About Me

            "No matter where you go, there you are."    --Anonymous--

If only I had seen this quote and knew what it meant decades ago, I might have turned my life around and where would I be? Well, I'll answer that with what my late aunt from Arkansas, on my mom's side, would say to me. "If a cow could s**t butter, you wouldn't have to churn it!" So much for rhetorical questions and deep thought. 

I took the struggles and issues of each of the hundreds of men, that I guided through my program in the prison setting, as seriously as I did for myself. I feel that's why they responded so positively to my work and said as much in the testimonials on this site. So, here's a little story of how I came from a life of emotional struggle to where I'm at in life and where I hope to get others to with the help of my program.

I left the teaching profession after close to 30 years of having an unusually diverse background of service to education. Over my first 16 years, I had teaching experiences with students at the elementary, junior-high, and high school levels in both the public and private setting. Many of these years were spent working with at-risk youth. Additionally, my nomadic-like career had taken me to rural, suburban, and urban environments. Even though my career in education was marked with instability, I never doubted my dedication to my students. However, I often questioned myself as to my remaining in the teaching profession when I felt, more often than not, the seemingly chronic burden of being unhappy with my life.

In 2005, I made a bold and desperate move, in an effort to redeem my life, to re-locate from my hometown area in Central California to the state of Washington in the Northwest. Initially, I had made a decision to make a career change of some kind and leave teaching behind. Well, that decision lasted about a week or so after getting settled. For strange reasons that I won't go into at this time, I ended up accepting an offer to be a community college instructor and my assignment was to teach in a Washington State Prison for men. Even though I lacked a Masters Degree, I was hired because they felt I would be an asset to the program because of my very diverse background with all the educational experiences that I had over the years. At that moment, I didn't know whether to laugh or be angry at the cruel irony at work. When I had decided to leave those first 16 years in education behind, I couldn't have thought, in any way imaginable, that I would ever be grateful for that frequently disruptive part of my life. But, I ended up finishing my career in education, for almost another 14 years, with a job that I was meant to do. I ended up helping men, of all ages and in very tense environments, with preparing to pass their GED and Stress/Anger Management classes. Additionally, I became an advisor/consultant to several hundred men over the years. I involved myself in their lives, so as to help them cope with their lives in prison and their family issues on the outside.

Consequently, my interactions with these men had an unintended effect on my own life. I was able to bring my life to a point of clarity and peace that I had never known before. Eventually, through hard work and "practicing what I preached" to these men in prison, I was able to recover my relationship with the "real me" that I always struggled to be and with my family that I thought I had lost.

For this reason, I decided to create a program that offers up my life experiences and knowledge to help those that have the very struggles that I had for decades.