For most of my life, I didn’t know I had a reading problem.
That may sound strange coming from someone who spent 20 years as a pastor, preached hundreds of sermons, and later ran several businesses. But it’s true. And the day I finally figured it out, everything changed — including how I coach today.
Let me back up.
The late bloomer
I started college as a late bloomer. My first two years were rough — I ended up on academic probation when I transferred to my next school. Nobody could quite explain why a kid who clearly wanted to learn couldn’t seem to keep up. I just knew that reading took me forever, and half the time I wasn’t sure I’d actually understood what I’d read.
It took several years to even name the problem: I had a genuine reading-and-comprehension difficulty. And it took several more years to find the answer.
That answer came in the form of a single book — How to Read a Book. It gave me a method for college-level reading and comprehension, and for the first time in my life I could move through books lickety-split and actually learn from them. Reading went from being my enemy to being genuinely fun. At my peak I was averaging two books a week, and I went on to teach that method to people of every age group.
The second discovery
About the time my reading problem got solved, I stumbled onto a second one: I also had a critical thinking problem.
Here’s what struck me — and honestly, what still burdens me. Critical thinking is something we all do, every day. But almost none of us were ever taught how it works. Most of us couldn’t explain our way out of a paper bag if someone asked us to define critical thinking, describe how it works, or say why it matters. And the reading problem — people’s inability to read well and comprehend what they read — is getting dramatically worse.
So these two gaps — reading and critical thinking — ran parallel in my life for years, and slowly they came together into one integrated set of tools. And those tools are exactly what I leaned on to work my way through some of the hardest chapters of my life.
Where the road got hard
I won’t pretend those chapters were small. After 25 years of marriage, I went through a painful divorce. In my 50s I walked through a wild season of dating again, and alongside it a real crisis — self-doubt, self-hatred, depression, anxiety, and even homelessness. It took years to come back to regular life.
I’m grateful — deeply grateful — for the counseling I received during that time. I don’t want to minimize how hard those years were. But I also wouldn’t trade them. They were years of learning, growing, and maturing in ways comfort never could have produced. That season is also when I lost more than 200 pounds, slowly, without a major diet. The healing was spiritual and physical all at once.
Later came more transitions — finding my footing again, navigating the reality that some of the roles I’d held for years weren’t coming back, partly because of my age. Then, since COVID, more health challenges: balance issues, type 2 diabetes, and the daily work of pivoting well when pivoting isn’t easy.
Every one of those seasons I worked through with the same two tools I’d finally learned: read well, think critically. They didn’t just help me survive. They helped me learn what God was actually doing in the middle of it.
Why I coach this way
That’s why critical thinking and reading aren’t side notes in my coaching — they’re woven into how I work.
I use what I call a book-based teaching approach. For each lesson or coaching focus, I anchor the conversation in what I believe is the best book on that topic — whether it’s communication, identity, purpose, discovering your passions, overcoming what’s weighing you down, or building financial literacy. I summarize that book into its three main points and help the client get their arms around the most significant writing on the subject, so they’re not just getting my opinion. They’re getting the best of what’s out there, made accessible.
The whole approach is shaped by a book that changed how I teach: Teaching to Change Lives. Its central conviction is that the goal of teaching is transformation — that the people we’re teaching actually grow, progress, and have their lives changed for the better. And the way you get there is by teaching around people and their uniqueness, including how they learn.
We don’t all learn the same way. For some it’s auditory — they need to hear it taught. For others it’s visual — if you’re not drawing a picture, they’re not connecting. For some, humor is what opens the door. For others it’s hands-on learning, or writing things down on Post-it notes. My job is to find which of those works for you, and to give you tools that lead to ongoing success — not just a good session, but real movement toward whatever your next adventure is.
The invitation
If you’ve ever felt like you’re playing catch-up — like everyone else got the instruction manual for reading, thinking, and navigating life and you didn’t — you’re not behind. You were never taught. And that’s fixable.
That’s the work I do. Not just coaching you through a decision, but equipping you with the lifelong tools to read well, think clearly, and keep moving forward long after our sessions end.
Let’s find your true north — together.