Your Guide
About Me
Thirty years inside organizations as they grew, merged, and reorganized taught me that leadership begins with self-awareness and is learned in the moment.
The Experience Behind the Guidance
My career ran through direct marketing, Ad Tech, and MarTech, and included five mergers and acquisitions at three companies with deal values ranging from $295 million to roughly $182 billion:
- CUC International (membership services): the ‘merger of equals’ with HFS, Inc., which formed Cendant.
- AOL (digital media): the ‘deal of the century’ merger with Time Warner, announced less than a year after I joined.
- Dotomi (marketing technology): a 35-person startup when I joined. The company grew to about 160 people by the time of the ValueClick acquisition, was rebranded Conversant, was acquired by Alliance Data Systems (Epsilon), and was later sold to Publicis Groupe.
Living through the mergers taught me how to navigate change and uncertainty as it unfolds. Watching how leaders responded, what their teams experienced as a result, and how I responded myself taught me how much leadership depends on self-awareness.
Along the way, I experienced what many leaders face: new managers and senior teams, outsiders brought in, and teams moved to different departments and leaders. You may have lived some of this too. Over more than a decade of leading teams, I guided people through those seasons, including times when my team, and occasionally I, wondered what the changes meant for our jobs.
How Coaching Took Root
I chose marketing as my college major because I was fascinated that the same product, idea, or experience can lead different people to different outcomes, depending on the perspective each person brings. That curiosity about what others think, believe, and experience followed me into every role. Colleagues often came to talk through challenges and seek my perspective, and I found myself asking what they saw, believed, valued, and wanted, so they could work out their best next steps.
I stayed in marketing for much of my career, in roles from account management and digital strategy to data segmentation and taxonomy, while reading more than two hundred books and taking courses on leadership, communication, psychology, and coaching. Eventually I moved into corporate Learning & Development, where I studied adult learning, worked with assessments, and earned my iPEC Certified Professional Coach credential on my own time and at my own expense. For more than ten years, I combined those tools with my own experience of leading through change to help leaders build the awareness and skills that strengthened their careers, especially around how their communication lands.
The Manager’s Chair
Moving into leadership is a psychological shift. You go from being the person who gets things done to the person who helps others get things done. That means balancing the needs, motivations, and strengths of a team against the pressure of senior executives and company goals, often while the organization itself is changing.
Books, courses, and programs provide language, structure, and ideas. Yet the manager’s chair is where we learn how that knowledge works in real life.
Hard Seasons
My path included burnout and stretches of real self-doubt. Part of the cause was fit: as the company grew through acquisitions, the environment offered less of the autonomy and financial upside I value, and my Hogan results helped me see both clearly.
Self-development, coaching, discovering blind spots, stepping back to see the bigger picture, and learning to reframe helped me work through those seasons. I mention this because many leaders carry the same weight quietly. Working with someone who has been challenged from several angles, and understands that weight, can help.
People are usually doing the best they can with what they know, believe, understand, and have available to them at the time.
What Guides My Coaching
That weight is not new to me. At my first corporate job, I was stressed and working long hours while colleagues with bigger titles and larger responsibilities seemed less stressed. I wanted to understand why. On long weekend drives with the radio off, I asked myself hard questions and demanded honest answers. Somewhere on those drives, I realized that we each assign our own meaning to what happens to us, and the realization felt like freedom. That started a lifelong journey into psychology and self-development, which grew into leadership development and broader questions about meaning and how we live.
Four beliefs now anchor my work. They come from my own observations and from what I’ve learned from others:
- We are usually doing the best we can with what we know, believe, understand, and have available to us at the time.
- We do not simply respond to events. We respond to the meaning we assign to them, and that meaning is shaped by our own perspective.
- Self-awareness is the foundation of personal leadership.
- Curiosity allows us to admit that we don’t know everything, and that humility opens the door to what lies beyond our own view.
That is why I pair coaching with assessments such as Hogan, Lumina Spark, and the Energy Leadership Index. They offer structured, evidence-informed insight into how you see yourself, how your communication and behavior may land with others, and the blind spots in the gap between the two. That helps us separate what happened from what we made it mean. From there, we stay curious about your perspective and about the perspectives of the people you lead.