I spent twenty years watching brilliant leaders make poor
decisions. The problem was never their intelligence. It was
always their biology.
I started at Adidas in Herzogenaurach — managing global performance and lifestyle design across international markets, presenting to upper management, running at the pace that tier-one sportswear demands. From there to Nike in Portland as Design Director, leading creative direction for US Soccer, the US Olympic Committee, and Major League Baseball. Then Divisional Design Manager at Columbia Sportswear, and consulting engagements across Backcountry.com, Pendleton Woolen Mills, Wilson Tennis, Handful Bras, and Alps & Meters.
Then I co-built Exit 21 — a design and sourcing agency that generated over half a million dollars in revenue in its first year. When the process broke down, I built a proprietary tool to fix it rather than hire around it.
Two decades. Multiple director-level roles. A company built from zero. And across all of it — at every level, in every organization — the same pattern: the higher the pressure, the more the biology took over. I watched brilliant people make poor decisions. Not from lack of intelligence or vision. From a nervous system running a survival program that no strategy session could reach.
ADIDAS
Herzogenaurach, Germany
Global Sr. Design Manager
Global Sr. Design Manager — Performance & Lifestyle
Led design across global performance and lifestyle categories. Managed cross-functional teams, presented creative direction to upper management and regional merchandising across global markets.
The pace demanded constant output from everyone. I watched talented people make short-sighted calls — not from lack of vision, but from systems running on depletion.
NIKE
Portland, Oregon
Design Director
Design Director — US Soccer, USOC & MLB
Led creative direction for US Soccer, the US Olympic Committee, and Major League Baseball. High-stakes, high-visibility work at the intersection of performance, culture, and brand.
Here I first clearly named it: fight-or-flight dressed up as urgency. Cortisol mistaken for drive. When performance eroded, everyone looked at the strategy. Nobody looked at the hardware.
COLUMBIA SPORTSWEAR
Portland, Oregon
Divisional Design Manager
Divisional Design Manager — Women's Outerwear & Titanium
Managed design across Women's Outerwear and Titanium performance lines — concept through to market. Full creative and operational accountability at the divisional level.
The sophistication of the organization didn't change the pattern. If anything, the stakes amplified it. The window of good decision-making narrowed the higher the pressure climbed.
PENDLETON WOOLEN MILLS
Portland, Oregon
Creative Director Womenswear · Consultant
Creative Director Womenswear — Consultancy
Engaged as Creative Director Womenswear on a consultancy basis. Left the contract early when my daughter's health demanded my full presence — a decision that clarified everything about what actually matters under sustained pressure.
Walking away from a contract before it ended was the most expensive and most important decision I made. It was also the one that led directly to this work.
My daughter became seriously unwell. For a long time, nobody could tell us why. What followed was years of a mystery illness — months of extreme fatigue, migraines, rashes, cognitive fog — that made it impossible for her to attend school normally, to keep pace with her peers, to be taken seriously by the teachers and doctors and friends who could see that she looked fine on the outside.
The invisible nature of her condition made it harder, not easier. She was suffering in ways that the people around her couldn't see — and therefore didn't fully believe. The emotional toll of wanting to excel and falling further behind every year. The exhaustion of having to explain what shouldn't need explaining. The particular difficulty of an autoimmune condition that disrupts the body quietly — physically, neurologically, emotionally — while presenting as normal from the outside.
She was eventually diagnosed with Celiac disease — an autoimmune condition with cascading effects across physical health, mental health, energy, and neurological function. The diagnosis gave us a framework. It didn't erase what the years of uncertainty had cost her, or what they had cost me.
I left my contract at Pendleton Woolen Mills before it ended. That decision cost me professionally and financially. But I was watching my daughter fall behind while trying to hold everything together — and I understood, with a clarity I hadn't had before, what it means to keep performing while your nervous system is running a continuous threat response underneath.
I had watched this pattern in leaders for twenty years. High-functioning on the outside. Biology running the show underneath. I just hadn't lived it so personally, so undeniably, until then.
The shift didn't come from a new strategy or a coaching program. It came from work that met the problem at the level where it actually lived — in the body, not the mind. What I experienced confirmed what I had suspected across two decades of watching brilliant people underperform under pressure: the nervous system is the operating system. Everything else runs on top of it.
That's why I do this work. Not because I studied it from a distance. Because I lived the cost of ignoring it — and found the way through.
Built from two decades of firsthand observation and grounded in peer-reviewed neuroscience, the BEACON Method™ is a structured, bottom-up approach to nervous system recalibration. It addresses performance at the biological layer — not the behavioral one — because that's where the problem actually lives.
Establish where the nervous system is currently operating. HRV, activation patterns, Window of Tolerance. Measure before intervening.
Bottom-up intervention through breath. Direct access to the autonomic nervous system — faster and cleaner than any top-down cognitive approach.
Rebuild the embodied experience of agency — actions producing results. This overrides the brainstem's default shutdown response.
Progressive, consistent practice that structurally rewires. Like the gym — one session produces results; the practice builds the infrastructure.
Scale coherence through the leadership layer until the 25% tipping point is reached. The leader's regulated state becomes the organization's operating environment.
Neuroplasticity-informed consolidation. New pathways form. Survival patterns weaken. The window of tolerance expands and holds — permanently, over time.
This work is grounded in peer-reviewed neuroscience,
clinical research, and structured methodology — not
intuition or belief. The credentials below represent the
formal training that scaffolds twenty years of lived
experience.
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Certified Pause Breathwork Facilitator — Methodology developed with PhD neuroscientist Andrea Freemyer. Grounded in polyvagal theory, somatic neuroscience, and trauma-informed practice.
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iPEC Certified Professional Coach (CPC) — International Coaching Federation member. Core Energy Coaching framework.
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PSYCH-K® Facilitator — Subconscious belief integration grounded in neuroscience and kinesiology.
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ICF Member — International Coaching Federation. Adherence to global standards for professional coaching practice.
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Nervous System Science — Applied study of polyvagal theory (Porges), somatic experiencing (Levine), Window of Toler
The Coherence Audit is a diagnostic that pinpoints precisely
where nervous system dysregulation is affecting your
leadership performance, decision quality, and team output.