Life didn't go
according to plan.
Neither did I.

I didn’t take
the scenic route on purpose.

I was the first person in five generations of my family to graduate high school. You don't come from that starting line assuming a doctorate is waiting for you. Mine wasn't a straight road from one impressive credential to the next. It was a lot of figuring things out, getting things wrong, and finding people who believed I could do more than I imagined.

Then came some unusually demanding teachers. In the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, I learned what it means to trust people when there's no room for pretending. As a Navy corpsman working alongside Marines, I saw how much the person beside you matters. Those experiences weren't an introduction to a tidy leadership formula. They were an introduction to responsibility, fear, loyalty, and people at their best and worst.

My career kept changing classrooms. I worked in corporate settings, taught at the University of Kansas and Creighton University, spent years in the mental health field, and built a practice and business. I earned a master's degree and a PhD in counseling psychology along the way. At every stop, I noticed that talented people can get extremely good at carrying a life they no longer recognize.

Long before I had a microphone for leadership talks, I was a theatre major learning that the best way to connect with people is to tell the truth about being human. Away from the microphone, I'm the father of five children. There are games, practices, loud conversations, unexpected questions, and the daily proof that a parent's carefully developed plan has a life expectancy of about six minutes. The five of them keep me humble and remind me that leadership is often just showing up again, doing the next right thing, and admitting when you were wrong.

I'm also someone who has had to rebuild parts of my own life. That experience made me less interested in performing certainty and more interested in the questions we usually avoid: What have I been carrying? What have I stopped noticing? What do I need to own? What deserves repair? And what sort of person do I want to become next?

That's what I bring to The Reshaped Leader and The Slow Drift. Not a claim that I've figured life out. I bring perspective, honesty, a healthy respect for absurdity, and the belief that we can talk about hard things without making the room feel hopeless. In fact, sometimes a good laugh is exactly what lets the truth land.