Certified Financial Planning Practitioner® for 25 years. NLP practitioner. Certified Neuropsychology Coach. Longtime leadership trainer. The person who had to learn all of this the hard way before he could teach it to anyone else.
I've spent over three decades in financial services, twenty-five years as a Certified Financial Planning Practitioner®, working with individual clients and business owners and teaching other advisors how to do it for a living. Then in 2019, I found out that a person can know everything about money and still be run entirely by old, unexamined programming. I did the work to change that. Now I help other people do the same, starting with forgiveness, ending with a life that actually feels like theirs.
I grew up getting the message, in a hundred small ways, that whatever I did wasn't quite good enough. So I did what a lot of us do with that message: I went and achieved things. A computer science degree with honors from Purdue University. A career in financial services starting in 1996. The CFP® exam, passed on the first go in 2000. A national training role. A seat teaching the next generation of planners at the University of St. Thomas and undergrads at the University of Houston. By most measures, I was doing fine.
Underneath it, I wasn't. I'd spent years telling clients how to get their financial house in order while quietly avoiding my own. Debt I didn't talk about. Tax problems I told myself I'd deal with later. A story running in the background that said none of it would ever be enough (that I would never be enough) and I believed it so completely I never thought to question it.
"It wasn't a logic problem. It was code I didn't know I was running."
In September 2019, that story got loud enough that I found myself standing next to a set of train tracks, having the first full-blown panic attack of my life, waiting to step in front of a freight train and doing the math on whether the life insurance proceeds would fix all the financial mistakes I couldn't admit to anyone, including myself. I tell that story more fully from the stage than I will here. What matters for this page is what came after: the train passed, and so did the panic attack. And I finally understood that the problem was never a lack of information. It was old programming I'd never once examined.
That's the work I do now. The 4 Steps I use with every client are the same four steps I used on myself: forgive and release what isn't yours, decide what you actually want from a clean slate, build the felt sense of already having it, and take real action. I'm not teaching this from a textbook. I'm teaching it from the other side of it.
Credentials matter. So does having lived what I teach. Here's the paper trail.
When I'm not coaching or on a stage, I'm usually traveling, cooking something a little too ambitious for a weeknight, or losing golf balls with real enthusiasm. I share my life with my wife, Michelle, our dog, Ivy, and a family that's taught me more about forgiveness than any framework I've ever built, including my own.
Ours is a blended family: Michelle’s girls and my boys. Between us we’re one shy of a Brady Bunch: Parley, Lauren, and Hayley; Jason and Robert. And along the way we picked up the people they love, too. This is who I mean when I say family taught me more about forgiveness than any framework I’ve built.
Michelle; between us, our five kids Parley, Jason, Robert, Lauren, and Hayley; and the people they love.
That's the question I ask myself now, before I react to anything: a client's fear, my own money stress, a hard conversation I'd rather avoid. It's simple. It's not always easy. But it's the only compass that hasn't steered me wrong since 2019.
No algorithm, no drip campaign — just me, writing when there’s something real to share. Join the list and I’ll add you myself.