He’s still
doing the work.

I haven’t built this practice from a comfortable distance. I’ve carried my own weight as a leader, as a father, as a person navigating real difficulty, and the perspective I bring into every coaching conversation has been earned through that and refined through education and training. One without the other wouldn’t be the same.

My background spans over 15 years in human services, counselling, leading teams, managing compliance, developing policy, and sitting in the kinds of difficult conversations most people find a reason to leave. I received the Chief’s Award for Exceptional Service from the Calgary Police Service in 2017 as part of that work. But that’s not the real story.

At twelve I found drugs and alcohol, a solution to everything I couldn’t handle inside. I got sober at eighteen, relapsed at twenty-five, and in the darkest moment of that relapse I took an innocent life. I turned myself in the next day, confessed, went to prison, and spent nearly a decade doing the hardest personal growth work of my life.

I’m telling you this not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s the only reason I can sit across from you and mean it when I say that it’s never over, that you can come back from anything, that you can build yourself onto something better, and that the choices you make today still matter. I know that because I lived it.

What I learned in prison, in recovery, in therapy, and in the years since is that the content of your story matters less than what you do with it. The shame, the isolation, the belief that you are beyond redemption or repair, the small things you stop doing that kept you well, the compounding weight of pretending you are fine when you are not. Those are universal. A teenager in a recovery center feels them, and so does a business owner carrying the full weight of their organization. I have sat with both, and I know what it costs to carry that alone.

Coming out of prison, rebuilding meant more than just putting processes in place to support my own wellbeing. It meant becoming a vibrant, active part of communities where I could both receive support and offer it. I reconnected with my rugby club, got involved in twelve-step communities, and joined a men’s group. I was deliberate about building a network of good people around myself, people who genuinely wanted to see me do better and who also asked me to help them do the same. That reciprocity mattered. Over time I moved from being someone on the periphery to being someone trusted enough to lead, training and developing teams at work, becoming president of the rugby club, and facilitating a men’s group. It wasn’t handed to me. I had to earn it through showing up, doing the work, and proving over time that I was worth believing in.

There were setbacks. There were people who didn’t think I deserved a second chance, and moments where the weight of that doubt was real. But the communities I had built myself into, the good people I had surrounded myself with, they kept seeing me when I couldn’t see myself. They lifted me up. And through that I learned something fundamental: we don’t do this alone. None of us. That insight is now central to the work I do with leaders, looking not just at their individual performance but at the structures, the relationships, and the people around them that either support or undermine their capacity to lead. What do you need? Who is around you? Can you ask for help? That work of building genuine support is what allowed me to rebuild. It’s what allows the leaders I work with to do the same.

I have spent nearly twenty years learning how to stand in that weight without being crushed by it, and that is what I bring into this work. When you sit across from me, you are sitting with someone who has been to the absolute bottom and built a real life on the other side, a rich life full of family and friends, being a father, pushing myself on mountain trails and ultramarathons, and continuing to be engaged in the many communities I am grateful to belong to. I continue to do my own therapy, my own coaching, my own internal work. The same work I ask of my clients. That is not a credential. It is a commitment.

What that means in the room is that I am not managing my discomfort from behind a professional distance. I am in it with you. When you bring something hard I do not flinch, I do not need to fix it, and I can hold the space for it because I understand that real change is built through small choices made over and over when it would be easier to stop.

Every choice we make shapes tomorrow. I believe that completely, and I have built a practice and a life around helping leaders make better ones, not because I have it figured out, but because I know from lived experience that it can be done, that you can change, that you can come back from anything, that it is never over.