Thoughts on Transformation
I’ve been coaching for twenty years — from kindergarten PE and NCAA soccer to 76-year-olds and #1 NFL draft picks. I’ve worked with just about every kind of human, goal, experience, and limitation.
Early on in my career one question kept me curious:
How do people become their best?
At first, that question lived in the world of sport & performance.
I explored skill, tactics, strength, conditioning, recovery — all the external levers that make athletes great.
That led me deeper into sport psychology and the role of mindset in leveraging those abilities.
Then life hit hard, and I learned what no textbook could teach me — the value of internal awareness, emotional regulation, and understanding the self.
As I transitioned from the world of sport into one-on-one coaching, my curiosity evolved too — from helping people perform at their best to helping them live at their fullest.
And with that, the question shifted again:
How do we live a full, meaningful life?
From Performance to Person
Most people who come to train with me want some version of the same thing:
They want to perform better, feel better, and look better.
They want to change, to grow, to transform. With the believe that this will improve the quality of their life.
The roadmaps to these destinations are well known and wide spread. Workouts, nutrition, recovery - with consistency.
But even with all the knowledge in the world, most still fall short.
Which lead me to start asking: What’s really standing in the way?
The answer became clear.
Themselves.
The path to every goal is littered with resistance. Some are external - family demands, the work environment - but most are internal.
They don’t need another training plan — they need to meet their internal resistance with curiosity and compassion, and still choose to act in alignment with the life they want to live.
They don’t need someone to hold them accountable — they need to learn to hold themselves accountable.
That’s the real work.
That’s self-leadership.
The Inner Reps
Transformation doesn’t come from more complexity — it comes from deeper simplicity.
You don’t need a new set-and-rep scheme, an infrared sauna, or the latest Garmin watch.
You need to get out of your own way long enough to step into who you’re meant to become.
Here’s the framework I’ve found to be true over and over again —
The Five Pillars of Transformation:
Awareness – Understand what’s holding you back internally and externally.
Ownership – Take full responsibility for where you are.
Clarity – Know who you’re becoming, what you want, and why it matters.
Curiosity – Meet resistance with openness instead of judgment.
Action – Align your behavior with your beliefs — consistently and courageously.
Because real transformation is an inside game.
Your external world shifts as a reflection of your internal state.
Doing flows from being.
The Coach’s Work
As a coach, I don’t like to just hand people programs — I want to walk beside them as they learn to lead themselves.
Not everyone is ready for the inner lifting, and that’s okay.
I meet them where they are, help them play the surface-level game until the pain of staying the same turns into the spark to go deeper.
Because true transformation isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about shedding who the world told you to be, dropping the limiting beliefs keeping you comfortable, and returning to who you were always meant to become.
That’s the work.
That’s the path.
And none of us walk it alone.