Why I Created the Human Capability Project

I didn’t set out to create the Human Capability Project.

I was trying to understand a question that had followed me through athletics, coaching, sales, personal development, profound personal challenges and years of inner exploration:

Why can we possess extraordinary capabilities—and still struggle to access them when we need them most?

I had seen it in athletes who performed freely in practice but tightened under pressure. I had seen it in salespeople who knew exactly what to do but could not consistently do it in the moments that mattered. And eventually, I experienced it in my own life.

My abilities had not disappeared.

My access to them had changed.

Understanding what influences that access—and learning how to affect it deliberately—became the work of my life.

Long before I had the language to describe the Human Capability Project, I was drawn to helping people recognize and develop what was already within them.

Growing up, I participated in a variety of team sports and was often looked to for leadership. After high school, I became an assistant coach for my former high school hockey team.

What stayed with me most was the excitement of watching players apply something we had taught them—and then seeing their confidence, performance and understanding begin to grow.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but that experience revealed something fundamental about who I was.

I loved coaching.

I loved teaching.

And I loved those moments when someone gained greater access to a capability they already possessed.

In my late twenties, I became interested in entrepreneurship while working in my first sales position, selling radio advertising in my hometown.

I knew many of the local business owners, so I was able to make a living.

But two exceptional salespeople in the office were earning roughly twice what I was earning, and watching them made me want to understand what separated their performance from mine.

Around that time, I immersed myself in personal development and positive-thinking material. I read, listened, attended events and deliberately surrounded myself with positive people.

I loved what I was learning—but knowing more wasn’t producing better results.

That began to change when I attended an NLP-based communication and sales training led by Jay Sargeant.

The training did more than give me additional information. It changed what I could access while I was actually engaged in a conversation—my confidence, awareness, flexibility and ability to communicate.

Within a month, I surpassed my previous best sales performance.

Soon afterward, I was competing at the top of the board with the two salespeople who had initially inspired me to improve.

My manager and coworkers began asking what I was doing differently, and before long, I was teaching many of those communication strategies to other salespeople.

That experience gave me my first clear understanding of something that would eventually become central to the Human Capability Project:

Possessing knowledge and being able to access it when it matters are not the same thing.

For years, I continued using the communication and personal-development strategies I had learned.

I applied them in sales, entrepreneurship, leadership and coaching.

I also continued teaching them to others.

But around 2006, a personal self-evaluation forced me to confront something I could no longer ignore.

There were areas of my life that had not been working for quite some time.

I had accumulated years of knowledge about personal growth and positive thinking.

Yet that knowledge had not protected me from becoming disconnected from many of the capabilities I knew I possessed.

Between 2008 and 2011, much of the life I had known began to collapse.

I spent nearly two years in self-imposed solitude, trying to understand what had happened and searching for a way forward.

My intelligence had not disappeared.

My creativity had not disappeared.

My ability to communicate, lead and make good decisions had not disappeared.

But my access to those capabilities had changed.

At the time, I did not have the language to explain what I was experiencing.

Looking back, I can see that this period gave me the question that would eventually shape the Human Capability Project:

What influences how consistently we can access the capabilities we already possess?

My search for answers led me beyond the personal-development ideas I had studied for years.

I began exploring the work of teachers including Dr. Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle and Dr. Michael Beckwith.

I also began learning about meditation, consciousness and the principles commonly associated with the Law of Attraction.

At first, much of it felt a little airy-fairy to me.

I had no formal background in spirituality, and I wasn’t sure where any of it was leading.

But I noticed something important.

When I practiced meditation, I felt different.

I became calmer.

My awareness expanded.

And I began experiencing moments when I felt more connected to myself and more receptive to possibilities I might otherwise have missed.

Meditation helped me observe my internal state.

My earlier work with NLP had taught me that internal states could also be deliberately influenced.

I began bringing those ideas together.

I experimented with breath, repetition, focused attention, visualization, sound and the deliberate experience of specific emotions.

Instead of waiting for something outside of me to create love, appreciation, joy, abundance, calm or confidence, I began practicing access to those emotions intentionally.

I did not yet call it emotional rehearsal.

But I was beginning to understand that I was always rehearsing an emotional state—either by design or by default.

And whatever I rehearsed most consistently was gradually becoming the emotional baseline I returned to throughout my day.

Over time, those experiments became a consistent morning practice.

I began deliberately accessing expansive emotions such as love, appreciation, joy and abundance.

I would then move into stabilizing emotions such as calm, confidence, focus and emotional stability.

The purpose was not to escape reality or pretend that challenges did not exist.

It was to influence the state from which I would meet those challenges before the pressures of the day arrived.

As the practice became more consistent, I noticed that I was responding to life differently.

I was more aware of my thoughts and emotional momentum.

I noticed possibilities and connections that I might previously have overlooked.

And when something did disrupt my state, I found it easier to recognize what was happening and return to the baseline I had rehearsed.

