I spent 15 years helping the world's biggest companies tell their story. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped living mine.

I grew up outside in the forests and hollows of upstate New York, then built a career almost entirely indoors, in Atlanta, DC, and San Francisco. My path ran through Cox Enterprises, Hilton, and Google, working on brand, reputation, and the realities underneath them. The lesson I kept seeing, and living: stories aren't just messaging. They're the meaning we make under pressure, shaped by incentives and attention, inside an organization and inside a person. Sometimes we cling to them because they help us feel safe, connected, and certain about what to do next.

For most of that decade, wilderness was something I visited on weekends. A reset button. A place to blow off steam. Not something I belonged to day to day. The work lived in my head and on my screen. The mountains lived in a different compartment.

Eventually I left Google to co-found Storyline. We do research and narrative strategy for organizations like Google and YouTube, often where product, policy, and public perception collide. It's work built around listening closely, getting underneath the performed answer, and naming what's true enough to act on. I still lead the company as co-founder and COO.

From the outside, my life looked solid. Meaningful work. Responsibility. Forward motion. But over time I started noticing a gap between the life I was building and the life I was inhabiting. I was spending my days inside other people's priorities, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd been alone long enough to hear my own.

Then COVID hit. In the early weeks of a global lockdown, the world got quiet enough for me to hear what I'd been outrunning. Without the usual noise and momentum, the question I'd been avoiding showed up clearly: what am I doing all of this for?

That shift didn't stay abstract. It changed our life. Molly and I left San Francisco for Utah, and eventually made our home in the mountains at 7,500 feet near Park City. It wasn't an escape plan. It was a decision to stop treating the outdoors like a weekend accessory and start building a life that actually included it.

The move sent me back to something I'd known as a kid and paved over as an adult: the natural world isn't a backdrop. It's the thing itself. The rest is infrastructure.

I trained at the Earth Based Institute as a nature-connected coach, and I'm working toward my ICF PCC credential. Not because I want more letters next to my name, but because I care about craft. I care about rigor. I care about people leaving with something real.

Now I hold both. I lead a business inside the system, and I work with people who can feel the same gap I felt — people ready to reclaim attention, clarity, and a direction that's actually theirs. I'm not selling a fantasy of quitting your job and moving to the woods. I don't have a formula and I'm not pretending to have it all figured out. I still have the job. I still check Slack. I still care about building something meaningful. What changed is that I stopped treating the rest of life like an afterthought — and started trusting that the right questions, asked in the right places with the right people, move you toward something true.

I live in the Wasatch Range near Park City, Utah, with my partner Molly. Our dog Brady was a huge part of our life here, and we miss him. I'm still figuring out what it looks like to hold both worlds well — deeper work in wild places, harder questions inside the business, and the ongoing project of practicing what I'm preaching. Community helps. Conversation helps. Having people around who ask the real questions and sit with the answers. Sometimes the change is dramatic. More often it's simpler: disconnect long enough to tune in, then come back a little more clear.