What I Do Isn’t for an Industry. It’s for Humans

For the last few months, I’ve been stripping things down. Not optimizing. Not rebranding. Not “positioning.” Stripping. Taking things apart to see what’s actually load-bearing and what’s just noise.

That process is uncomfortable if you’re honest. It means admitting where you drifted. Where you bent. Where you started responding to what people thought you should be doing instead of what you actually do well.

There was a stretch there, a good year or two, where I chased. Not money, not status. Approval. Clarity-by-proxy. Listening a little too closely to what the market said it wanted, and slowly shape-shifting to meet it.

I learned a lot in that time. I worked with a wide range of people. Different problems. Different personalities. Different levels of seriousness. That part mattered. You don’t sharpen judgment in isolation.

But there was no consistency.
And worse, there was no centre.

For a while, I thought what I needed was consistency in the traditional sense. A tighter niche. A clearer industry lane. Athletes only. Or executives only. Or parents. Or recovery. Something clean. Something easy to explain.

That was the mistake.

What I do is not industry-focused. It’s human-focused.

Every person I work with is dealing with the same raw materials, just dressed differently. High-level athletes. Single dads. Kids. Parents. CEOs. Entrepreneurs. Different environments, same internal mechanics.

Everybody has emotion.
Everybody has feelings.
Everybody is carrying load they don’t fully understand.
Everybody lacks awareness at times.
Everybody has moments where awareness outpaces capacity and turns into anxiety, frustration, or paralysis.

The surface story changes. The system underneath doesn’t.

That’s where I lost the centre for a while. I started adjusting the work to fit categories instead of holding steady to the human architecture underneath it. When you do that long enough, you don’t break. You blur.

I found myself almost becoming what people thought they needed instead of staying anchored to who I am and how I actually work. That’s a quiet kind of failure. Not dramatic. Just erosive. You don’t fall apart. You thin out.

So I stopped.

The last three months have been about honesty. Real honesty. Not the Instagram version. The kind where you ask uncomfortable questions and don’t rush to answer them.

What do I actually do
Who do I do it for
Who benefits from this work and who doesn’t, no matter how good my intentions are

That’s where EQ-OS came from. Not as a product. As a language. A way to explain what I’ve been doing intuitively for years without dressing it up as something it’s not.

Awareness.
Capacity.
Load.
Systems.
Behaviour under pressure.

No theatrics. No borrowed certainty. Just structure.

Why Applied Performance Psychology

At some point, I had to be honest about the title too.

“Performance coach” started to feel thin. Not wrong. Incomplete.

It implies tactics. Tools. Techniques. Inputs and outputs. And yes, I use those. Everyone does.

But what I’ve been doing for years isn’t coaching around performance. It’s diagnosing and rebuilding the systems underneath it.

That’s why the title changed to Applied Performance Psychology Coach.

Not because it sounds smarter.
Because it’s more accurate.

Psychology stops being theory when it’s applied properly. It becomes pattern recognition. Behaviour under load. Decision-making when nervous systems are taxed. Identity under pressure. What people do when no one is watching, and something is on the line.

I’m in school because I wanted language and structure for what I was already seeing. I wanted to tighten my thinking, not outsource it. Research doesn’t replace experience, but it sharpens it. It separates what feels helpful from what actually changes behaviour.

And the more I study, the clearer something becomes.

Every space that touches “mental performance” is flooded with the same tools.

Breathing.
Visualization.
Self-talk.

They’re everywhere. Sport. Business. Recovery. Parenting. Leadership.

Here’s the part people don’t like hearing.

They all work.
They’re all useful.
They’re all valid.

They’re just layered in the wrong place.

In a world already drowning in noise, they become more things to do. More reminders. More protocols. More work for the sake of work. For people with limited capacity, that isn’t regulation. It’s overload disguised as improvement.

Try visualizing when you’re emotionally flooded.
Try reframing self-talk when your nervous system is already maxed.
Try breathwork when you’re exhausted, resentful, and stretched thin.

It’s very hard to use tools when you don’t have the capacity to hold them.

That’s the miss.

Most mental performance systems start at the top. I start underneath.

That’s what EQ-OS actually is.

It’s not mindset.
It’s not motivation.
It’s not positivity.

It’s an operating system.

Awareness without capacity creates anxiety.
Capacity without awareness creates recklessness.
Load without structure creates breakdown.

EQ-OS looks at how those elements interact in real life, under pressure, over time. It’s about building a system that can actually run, not stacking hacks onto something that’s already overheating.

The Unbecoming

Writing the book forced this clarity. You can’t fake coherence across hundreds of pages. The gaps show up fast. Writing exposed where I was bloated, unclear, or holding onto ideas that no longer earned their keep.

That’s where the unbecoming started.

Mentally.
Emotionally.
Physically.
Spiritually.

I had to look at myself like a corporation that wasn’t working.

Lay people off.
Cut departments.
Kill legacy systems.
Audit the budget.
Stop funding initiatives that sounded good but didn’t produce results.

It felt less like self-discovery and more like a hostile takeover. Which, honestly, is pretty accurate. I took over a business that had grown inefficient, reactive, and distracted.

A lot of that came from reading Jung, sitting with uncomfortable ideas longer than I wanted to, and a growing obsession with Buddhism that has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with discipline and presence.

My 3 a.m. workouts aren’t about toughness. They’re about silence. No noise. No inputs. Just effort, breath, and friction. One of the few times the world isn’t asking for anything.

Family anchors everything. Being present isn’t a slogan. It’s work. Especially when you’re tired. Especially when you’re distracted. Especially when your phone is right there.

I stopped tracking screen time and started tracking what I look at when I pick it up.

That’s the real audit.

I dare you to look.
It’s not fun.

What you reach for tells you what you’re avoiding. What you consume tells you what state you’re in. If you’re honest enough to not lie to yourself about it, behaviour changes fast.

And that’s the through-line in all of this.

Precision.
Intention.
Truth.

In how I speak.
In how I write.
In how I listen.
In how I coach.

Not perfection. Not virtue signalling. Just not lying. Not to other people. Not to myself.

Baseball season is coming, and that always sharpens things for me. Baseball doesn’t care about your brand. It doesn’t care how articulate you are about your feelings. It exposes what’s real, fast.

You can’t fake readiness.
You can’t outsource discipline.
You can’t talk your way out of a bad swing decision.

That’s the lens I live through.

Right now, there’s clarity in my life that hasn’t been there in a while. Clarity in how I train. Clarity in how I eat. Clarity in how I work. And clarity in what I won’t do anymore.

I’m done sanding edges off the truth to keep people comfortable. The people I work best with don’t need comfort. They need precision. They need someone willing to be exact, detailed, and occasionally unpopular.

This work is intentional.
It’s specific.
It’s not for everyone.

And that’s the point.

If you’re looking for motivation, reassurance, or someone to validate the story you already like telling yourself, I’m not your guy.

If you want to understand how your patterns actually work, where your capacity leaks, why certain situations keep breaking you down, and what has to change structurally, then we can talk.

This is me. Fully aligned.
No chasing.
No disguises.
Just the work, done properly.

Baseball season’s almost here.
And I’m ready.