MY WORK IN 20 SECONDS 

What stresses you out most? It’s probably important to you. 

     Most people don’t realize that their stress responses are signals of importance from their unconscious processing of reality. What stresses you out most? It’s probably important to you, and if you’re avoiding it, the stress will get stronger and STRONGER. Sometimes it gets so strong it’s paralyzing. Or you spend your whole live putting out urgent fires, never tapping into the power of your real stresses – what you really care about. 

I help people like you use the energy inherent in your stress to get what’s most important to you done in a way that starts to feel effortless.

At this point “distress” ⇨ “eustress” (excitement, inspiration, aliveness), and this shift transforms your experience of life, allowing you to start waking up clear, inspired, and grateful. 

COACHING

Please – for yourself and the world – run as fast toward what you want as you (safely) can.

Consider that the only thing that keeps you from achieving your dreams is staying confused about what you truly desire.

There are many reasons why staying in confusion is safer. For one, society validates certain things – so by default we’re programmed to want those things. Second, even deeper than cultural conditioning is your childhood experience, there were likely things that if you did them, you received praise and validation, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. You may have also been guilted, shamed, or in some cases even physically attacked if you didn’t do what you “should” do – by family, peers, teachers… so the idea of getting clear on and owning your deepest desires often (not always) involves facing deeply wired “danger” responses.

Usually, these are just emotions(!) – not real dangers – but I’ll be there with you to help you discern the difference. And if there IS a danger, we’ll be glad we carefully felt through them rather than suppressing the danger response and recklessly proceeding (something people try, when desperate). Also, when you suppress any emotions, you suppress all emotions – so you just can’t enjoy life when you’re tuning your feelings out. With feelings, it’s all or nothing! 

Your body knows what feels good to it and what doesn’t, though your protective response, wired during your childhood, was designed to serve you when you were in the care and dependent upon others – like parents, teachers, etc. for survival.

Now that you’re a free, independent adult… it may be a bit overprotective, causing you to hesitate when you want to run excitedly toward an opportunity, distract yourself when you want to focus, say “no” when you want to say “yes,” or say “yes” when you want to say “no.” I’ll help you rebuild this connection with yourself through focusing on clarifying your most deepest and essential desires. The rest falls into place when there’s a good “reason” to face the danger response – but if you don’t have a “why,” you will most likely default to semi-pleasurable distraction than face a danger response “for no reason.”

To offer some structure, you can consider that we’ll work together on three key “intelligences” that combine to form the world that you experience, the world that gives you your actions. These intelligences are,

Mental Intelligence– your ability to put your attention on what you want and choose your perspective on a situation.

Emotional Intelligence– having access to a full spectrum of emotions and your ability to be aware of and not be shaken by emotions.

Action Intelligence– your capacity to choose, to say “yes” to what you want and say “no” to what you don’t want.

As you allow yourself to want and you free yourself from confining beliefs, the creative force that sits within you ignites and you find a sense of being you right now that inspires you and launches you into making your vision a reality.

MEET ERIC

I had an epiphany of sorts in 2009 after losing a substantial amount of money in the stock market. 

     From the depths of confusion and numbed regret, in one monumental moment involving a gingerbread cookie and misty Seattle weather, I had an experience of complete joy. This joy both didn’t make sense (since I had just lost a lot of money) and had me start to question my obvious life path of finance and trading.

I quit trading three months later having lost the motivation I had to make money, which I had used as an emblem of my worth. I transitioned to understanding how people transform, but unwittingly changed the emblem of my worth from money to wisdom. For the next two years I studied the transformation process diligently, attending more than 20 multi-day retreats and seminars, reading hundreds of books and book summaries, giving a TEDx talk, and traveling to over 30 cities. Throughout, I did my best to appear wise.

In 2011, I wound up in Powell River, BC, Canada where I lived with and developed under an emotional intelligence and mindfulness teacher for six months. It was with this mentor that I started to realize the flaw in my motivation. I was still seeking to make up for a deeply rooted sense of lack. A sense that I wasn’t attractive, good, or worthy. I realized that these insecurities continued to drive my motivation, even though the subject matter of the work I was doing was quite different.

When I landed back in the States this old, insecurity-driven motivation crumbled and I did virtually nothing for many weeks. The motivation I had run on for the majority of my life had gone, and left a void in its place. I didn’t know how to engage life if I wasn’t trying to get somewhere or win someone’s affection or approval, so I did nothing.

Gradually and with much frustration (mostly from trying to force myself back into the old motivations), I found that there were little things that I enjoyed. I really did enjoy exploring the transformation process, and I really loved the connection and presence I felt when giving my full attention to understanding the reality experienced by another person in a coaching conversation. Eventually I learned to do things because I enjoyed them, rather than to manipulate my environment into giving me praise, and this changed everything. A sense of freedom set in, and the ongoing question of if I was good enough had been laid to rest. I was not good for what I had achieved, no, I got my feeling of good from how it felt to be with myself in my own skin, with the choices I make and the fears I acted in spite of. Finally, life started to feel like the blank canvas from which to create that I remembered as a child, the space where I did things because I was curious and wanted to without the fear of looking bad or being misunderstood.

Over the last 12 years, I’ve helped hundreds of people with coaching, and thousands more from 64 countries with my courses. 

I now live in Los Gatos, CA, I’m a dad to a 3 year old girl and husband to a surgeon. Right now I love mapping the laws of the universe onto my work (ask me about how thermodynamics and emotions map to each other!), learning to do hand stands, and working on muscle-ups (for fun). I spend a lot of time walking (including when I’m coaching), enjoy volleyball and ping pong, and recently picked up pickleball.