my professions
I’ve worked in user experience design for 12 years, exercising professional grade empathy in order to design optimal paths through complexity.
Throughout my life, I have followed a variety of career paths, including roadie, motorcycle messenger, and user experience designer. All of my professional experiences have centered around people moving through life more smoothly: whether it’s a well designed user interface, a flawlessly engineered band performance, or a perfectly executed delivery route, I have again and again found myself drawn towards the optimization of the human experience.
Some of the most rewarding moments in my various careers have come while managing and mentoring those who worked under and alongside me. My absolute favorite people to teach are beginners because of the wide-open possibilities.
As a trans nonbinary person, some of my favorite reaches are for people who are leery of woo-woo, or cisgender people who are open and curious. I love working with men and masculine people. I LOVE working in boundary conditions, which is where evolution happens.
My facilitator training with Holistic Resistance taught me that discussion, learning, and connection are the way to dismantle racial, gender, and other disparities and develop lifelong relationships.
Two elements of my practice are to slow it down and to ask questions. We rarely find new answers if we try to stay in what we know, and racing to a solution skips over all of the juicy discoveries along the wandering way.
A list of my trainings is here
my focus
I find myself returning again and again to the power of storytelling. The stories we tell ourselves and one another shape us and guide us through our lives, for good or for ill. Journeys - physical, emotional, and spiritual - are a powerful and ancient practice and metaphor that can give shape to the stories we tell ourselves. When our obstacles become parts of our journey, we can see them as teachers, companions, and even allies.
In my own life I have journeyed through addiction, abuse, and poverty, and these experiences have given me empathy for others from a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences. If you are struggling to transcend difficult things in your past or roadblocks in your present, I can help you turn your eye toward the future and find a path towards what calls to you most.
my journeys
I am a lifelong traveler, starting from my first solitary trip to the Netherlands, England, and Scotland when I was nineteen years old. Highlights including driving 10,000 miles across Europe and along the Silk Road through the Middle East, and Asia as team captain on the 2016 Mongol Rally, followed by an additional driving jaunt to the Arctic Circle.
Recently, I traveled for 16 months, going over 100,000 miles through 18 countries across three continents. I attended trainings and workshops, getting certified in things as varied as wilderness first responder training to de-armouring.
With seven years of training as a practitioner of Northern European earth-based, I am comfortable in both practical and spiritual realms and love to weave both into a holistic experience. During my magical training, I found people in my life increasingly coming to me for advice, and felt myself drawn to and rewarded by helping them discover and move towards their life dreams.
collaboration
I am interested in meeting and connecting with people who are interested in collaborating in areas including:
Anti-racism and pro-transgender work
Storytelling as a transformational tool for individuals and organizations
Living in community and the development of more resilient social networks in living spaces
Pragmatic approaches to social change
If you are interested, contact me.
networking
Over decades of professional work and world travel, I have developed a diverse and far-flung network. If you are looking to meet someone with a particular knowledge base, skill-set, or set of relationships, I may be able to connect you. Contact me to discuss how this might be approached as a conversation or as part of some larger coaching work.
the land that i’m on
I am currently residing on Coast Salish, Stillaguamish, Duwamish, Suquamish lands. Find the lands you’re on at native-land.ca
also, it me