In 2018, a friend named Kevin asked what I believed was responsible for the growth he had observed in me.

I explained how I had combined elements of NLP, meditation, focused attention and emotional practice into something I was using every morning.

After hearing my description, he said:

“When you’re ready to teach that, let us know—because that sounds powerful.”

That conversation helped me recognize that the practice I had developed for myself might also help other people.

Over the years, I continued refining it through personal use, teaching and observation.

That evolving practice eventually became Morning Reset—a structured daily experience designed to help people get out in front of their day emotionally and cultivate more consistent access to the capabilities they already possess.

For approximately nine years, my working life placed me face-to-face with people from an extraordinary range of backgrounds.

During four of those years, I completed over 14,000 rides as a Lyft driver.

Between rides, I spent hundreds of hours listening almost exclusively to Abraham-Hicks videos on YouTube.

It became a deep dive into the principles of the Law of Attraction, consciousness, human behavior, emotional alignment and personal transformation.

I later spent years working closely within the University of Michigan community, where I developed relationships with students, athletes, parents and campus leaders.

Those experiences gave me something no book or training program could have provided.

They gave me tens of thousands of real conversations.

People often shared what they were navigating in their careers, relationships, health, education and personal lives.

Many of those conversations began casually.

But some became remarkably open, honest and meaningful.

During the rides themselves, I had the opportunity to watch the ideas I was studying meet real life.

I saw intelligent people who already knew what they should do but could not consistently access that knowledge under pressure.

I saw capable people lose contact with their confidence, clarity or emotional stability during difficult moments.

I also saw how quickly someone’s state could shift when they felt heard, gained a different perspective or reconnected with something they already knew within themselves.

These were not formal coaching sessions.

But they became an extraordinary education in human capability.

Nine years of listening, observing and interacting with people reinforced what my own life had already begun teaching me:

The capability is often already present.

What changes is our access to it.

For a long time, most of my attention was focused on thought, emotion, consciousness and the internal state from which we experience life.

But my own health journey eventually forced me to recognize another important part of the equation.

Our capabilities may be innate.

But we access and express them through a biological body.

When that body is exhausted, inflamed, undernourished, in pain or struggling to function efficiently, access to clear thinking, focus, patience, creativity and emotional stability can become more difficult.

This became deeply personal for me during a period when I was living with persistent physical pain.

I was eventually introduced to a combination of foundational nutritional and plant-based support.

Over approximately five months, I experienced a gradual reduction in my discomfort until I was living pain-free.

That experience expanded my understanding of human capability.

Emotional rehearsal could help me get out in front of emotional reactivity.

But supporting the body could help me get out in front of biological decline.

I began thinking of the body as the receiver through which our thoughts, emotions, awareness and innate capabilities must be expressed.

The clearer and better supported the receiver becomes, the more consistently those signals may be available to us.

That realization became another foundational principle of the Human Capability Project:

Better signals require a better-conditioned receiver.

The Human Capability Project did not emerge from one course, one teacher or one breakthrough moment.

It emerged from a pattern I had been observing throughout my entire life.

I had seen capable athletes lose access to their abilities under pressure.

I had experienced the difference between knowing how to sell and being able to access those skills during an actual conversation.

I had lived through a period when many of my own capabilities felt unavailable to me.

I had learned that emotional states could be deliberately rehearsed.

And I had discovered that the condition of the biological receiver could influence how clearly and consistently those capabilities were expressed.

Eventually, all of those experiences began organizing themselves around one central understanding:

Your capabilities do not simply disappear.

Your access to them changes.

The Human Capability Project was created to explore what influences that access—and how we can support it more intentionally.

It brings together emotional rehearsal, biological support, focused attention, breath, sound, repetition and practical education within one larger framework.

The goal is not to turn people into something they are not.

It is to help them cultivate more consistent access to who they already are.

That is why I describe the Human Capability Project as:

An ecosystem designed with nature in mind to support greater access to freedom and well-being.

Today, my work is focused on developing the Human Capability Project into an educational ecosystem that people can understand, experience and apply in their daily lives.

It is designed for students, athletes, sales professionals, health practitioners, organizations and anyone interested in gaining more consistent access to their innate capabilities.

The project brings together education, emotional rehearsal and foundational biological support.

Each element serves a different purpose.

But they are all organized around the same central question:

What influences how consistently you can access the capabilities you already possess?

I do not believe people need to become superhuman.

I believe human beings already possess remarkable intelligence, creativity, intuition, adaptability, emotional depth and awareness.

The opportunity is to understand what supports—or interferes with—our access to those capabilities.

The Human Capability Project is still growing.

So am I.

After decades of study, personal practice and tens of thousands of face-to-face conversations, I remain deeply curious about what becomes possible when people learn to support that access more intentionally.

If this question resonates with you, the best place to begin is the Human Capability Project Summary.