Ever since I can remember, I have been interested in human and animal minds. As a young child, I spent hours reading about dolphins in the wild and about Elsa the lioness in the half-wild/half-vicinity of Joy and George Adamson. I marveled at how similar the intellectual and emotional experience of life between humans and animals seemed to be, and about how the two can form such intimate bonds with each other, despite their obvious differences.
As an undergraduate at Yale, I studied the psychology of Freud, Skinner and others, while also getting a degree in economics. Then I went to MIT and got my PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department in the Artificial Intelligence Lab. Again I was pondering the mind and how it comes to the conclusions it does, this time comparing humans to what we might be able to achieve with computers.
After a few years of working in the field of applied AI, I got married and started a family. When my first child was born, I realized I had finally found a job that felt important enough to me to be thrilled to do it (more than!) full time – and that job was raising him, and now also his brother.
Then a few years ago, I discovered coaching. A perfect fit, it combines understanding our animal nature with using our intellect and the power of our virtually limitless agency that comes from being human to make decisions that affect the course and quality of our lives. Applying these tools to myself has changed my life in many ways, and it is the most exciting career I could imagine.
When I’m not thinking about coaching, I’m with my family, or I’m in the woods checking my trail cameras, where I am still in pursuit of understanding the animals around me and all that it means to be a thinking, feeling being on this planet.