My purpose and my hope are the same. That anyone who comes into contact with me, or with my work, will feel at least a little less alone. Less alone in who they are, what they're feeling, what they're not feeling, what they've done, and what they didn't do.

Coupled with that is the belief that new behaviors are not created through new insights. They are created through new experiences.

Understanding the problem is rarely enough to change it. But… we have never been asked to be more performative than we are right now, which means it has never been harder to have an honest experience of yourself. The meeting that is somehow also an audition. The pitch that is somehow also a screen test. The Zoom that is somehow also a stage. Most people are good at what they do and quietly exhausted by the version of themselves they run while doing it. The cost is trust. Trust does not arrive from polish. It arrives from presence.

That performance, the managed version of you that gets rewarded and never quite feels like you, does not only cost you trust. It costs you time. Every year you spend running the act is a year the real person does not get to flower. The act is what delays the bloom. Dropping it is how you finally bloom.

We cannot 'insight' our way into presence. We must experience our way into it. Drop the Act™ is the body of work built on that belief. One methodology, lived in different rooms.

The Communication Dynamics Lab™ is the rehearsal room. Athletes have the practice field. Actors have the rehearsal studio. Professionals have the Lab, a psychologically safe room to practice the highest-stakes thing they do, which is talking to other human beings. Full-day labs and ongoing labs that turn one breakthrough day into a monthly practice, for teams who want confident, clear, and compelling communicators in front of clients, on stage, and on Zoom. Applied psychology and conservatory training, delivered as experience, not theory. The Lab has run for Red Hat, Soho House, and Blockchain Capital.

SoHo Creative Studio is the camera room. For law firms, financial advisors, and consultancies, the website is the first room their next client walks into. SoHo is the trust-building video system. We handle the recording, the production, and the publishing. The professionals show up and share what they know. More clients. Better fits. Shorter sales cycles.

The keynote is the presentation, Drop the Act: The Power of Presence in a Performative World, for conferences, leadership offsites, and executive education. And the deepest version lives in a fourth room, my private therapy practice, where the act can come all the way down, because the room is sealed by confidentiality.

How I got here…

I was a U.S. Navy Rescue Swimmer, where I learned that staying present under pressure is not a personality trait but a skill you can train. I am a conservatory-trained actor with an MFA in acting from Rutgers University, where I learned that the body, not the script, is where the truth lives. I am a portrait photographer with work in The New York Times and on Comedy Central, where I learned that no one can be photographed honestly until they feel safe. I spent a decade producing the CIO Strategy Exchange, the off-the-record community of Fortune 70 Chief Information Officers, where I watched what happens when powerful people finally stop posturing. I served as a Communications Professor at the University of New Hampshire Paul College of Business. And I am currently completing a second Master's in Applied Psychology at Northwestern.