About

Background

After graduating from Brown University in 1980, I moved to N.Y.C. and began a doctoral program in Environmental Medicine at NYU. A couple of years into the program, I also began training at the N.Y. Training Institute for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. While the doctoral work was rewarding in some ways, I found NLP absolutely fascinating, and after four years of training in that, I began as an NLP therapist at the Institute. I spent a few more years with a foot in both worlds, but I knew where my heart lay. In 1990 I made a decision and left for Seattle to start a counseling practice.

In that same year I arrived in the Northwest, I attended a silent retreat for meditation for the first time. I found that it took what I already knew and sent me on a thrilling and limitless journey. I’ve spent much of my spare time doing this ever since, so it inevitably shapes how I think about change and its purpose.

At the beginning of 2023, after turning 65, and getting used to some different ways of working due to Covid, I began a plan for shifting my work. Over the rest of that year, I wrapped up with clients needing serious ongoing counseling, and only took on new clients who would benefit from some simple coaching. As of January 2024, I retired my counseling license and will carrying on solely with coaching. If someone comes to see me who needs the professional services of a counselor or psychologist, I can help find a suitable referral.

Coaching Approach

Resources

Each person has all the requisite resources, or the building blocks of those resources, to meet every life challenge. They may be weakened, traumatized, misplaced or forgotten, but they’re there and can be reclaimed for the task at hand.

Compassion

Besides practically and objectively looking at the issues at hand, and developing the skills to understand those issues, the most important quality which will ease all issues, is compassion. Of all our innate resources, compassion for ourselves and others will help to get us unstuck quicker, more gracefully, and more completely than any other.

Control

While most things are outside our control and many unfortunate things may occur, our happiness can ultimately only be found within, and is in direct proportion to how much responsibility we take for our experience.

Value

Each person’s life and story has intrinsic value, and the world is less well off when that value is in any way diminished.

Choices

We are often faced with a mutually exclusive choice between being right and being happy. Choose wisely.

Relationships

Relationships are life’s core curriculum, since they teach us the most about ourselves and about love. So however difficult they may be, we will always be amply rewarded for our good faith efforts.

Perspective

However strangely we, or others, may behave, there is a vantage point from which the apparent madness makes sense. Finding that perspective may be difficult, but it is also helps compassion arise.

Collaboration

My approach is collaborative rather than prescriptive. The most effective solutions are found within, not prescribed from without.

Homework

A therapy session is a small part of one day. How one uses each session, how one uses the rest of one’s days, will determine one’s progress.