A tariff threatened to wipe hundreds of millions off his balance sheet overnight. We got to work. We ran it like a war room, and his team rallied around him like a SWAT unit. Instead of putting his head in the sand, he stayed grounded, clear and engaged. The tariff never hit. By then it didn't matter. Using the business as the dojo, he'd become the CEO who wouldn't have blinked if it had.
John's story
I came to it through the body.
Executive coach to CEOs, founders and family enterprises. 17 years, more than 15,000 hours.
If you're reading this, someone you trust probably sent you. That's how nearly every client has found me for 17 years. I've never run an ad. The work has traveled by one CEO telling another.
For 17 years before I coached, I was a licensed massage therapist specializing in deep tissue and craniosacral work, and I owned a bodywork studio in New York City. Patti Smith named my company. Michael Stipe wrote an album on my table.
They came in for the body: jaw pain, chronic fatigue, burned-out nervous systems. What they found on the table was a connection to themselves. Somewhere in the hour they'd drop back into their body and leave clear about their life and what to do next. Then they'd go back out into the world and return a few weeks later with the same problem.
I was repairing the downstream end of something, so I went upstream. I studied trauma and identity, and the strategies people build to survive their own success. I looked at the old story about who they are, written when they were young, and at patterns set in motion decades ago that had long stopped being useful.
I knew that territory firsthand. When I was eight, my sister and I were in an accident. She lost her leg. I was thrown clear, and somehow I didn't have a scratch. Everyone tended to the wound they could see, and nobody treated the kid without one. I carried complex PTSD for years with no name for it, and I drank on top of it.
My father was the executive videotape editor for Another World, the soap opera, and I worked there myself during summers in high school. I watched actors who had something I didn't: the freedom to be completely themselves in front of the world, relaxed, emotional, unguarded, with a full crew watching. I saw that and wanted it. I went to acting school chasing it and studied for years. The teachers kept asking how I felt, and I only had two answers, angry and sad. Learning the rest of the range is where I started to thaw.
At 25 I was standing in the Rodeo Bar at 27th and Third at one in the morning, holding an Amstel Light with the label half peeled off. I'd decided to quit drinking many times before. That night it became a choice. I didn't know it then, but looking back, I'd found what I now call inner sovereignty. I've been sober 25 years.
For the next ten years I ran the studio, acted, and produced ambient music out of a small setup of my own, three careers running at once, none of them the one I ended up building.
Around the time the upstream question took hold, my wife and I were raising capital for a tech company that let people record their life story on video for future generations. I recorded messages my son will receive in 2050. We were too early, and the money didn't come. My wife suggested I get a coaching certification so investors would take me seriously. When I got trained, I saw I'd found the frame I'd been looking for.
I kept going. I earned an NLP trainer's certification, which few people hold, and trained in hypnotherapy, IFS and parts work, and shadow work. I joined a men's group 20 years ago and have led hundreds of men's retreats since. At those retreats the agreement is that I don't bail out halfway through your rage or your grief. We go all the way through. One by one, my clients moved from the massage table to the coaching chair, and 15,000 hours later that's the work.
After a keynote for EO, an author came up and asked how I'd held a room of CEOs and taken all of them that deep, that fast. I told him I was trained on the ground: seventeen years with my hands on people and seventeen years in the chair across from them.
Why you haven't heard of me
Early wounds write rules into the nervous system before we're old enough to argue with them. I know that territory personally. Something that happened to me long before I could name it left one rule running underneath everything I did: that being fully seen wasn't safe. I didn't choose that rule, and for a long time I didn't even know it was there.
The workaround was to be so good that people would find me anyway, without my ever having to ask. It worked. Both businesses I've built ran entirely on relationship and results instead of a pitch. It's also why this page undersold me for years, until a client told me that if he forwarded it to his business partner, the partner would think he'd hired a quack. He was right.
A wound writes a rule. The rule runs the business, the marriage, the family, from underneath, dressed up as a personality trait or a work ethic, and nobody can see it, including the person living inside it. Freeing that constriction is what I mean by agency. Getting back to the person who was there before the rule got written is what I mean by inner sovereignty. I didn't learn that from a book. I found my own way out of the rule first.
I'm a Certified HNLP Master Coach, NLP Trainer, Somatic Facilitator and Brain-Based Leadership Trainer, with advanced training in hypnosis and generative trance, and I'm IFS-informed. I live in Colorado with my wife of 17 years, our son, and my stepson. My son is fifteen and already a formidable heavy metal drummer. My stepson is on his way to medical school. I've meditated for 30 years, these days in the form of a 90-minute tea ceremony every morning, and I hold a purple belt in jiu-jitsu.
If your company goes where you point it, the most valuable thing you can work on is the state you're in when you point.
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