Reflections to begin with
If you’re new to my writing, these reflections offer a good place to begin. They explore leadership, identity, dignity, and what it means to remain human while navigating responsibility, conflict, and change.
Many readers encounter these essays first and later decide to explore coaching. Others simply return to them when they need a moment of clarity or perspective. Either way, you are welcome here.
Continuing the conversation
I publish weekly reflections at Staying Human, exploring leadership, identity, and dignity in an age of fracture. If you’d like to receive future reflections directly, you can subscribe below.
Exploring this work more personally
If these reflections speak to something you are carrying — in leadership, transition, or a season of change — coaching offers a space to explore those questions more personally and in real time.
The Repair Velocity: What Happens After Someone Says “I’m Triggered”
Repair velocity—how quickly leaders move toward problems instead of away— is something I work with frequently in coaching. If you're navigating team conflict or difficult conversations, let's talk.
Where's My Keys?
Between “Where’s My Keys?” and “We Have to Stay”
A reflection on love, dignity, and what it means to keep showing up for people who hurt us, starting with the ones we love most.
Leaders everywhere are facing the same impossible question right now:
When someone hurts you, do you leave or do you stay and try to repair?
A moment in my mother’s kitchen changed how I think about leadership, loyalty and what real courage looks like.
This reflection grew out of a quiet, painful moment in my mother’s kitchen when love, history, politics, and dignity collided in a way I couldn’t ignore. It’s not a story about villains or heroes. It’s a story about what happens when people who love each other find themselves standing on opposite sides of something they can’t fully bridge. I wrote it because so many of us right now are being forced to choose between staying connected and protecting ourselves and because I don’t believe there are simple answers anymore, only brave ones.
Leadership Coaching in a Time of National Fracture
It’s not too late. In fact, this moment is the moment to lead. If you're a leader navigating this moment, or someone who supports leaders,
I hope this one gay man’s weekend reflection offers some small glimmer of clarity about what our country is asking of us now. Not neutrality. Not technique divorced from context. But the hard, human work of staying awake, staying grounded, and refusing to let fear decide who we become.
I do not experience this moment from a neutral distance. I am a gay man, married to a Black man. We exist in public because of decades of hard-won social progress, because many people I will never know in the past insisted, often at great personal cost, that dignity, visibility, and protection under the law should extend to those of us once deemed unacceptable or inconvenient.
I am also a citizen of a Native nation. My people carry a long memory of what happens when those in power decide that some lives are expendable, that some communities are obstacles to progress, or that the majority’s supposed "need," security, or destiny justify erasure of a people. Indigenous Peoples know what it looks like when the language of order masks domination, when fear is weaponized, and when leaders insist that harm is regrettable but necessary. Sorry we had to force march you and your families thousands of miles. We needed your land. History does not whisper these lessons to us. It speaks to us directly and plainly.
So, I feel compelled to say as clearly as I can: what we are seeing in the United States of America looks, smells, tastes of fascism, not as a rhetorical insult, but as a lesson from history. The glorification of force, the dismissal of dissent, the dehumanization of targeted groups, the insistence that some people are threats by nature rather than citizens by right: these are not new 2026 inventions. Leaders who flirt with or normalize these dynamics, even coyly, even indirectly, do real damage. Not even necessarily because they intend to, but because they provide cover for those who do. Silence or ambiguity in the face of this drift is not neutrality; it is participation.
And still, I want to be equally honest about something else. Please listen, everyone—this one is hard, especially now: hatred is not confined to one camp. It is circulating everywhere. Outrage hardens into certainty. Fear calcifies into contempt. People who feel threatened (whether by state violence, demographic change, economic precarity, or loss of status) often reach for narratives that simplify the world into enemies and allies. This mutual dehumanization is profoundly human, and profoundly dangerous. It corrodes our capacity to see one another clearly and makes collective repair nearly impossible.
Darth or Obi-Wan?
What does formidable mean to you? I choose Obi.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone.
May the Force aways be with you.
The Bitch is Back: My Superpower?
Mid-January truth: I’m done with people-pleasing.
Not kindness. Not compassion.
The kind of niceness that edits my truth in real time.
For a lot of us—especially those who grew up queer or different—people-pleasing wasn’t weakness. It was survival. We learned to read the room, adapt fast, stay likable, stay safe. Those skills became superpowers… and also a cage.
At some point, growth asks for something new.
Boundaries. Honesty. A willingness to disappoint.
A little inner bitch who can say, “That doesn’t work for me,” and mean it.
The bitch is back.
And maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a superpower.
Good Fire: Clearing for What Comes Next
New Year. Same Human. Deeper Intention.
The Intentional Growth System invites a different kind of renewal—one rooted in stewardship, not self-fixing. Like cultural burning, intentional “good fire” clears what no longer serves, enriches the soil and makes space for robust new life. Through awareness, choice, integration and return, growth becomes holistic, cyclical, and sustainable. No reinvention required. Just careful tending, honest noticing and faithful return to what matters most.
You Do You, Babe
You do you, babe.
If “you” need rest, grab it.
If “you” need movement, walk, run, ride, ski, just do it.
If “you” need space, take it.
If “you” need to laugh it off and eat another cookie, savor it.
Give yourself permission this week…
Winter is coming.
What kind of leadership becomes possible when I allow growth to emerge from stillness and deliberate quiet?
As winter arrives, the Earth invites a natural slowing. Light shortens and with it comes an opportunity to pause and listen.
Rather than grading the year a success or failure, winter asks a gentler question: What did this year teach me?
Where did I stretch, learn, and discover my limits and what wisdom lives there?
This season is not for harsh self-assessment or relentless forward motion. It’s a time for rest, integration and insight. Let winter be a threshold, not a verdict. Consider winter a moment to release what no longer serves and then step forward with openness toward the returning light of spring.
Beginning With Intention
The Intentional Growth System honors each step forward as meaningful, each insight is a seed and each attuned action, no matter how small, as an act of choosing yourself.
You are invited.
Let’s begin right here.
should
Pondering “should”.
Should you? Says who?
We often, especially now, need the courage to experiment and find new ways of seeing, being and doing. Everything, literally everything, is shifting around us, re-organizing and racing ahead, fast. Now more than ever, we need to be ready to adapt to that change. And to adapt you need, or should, experiment.
Group Therapy.
Maybe it’s naïve, but I believe we need kind, caring, compassionate leaders who listen to and learn from their hearts, minds and bodies.
We need leaders willing to join the walk proudly as their most secret, most authentic self.
We need leaders so transparently comfortable with that authentic, secret self that everyone walking with them feels safe in their own respective authenticity.
That’s a tall order.
Will I be successful helping to nurture that kind of leader?
I have no idea.
Honestly, it doesn’t really matter that much because I do know with absolute certainty that I am already on the way.
I hope you’ll walk with me.
Do all with one intention.
We can lead each other with renewed commitments to grace, kindness and compassion. I know with my entire essence that includes my mind, heart and body, we each need to lead into our collective future with all the grace and compassion we can muster. We all need to get better, perhaps slowly at first but by building momentum, each day.
We need to get better at serving one another with this single-minded intention: to awaken our hearts to our profound connection with each other and everything around us.
The time to start is now.
Please join me.