020 happened.
Before any of this I ran a production studio for my father's company in Los Angeles, then became CEO of Silverbird Film Distribution. On paper, that was it. The version of success I thought I was building toward.
Then the world shut down and the work I'd built my identity around stopped. For the first time in a long time I sat still, and I had to admit I wasn't happy. I was stressed and grinding through a life that looked right from the outside.
So I let it all go. The first job I landed was at a Lowe's warehouse. Ten-hour shifts, twenty thousand steps a day, filling trailers in the heat. No title, no team, no name anyone recognized. I needed that. I needed to find out who I was when none of the old labels were doing the talking.
It was me, doing the work.
Starting over showed me something I'd been outrunning. My anxiety had gotten worse in the pandemic. I was pulling away from people, and things that used to be easy felt like a wall. I took a door-to-door sales job to put myself in the middle of what scared me most.
I remember sitting in a strip mall parking lot one afternoon, hand on the door handle, and I couldn't make myself get out of the car. I couldn't walk in and say hello to a stranger. The gap between who I was trying to become and who I was being had never felt so wide.
I stepped back from that job. Then I walked into a T-Mobile store, in a suit, and the manager told me I was overqualified. He gave me the job anyway. I talked to people every single day. Frustrated people, cranky people, people with every complaint. I wrote my own check by how much I sold, and for the first time in a long time I felt independent in a way that meant something.
From there I built. Tech sales as a BDR: cold calls, rejection, thirty seconds to have a real conversation with a stranger. Then account management, where I closed over a million dollars in revenue in my first year.
Thinking about becoming a coach yourself? iPEC is where I trained. Start here. That is a referral link: if you enroll through it, iPEC credits me at no cost to you.
I'm still in it. And I coach.
I didn't leave the arena to coach. I still work in tech go-to-market. I've carried a quota and I've led a BDR team, so I know the jump from hitting your own number to owning someone else's.
My first team came early. I was handed people to lead before I'd led anything, and I got a lot of it wrong. When I started coaching I didn't write a business plan. I called leaders I knew and asked what mattered to them, the same conversation over and over, until I could see who this was for.
Becoming a father sharpened it. It reordered my priorities faster than any career milestone, and it made me ask harder questions about who I was being in the meetings that mattered most.
I'm building this in the open. Some of it is awkward, and it won't be that way forever. I'll fall on my face sometimes. I won't stay down.
The Foundation. Presence. Performance. Integrity.
We build The Foundation: your identity, your values, and a plan built around three pillars, Presence, Performance, and Integrity. We clear what's in your way first. The clarity comes first and the results follow.
The most relevant credential I have is that I've been where most of my clients are.
If any part of this sounds familiar, let's talk.
Start with the Vibe Check. Twelve questions, four minutes, and a read on where you stand. Then, if it makes sense, 30 minutes on a call about where you are and where you want to be.