Most of my life has gone into telling what’s actually real from what I was handed.

My father is a pastor. He taught me one thing above all: lead with service, be with the people, find your joy there. As a child I read under the bedsheets at night, the Bible, illuminated manuscripts, Homer, sure there was gold in them. It took decades to understand what I was looking for.

I studied sociocultural anthropology at UC San Diego, graduating cum laude with the Mel Spiro Award. Anthropology taught me that most of what we call “just how things are” is learned: borrowed scripts we mistake for reality. That sent me into the traditions. Six months in Thai Buddhist monasteries learning breath meditation. Time with Sufi communities in Andalusia and the Middle East. Manuscripts at St. Catherine’s on Mount Sinai. A single breath down into the Red Sea’s Blue Hole.

I became a freediving instructor because insight without a body is noise. The ocean demands complete presence and does not negotiate with your story.

Years of building alongside people, in projects across industries and teams around the world, taught me that the problems are rarely operational. They are formational. People don’t need a better strategy. They need to remember what they actually believe, and build from that.

So I work as a scholar-practitioner. The reading and the fieldwork feed the room, and the room sends me back to the reading. The degree at the Kroc School and the books are the same inquiry as the coaching, at a different pace. Like Socrates, I left the monastery and the academy for the marketplace, to practice philosophy as something lived, and to help people remember what’s theirs.