The Practice

One life, looked at as a single system.

Most of what is offered as advice in adjacent fields treats a person in pieces — a coach for the body, another for the mind, a third for nutrition, a fourth for performance, often a fifth for the inner life and a sixth for the calendar. Each is excellent in its own sphere; none of them is responsible for the seam between the spheres. The seams are where most of life is decided.

My approach begins from the opposite premise. The body, the mind, the moral life, the relationships, the shape of an ordinary day — all of it is one system, and the only useful question is how that system actually behaves.

Who this practice is for

The practice is built for world builders — people at the centre of unusually large lives, whose private wellbeing sets the conditions for many others they will never meet. The leverage of the practice is largest exactly here. One coherent life at the centre of a system tends to produce many coherent lives downstream of it. It is also, incidentally, the place where most ordinary advice has stopped landing — usually a decade or so before anyone is willing to admit it.

The disciplines underneath the practice

Decades of study and practice have given me a deep fluency in applied kinesiology, the philosophy and psychology of human behaviour, the ethics and inner architecture of decision-making, the pursuit of high performance in sport and cognition, nutrition, supplementation, and the genetic and biochemical signals beneath the surface of how a person feels. These are not separate offerings. They are facets of a single way of attending to a life. I am no longer able to tell, with much precision, where one ends and the next begins. They have been folding into each other for years.

Coherence mapping

What I am doing, in technical terms, is a kind of coherence mapping. The body, the chemistry, the patterns of thought, the moral and philosophical orientation, the relationships at home, the architecture of the world they have built — all of it traced as one connected map, and examined for the places where the pieces are pulling against each other. Most of what wears a life down is not a problem in any one domain. It is incoherence between domains. The chemistry says rest, the calendar says go, the philosophy says be of service, the nervous system says hide. None of them is wrong. They have, however, stopped speaking to one another.

Once the map is clear, what follows becomes precise: find the smallest adjustment that brings the system back into alignment with itself, and let the rest follow. The map is rarely surprising in its parts — people usually sense where something is off. What I bring is the overview — the whole scope and structure of a life, taken in at once. A life has a shape that shows itself only from that vantage: every part, and the way each one is bearing on the others.

The enterprise as a system

Much of what I attend to reaches well beyond the person. The people I work with have built things — companies, often several at once, each with its own people and markets and pressures. A business at that scale is a living system in its own right: it has a state, a coherence or an incoherence, a way of moving with itself or against itself. It has a temperature, a tempo, a colour — felt before it is named. And it is never quite separable from the person at its centre. The founder’s state runs through all of it, and the state of the business returns to the founder.

What I read is how the whole holds together. Where the enterprise is quietly pulling against itself. Where one venture is draining another. Where the founder’s attention is going, and what it is costing. It is the same coherence mapping I bring to a life, turned toward the larger body that a life has built.

The principle of leverage

The most expensive and exhausting solutions are usually not the best ones. The best ones are small, precise, and almost invisible from the outside — and they make a great deal of the rest of the life unnecessary. The expensive and exhausting solutions tend to look better in the meantime. They are easier to defend at dinner.

The shift, when it lands, is rarely dramatic. Sleep deepens. Decisions cost less. The body that used to insist on being managed simply stops insisting. Time opens up. It is the kind of progress that does not photograph well, which is, in part, why it lands.

What has been possible

The people I have worked with have done remarkable things while we have known each other. They have held their families close and their marriages steady through seasons that would strain either. They have carried demanding careers across years of public scrutiny and the kind of recognition that tends to unbalance a person, and stayed themselves inside it. They have remade their bodies and their health in ways they had been told were behind them.

My part is a quiet one: to keep the whole picture coherent, to hold the ground steady underneath, and to be there, closely and for the long arc, while they do what is theirs to do.

The shape of an engagement

A retainer relationship, ongoing rather than episodic. Every domain is in scope — physical, cognitive, nutritional, philosophical, relational, and the enterprises that depend on the person who built them. We move at the pace of the life and what matters in it. I am close enough to be useful in real time, and far enough away to keep the long view. In practice, this means we talk often — not always for long, and not always about something formal. Some weeks I hear from you once. Some weeks we trade a dozen messages about something that started as “a small thing.” Both are correct. Some of the most useful moments happen in the question someone almost did not bother to ask.

Most of what I do is invisible. The result is a life that runs more cleanly and with less effort. The most reliable sign that the practice is taking is that there is less of it to do.

Availability

I take very few clients at a time, and only by introduction from someone already in the practice. There is currently room for one or two more. If someone who knows the practice has sent you here, the conversation is already half-begun.