About

Too many life coaches simply don’t tell you much about their background on their websites.  Instead, they rely on slick visual presentation to convince you to hire them.  I feel that if you connect with my story, you’re more likely to take what I have to say to heart, and THAT means you’re more likely to improve your life.  With that in mind, here’s a little about me…

I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, a hugely blue collar part of the world.  It’s a mindset I understand and a culture that I relate to, even more than 30 years after leaving the area.

In 1987, I moved to San Diego, California.  Shortly afterward, I went to school and began working in the computer support industry.  In that field, it’s common to work as a contractor (employed by a staffing agency, but providing services to another company), and I spent more than 20 years doing so.

In early February, 2013, I was working at the New York Life Insurance Company general office in San Diego, and I got a phone call from my rep at the agency I was employed by.  “They said to tell you that today is your last day.”  There honestly wasn’t much more to the conversation.  After nearly 15 years on the job, I was let go without warning or thanks.

 I didn’t work again for almost 2 years.  The accepted wisdom about situations like this is that I would become depressed, anti-social, withdrawn.  After all, a middle-aged man’s job is supposed to be an extension of his identity, and that job had been yanked out from under me.  But I DIDN’T get depressed.  To the contrary, I felt freed!  Released!

Then I questioned why that was.  The answer was in the information I’d been consuming and ideas I’d been exposed to since I was a kid.  I was lucky; my mother was a seeker of answers all her life, and in her search, she investigated all kinds of different things, and shared them with me.

As a result, I was exposed to different ways of viewing the world – perspectives that suggested I was in control of my life, and that I could be happy, no matter my circumstances.  I ate this stuff up, because it was interesting and positive-minded – something I was NOT being exposed to in my environment.  (My mother, for all of her searching, was never willing to accept responsibility for HER part in creating her circumstances, and died convinced that she was a victim of the Universe, so this was part of the programming I had to battle against.)

These ideas had helped me to change my own perspective on life.  I didn’t see things the way the “experts” said I would or should.  I viewed my job loss as something to be thankful for!  This was a perspective shift that I KNEW could change lives for people I knew, and from that point on, I began working toward helping other people to see how THEY could be happier, too.