My Path
I’ve been at this leadership thing a while.
I began my career as a counseling psychologist and psychotherapist. As a founding member of a counseling center in Amherst, Massachusetts, I worked with individuals and trained others to become professional therapists. That work eventually evolved into a leadership and human relations consulting firm I founded in Boston, where I worked with corporations, healthcare organizations, and educational systems.
From there, my path took an unexpected turn. I was asked to take the reins of a struggling multinational company in Western New York. I spent more than 25 years as its CEO, helping turn the company around, reshape its culture, and build it into a successful, world-class organization before eventually selling it in 2014.
Psychology and leadership proved to be a powerful combination. Each informed the other. My understanding of people shaped the way I led, and the experience of leading an organization deepened my understanding of people.
But there was a third thread running through my life—one that began much earlier and would ultimately become central to my understanding of leadership.
When I was 15, an older cousin who had spent several years in Japan introduced me to the wisdom teachings of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Something in those teachings spoke to me deeply. That early encounter began a lifelong exploration of the world’s spiritual and contemplative traditions and, over time, profoundly influenced both the way I lived and the way I led.
Then, in 2014, I was diagnosed with cancer.
Cancer has a way of clarifying things. It changed my relationship with time, with achievement, and ultimately with life itself. The sale of my company followed, and with it the end of a professional chapter that had defined much of my adult life.
What came next was something I hadn’t planned.
For nearly a decade, I lived a quiet and simple life. I spent more time in nature, more time in contemplation, and more time simply paying attention. I wasn’t trying to create another leadership model or figure out what came next professionally. I was learning a very different way to live my life.
And during those years, something was occurring beneath the surface.
The lessons of a lifetime—psychology, organizational leadership, spiritual wisdom, success, difficulty, relationships, loss, and the ordinary experience of being human—were quietly being reorganized. Ideas and experiences that had once seemed separate began revealing themselves as parts of a larger, intelligent whole.
This unique convergence of psychology, leadership, and spiritual wisdom now forms the foundation of my work with leaders. It is a synthesis of more than 50 years of personal and professional experience, grounded in a simple understanding:
Leadership begins within.
Before leadership becomes strategy, behavior, communication, or action, there is a source from which all of those things arise. The inner state of the leader shapes how we see, how we interpret what is happening, how we respond, how we relate to others, and the field we create around us.
Presence changes that source.
It allows us to meet complexity with greater clarity, pressure with greater steadiness, conflict with greater openness, and uncertainty with greater wisdom and courage. It changes not only how we lead, but the quality of what becomes possible around us.
This is the work I now call The Art of Presence.
It is the culmination of the path I have traveled—and the work to which I now devote this chapter of my life.
