My Path
I grew up learning how to do hard things. Ankle weights in fourth grade. Up at 5am to run before school. Two sports at Dartmouth, football and baseball. Then eight years as a Marine Corps infantry officer leading Marines on multiple combat deployments. I learned discipline, how to lead under pressure, how to operate when it mattered most.
What I didn't learn was how to stop. I couldn't sit still without earning it first. It worked, until it didn't.
After the military I kept going: private-sector work in tech startups and construction, an MBA. Different rooms, same pattern. None of it touched what was actually wrong. I was stuck and numb, and I was still performing the whole time.
My father died, and everything I'd built to keep moving stopped working.
My son was born not long after. I don't have a clean explanation for what changed. I just couldn't keep running the way I had been.
Then a different kind of training began: meditation practice, deep inquiry into non-dual and spiritual teachings, a year-long coaching certification, several years in a deeper coach-training program, breathwork facilitation, and seven years of real medicine work, including trauma-informed training in psychedelic facilitation. Not more credentials. Learning to feel what I'd spent thirty years learning to override.
Becoming a father, and a husband, did more for me than any of that training. It unlocked the deepest layers of my heart, and it's the thing that actually got me into my body, consistently, instead of just understanding the idea of it.
It's still messy and hard, but a wildly meaningful and beautiful journey that I'm full of gratitude for. This isn't a state I arrived at and now maintain. It's a daily practice.
“The outward work can never be great if the inward work is small.”
These Days
These days I live with my wife and our four kids and our dog Reef, by the water in Wilmington. We unschool the kids close to nature. I surf, and mess around with improv for fun.
GoneBeyond is what I've built out of that: a life oriented around depth, human potential, healing, and evolution. It's also a commitment to uncovering what it actually means to be a man, and to lead my own family, in a world that doesn't make either of those obvious anymore.
I don't coach from having it figured out. I like to joke that I help leaders stop trying to figure everything out. I coach from the ground of a man in the trenches, doing the work required of me, so my children inherit a more beautiful future, and living in alignment with what I stand for.