I'm a coach. I help adults think clearly about how they want to live.
Coaching can mean a lot of things. Here's what it means with me: I'm a thought partner. I don't give advice, and I'm not a therapist. I help people make sense of their own lives in their own words — through questions, through careful listening, and through the kind of conversation that's hard to have on your own.
If you've wanted someone to think with who won't tell you what they'd do, won't diagnose you, and won't need you to perform — that's the relationship.
A Few Numbers
10 — years Kevin played the trumpet regularly
9 — generations back Kevin has traced his genealogy
8 — years Kevin has been practicing yoga
7 — years Kevin was a leader in the hospitality business in one capacity or another
6 — states Kevin has lived in (Omaha NE, Iowa City IA, Indianapolis IN, Austin TX, Denver CO, Los Angeles CA)
5 — years it took Kevin to learn to speak Spanish fluently
4 — books Kevin is generally reading at any given time
3 — years it took Kevin to earn a Master's in Organization Development and Leadership Studies
2 — younger sisters Kevin has
1 — parents Kevin has lost to cancer
How I got here
I spent my twenties and early thirties in hospitality leadership — hotel front-office operations, training, the part of management my academic world calls the soft side. I loved the human part of it. I built training materials for a 35-person team and discovered I liked teaching more than running the operation. I stayed for the people, not the titles.
At 26 I took the career pivot that quietly changed the rest of it — a Master's in Organization Development and Leadership Studies. Three years in evening classrooms with people who were already doing the work of making organizations more human. That's where I started learning to listen for something other than what a person was saying on the surface.
Coaching found me later. I was in my first cohort at Erickson Coaching International, in practice sessions with other people new at this. After one of our early rounds, a few peers said some version of the same thing: you're really good at talking to people about the everyday parts of their lives. That feedback landed harder than any book or credential has. What they were naming, it turned out, was the direction I actually wanted the practice to go. Not executive coaching. Not performance coaching. Coaching for the kinds of questions people carry around.
What I'm trying to do
The short version: I help adults find more comfort in adulting.
The longer version: people keep growing in how they make sense of themselves and the world. The growth doesn't show up as new skills; it shows up as a different relationship with the things that used to run you. A role you used to be inside becomes something you can hold at arm's length and examine. A belief you used to defend becomes something you can contemplate more deeply.
Most of us don't get much support for that kind of growth. Therapy offers us a lot, but it's doing something different and operates from a rather well-defined body of knowledge. Family and friends want what's best for us, but they oftentimes can't help but tell us what they think we should do, which is oftentimes what they themselves would do (in their totally different context of life). Coaches who work in corporate settings often can't support us in this way — they're hired to help whomever is paying them hit a deliverable.
What I offer is a deliberate space for deep, self-reflective, contemplative work with a thought partner who specializes in staying out of your story. I think about my practice in four areas: how you relate to yourself, how you relate to a partner, how you relate to the community around you, and — for some people — how you relate to a piece of who you are that doesn't yet have a comfortable place in the rest of your life. None of these four "surfaces" of yourself is more important than others, and we frequently show up differently depending on the "surface" and others who are involved.
I don't think about growth as a ladder. It's closer to an unfolding — you're not trying to get ahead of some other version of adulthood, you're trying to get honest about the one you're actually living, and want to find increasing peace with it.
How I show up
I find that Maya Angelou captures one of my favorite maxims best: people will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. How you feel is important. How others feel is significant.
I take that seriously in the room. My job is not to leave you with advice or homework or a new framework. My job is to help you do your own thinking as someone present who won't judge you, interrupt you, or redirect you. Many of my clients describe the work as surprisingly candid and unusually patient at the same time — that's the posture I'm trying to hold.
Most of us carry pieces of ourselves we've quietly decided don't belong — old versions, contradictions, things we're a little ashamed of. I don't think any of that needs editing out to be useful in a session. Some of the best work happens when a client stops performing or contriving what they find to be the most polished response, and starts sharing the truth about how they authentically feel.
One practical consequence: you don't have to build a deep relationship with me to get something useful from this. You can come with one question, work it through across a few sessions, and be done. I don't sell packages, and I don't assume a long-term engagement unless you decide you want one. You set the depth. You set the pace. You leave when you're done.
Some of my clients work with me for a long time. Some come back years later for a new question. Some come once and never again, and that counts too.
I trained at Erickson Coaching International in the coaching methodology that shapes most of my daily practice. Erickson's first-day teaching has stayed with me: clients are already whole. They are resourceful. They already have what they need. I think that's true.
I've also trained at Cultivating Leadership with Jennifer Garvey Berger — whose work applies adult-development research to how people actually think and behave as a consequence. She's one of the best living explainers I've encountered as to why adulthood is best seen as an unfolding through our dying days.
My Master's in Organization Development and Leadership Studies gives me the broader frame — how people develop in concert with others, and how relationships and our roles in them either help or get in the way. I came to coaching through an interest in how we can create better lives for one another through our power and influence, not through therapy, and it's worth naming because it shapes what I notice.
I'm an ICF-credentialed coach. Credentialing matters to me — it's the closest the coaching field has to a shared standard of what competent practice looks like.
Training
I live in the Denver area with my partner. I've lived in 6 of the United States and have now traveled to over 50 countries on our lovely planet — long enough in some of them to stop seeing them as places to visit and start seeing them as places to understand. I read widely, usually a book or two at a time; one of them is always history, which is how I keep perspective about what's actually unusual about the present.
I've been described by those close to me in life as a Fruit Loop in a world of Cheerios. I've come to value that as a feature. And I prefer to work with Fruit Loops over Cheerios as a coach.
A little texture
If this sounds like a fit
The next step is a free thirty-minute consultation. No commitment, no assessment, no homework. It's a conversation, and at the end of it we both decide whether the work seems right for you.