About Me

Longer Version

When I was eleven years old, my babysitter (who was in college studying cognitive psychology) told me that if I cleaned up the colossal mess I’d made in the basement, she would teach me how to tell if my older brother was lying just by watching how his eyes moved when he talked. This was an irresistible incentive. I never really learned the eye trick, but within weeks I was reading books about psychology and human communication. And I was hooked.

By the time I was thirteen, I was being trained in NLP (Neurolinguistic Psychology) and at sixteen, after a 40-day training at the university of Santa Cruz in California (go Banana Slugs!), the trainer, Robert Dilts, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “As far as I know, you’re the youngest person to ever receive a Master Practitioner certification.”

Okay, yes, I am sort of bragging. And I’m proud of those accomplishments, but the reason they mean so much to me is that they highlight how passionate I was to learn about the nature of human experience. In college (UCSC), I widened my studies by focusing on psycho-linguistics and Narrative Psychology. For years, I was surrounded by encouraging adults and mentors who assumed I was going to become a therapist. I absorbed that assumption, and in 2002 I moved to the East Coast to get my Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology at Antioch University.

In 2005 — now the father of a fireball of a three-year-old girl — I became a therapist, working in private practice and in a mental health clinic. This work provided me with a rich variety of experience. I worked with individuals, couples, and groups, and built a strong reputation for helping hard-to-reach preteens and teenagers.

Yet, despite all things going to plan, within a couple of years I felt that I needed a change. I still felt passionate about helping people, but it began to dawn on me that working within the therapeutic frame was leaving too much of myself out of the process.So I stepped out of the therapeutic modality and began working as a personal coach, helping people make significant changes in specific aspects of their social and emotional lives. Suddenly, I felt the freedom to begin engaging more creatively with my clients, finding unique ways to help them approach their challenges from different perspectives.

Soon, things got fascinating. I began noticing a pattern in the feedback I received from my clients. I would occasionally get emails from former clients reflecting on their work with me. That’s fairly typical for therapists and coaches; what stood out to me was what my clients found most significant about their work with me: many of them enthusiastically mentioned the small ‘tasks’ that I gave them at the end of each session. One former client referred to them as the ‘odd little homework assignments you gave me each week,’ and he said that they often made the biggest difference.

Because of my client’s positive feedback, I began to look more closely in to how I was generating these weekly tasks.  I started discovering patterns in the tasks I created for people. I began to see how small, seemingly insignificant actions could lead to major changes.

In 2019 my wife Caitlin and I moved from Ashland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington so that she could pursue her career as a Speech Pathologist. I had begun to understand what was unique about my approach and decided to formalize into a methodology for coaching. I realized that my approach boiled down to two key components:

1) There must be a fundamental shift in our notion of ‘connecting.’

2) Small new habits of interacting create major changes in our core relationships.

These two insights eventually led to what I call the Minimal-Is-Maximal method (MIM). I began to shift all of my coaching work towards this approach.

The MIM Method encapsulates what I find most enriching and joyful about being alive. I love sharing it with people who are ready to try a deceptively small, new approach towards the people they care the most about in their lives.

If you are interested in working with me directly and learning more about how you could use MIM, please check out the three ways we can work together. And if you have more questions, I’d love to set up a free phone/video consultation.