I've never lived just one life in one place, and I've come to think that's part of the point.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska -- though I'm a city boy from the suburbs...no corn or cows for me! A career in hotel management took me from Iowa City to Indianapolis, and to the deep heart of Texas, Austin. Love swept me away to Los Angeles for a few years, and adventure led me to live on the north coast of Spain with a local family for a handful of months. I'm now happily rather settled, living with my partner in Denver where I find my most solid roots in adulthood...for the third time. Six states so far. Two countries on two continents. Each move has rearranged how I see things.
Life with my partner in Denver
How I got here
Hospitality is where I actually started - making people feel more at home away from home. I spent ten years in hotel management working from the front desk to managing teams as large as 75 with several layers of department managers and supervisors under my leadership. An opportunity of a lifetime in Customer Success pulled me into a trendy tech company where I've now been for over 10 years providing America's educators with my best customer care.
At 27: my mom died. My dad wasn't really in the picture at the time, and I collaborated with my two wonderful sisters to care for our mom as she moved through her end of life stages. It was a lot for a young adult, and also caused me to contemplate what we're all doing here together on earth.
This led me to my quarter-life crisis and a pivot that quietly changed everything for me. I went back to school — a Master's in Organization Development (OD) & Leadership Studies. Three and a half years of evening classes one by one with people who were already doing the work of making organizations more human. What I loved most about that program was that every class examined organizational dynamics through a for-profit lens, a nonprofit lens, and a government lens — a real departure from my real-world work experience where all decisions essentially protect the bottom line. It's also where I first started learning to listen for what's underneath what someone is actually saying, which turned out to matter more to me than anything in the textbooks.
Coaching turned out to be less of a professional departure than it looked like from the outside. What I loved most in those hotel years — getting to know someone, helping them get better at something hard — turned out to be the same thing I do as a coach...minus the screaming guest in the lobby. My mentor is a large part of why: I met him in 2009, and close to two decades of conversations with him taught me to sit with someone else's thinking instead of rushing in to interpret it or advise on it, long before I ever thought of that as a skill. I formalized that instinct later — training through Erickson Coaching International and Cultivating Leadership in Growth Edge Coaching. I take these credentials seriously; it's the closest this field has to a shared standard for what competent practice looks like. But the real education happened in those conversations with my mentor, well before I ever called it that.
Back to school for a Master's
I've now traveled to more than 50 countries, staying long enough in some of them to see past their famous sites and more deeply understand their society and culture. I read constantly — usually a couple books going at once; one of them is always history, the other explaining some dimension of psychology or sociology. It's a strange kind of pleasure to read about a different land and then go stand in the exact places many of my books describe. From Rome to Sydney, Cape Town to Stockholm and Tokyo to Cuzco — I go out of my way to learn who these people are, listening to their stories and understanding what makes them...them.
Outside of work and travel, my free time tends to run in a few consistent directions. I prioritize a healthy mind in a healthy body and have practiced yoga and mindfulness for over a decade now. I taught myself to speak Spanish with surprising proficiency, which took about five years and a lot of patience with being bad at something before I became solidly good at it. I played the trumpet in marching band through my high school and college years, and took 10 years of piano lessons. I've traced my own family's genealogy back nine generations, partly because I like a good historical puzzle and partly because it's satisfying for me to actually know where I came from. And I collect gemstones and minerals — over a hundred specimens at this point — which started as a curiosity about the physical, natural wonders of our world and has become its own quiet, ongoing interest that fuels intention and focus in my meditative practice.
People who know me well have called me a Fruit Loop in a world of Cheerios. I've come to think of that as a feature rather than something to explain away. I'm not especially interested in the version of a well-lived life that gets handed to most of us by default — and I think that's exactly why I'm good at supporting other adults to figure out what a well-lived life actually looks like for them, rather than the one they assumed they were supposed to want.
If this sounds like a fit
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