My work philosophy

Make a difference with one, and you can get two...

Origin Story: Coaching

I began my career in social work and counseling, working with homeless teens to start, then headfirst into reentry (formerly incarcerated teens reentering the community). I discovered some powerful frameworks at the time, applied them with every client’s permission, and we achieved some amazing results. Success was not having my face plastered all over the Sunday paper. It was research done by an outside firm that found that our program was reducing the recidivism rate by over 70%.

Wake Up Smiling

I am not a license therapist. I barely graduated high school (and dropped out of college 3 times). But I knew I could help people so I started Wake Up Smiling. Once this article came out, people came to see me for everything from gambling addiction, depression, anxiety and panic episodes, PTSD, drugs and alcohol, and on and on. When a psychologist, who happened to be a professor at the local university, came to ask what my secret was, I showed her some frameworks, and simply told her, “In the end, I just really care.”

Much of what I learned and applied in my coaching work, I learned from a variety of disciplines including religion, spirituality, business, literature, psychology, and philosophy. I realized that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, so I started scanning every book for frameworks and mental models that could be applied with powerful results.

These concepts include:

You’re already successful (and so is everyone else)
Everything’s made up
Life is supposed to be hard (and there’s a good reason for that)
BAN is the one thing that blocks all new success
There are 8 billion different worlds on this planet (so maybe learn to work together)
Life is all about relationships (who you are to you, to others, and to nature)
And so much more

I will be writing about all these topics soon, but my entire world changed when I entered the startup/scale-up universe.

From Coaching to Brand

Enter Typeform

I was working with reentry adults in California at the time. Our CEO tells me she just met with Zynga and Pandora, and that they said we should be using Typeform surveys for our participants. Wut?

Anyway, I go to their website, and see the following animated GIF:

What would you do?

A. Click

B. Go back to work

Well, I obviously clicked, and the rest is history.

I learned to be a better copywriter, product marketer, brand storyteller, presenter, strategist, team player, manager, leader, coach, and friend. Couldn’t ask for a better education. Came in as employee number 28, left after we went over 400, I believe. Crazy.

Got a crash course in startups. It was a wild 6.5 years of my life. Learned a lot, made some friends for life, and made Barcelona my second home.