About
There was an afternoon in London, sometime in early August of 2024, when I sat in the corner of a pub with a pint and a notebook and started writing down what I was feeling.
I had been on sabbatical for about three weeks by then. Long enough that the exhaustion had started to lift. Short enough that I still didn't have language for what had brought me there in the first place.
That afternoon, four words started making sense to me. Reflect. Release. Realign. Reignite. I didn't know yet that they would become the framework I now use with every coaching client. I only knew they were describing something I was living through, one movement at a time, in the quiet space that two months in another country had opened up.
How I Got Here
Getting to that pub took nearly ten years.
I had stepped into a role as Director of Communications at Holston Conference of The United Methodist Church that felt, for a long time, like it had been made for me. Strong team. Meaningful work. The kind of alignment between calling and vocation that most leaders spend years searching for.
Then slowly, and then all at once, things changed. Budget constraints led to staff reductions. Positions went unfilled. Responsibilities expanded until I was promoted to Executive Director of Operations and Communications, carrying both roles at once. My schedule went from full to something else entirely. There was a stretch where I worked sixty-five to seventy hours a week for eighteen straight weeks, telling myself I just needed to push through. I never did.
What I did instead was burn out in the slow, grinding way that doesn't look like collapse from the outside. I went from waking up energized about my work to waking up dreading the day ahead. The work still mattered. I had just drifted so far from the part of it that gave me energy that I could no longer feel the difference between doing the work and being consumed by it.
By the spring of 2024, I knew I needed something more than a vacation. I needed space to actually understand what was happening to me.
London
Holston Conference gave me two months of sabbatical, July through September of 2024. Brandy and I decided to spend most of it in London.
I couldn't have told you then why London specifically. I only knew it was somewhere I felt more like myself. Somewhere the pace was different. Somewhere I could think without the weight of every meeting and message pulling my attention back to work I was supposed to be resting from.
What I didn't expect was that London wouldn't only give me rest. It would give me the language for what had gone wrong.
I spent those two months walking, reading, and writing. A lot of writing. There was almost always a notebook with me, and by the end of the sabbatical it was full of pages of observation about my own drift, my own exhaustion, and what it might take to find my way back.
Somewhere in the middle of that, four movements started to surface.
Reflect was where it had to start. Before anything could change, I had to honestly understand what was happening to me, my responsibilities, my values, and where the gap between what I said mattered and how I was spending my days had gotten so wide.
Release came next. Not everything I was carrying was mine to carry. Some of it had been assigned. Some of it I had picked up along the way and never questioned. Some of it was internal, expectations I had quietly placed on myself over years. All of it needed to be honestly examined.
Realign was the work of reconnecting my time, energy, and decisions with what genuinely mattered. Which, for me, turned out to be a very different list than the one I had been operating from.
Reignite was the hardest one to see clearly from inside the sabbatical, but I could feel it starting. It was the sense that the passion and purpose I had drifted from could return, in a healthier expression, if I was willing to do the earlier work honestly.
I came home from London in mid-September with the beginnings of a framework and a growing sense that something in my life needed to change.
Coming Home
Then I did what most leaders do when they come home from a sabbatical.
I went back to work.
Not immediately, and not in exactly the same way. But close enough. The email began to stack up. The meetings resumed. And the clarity I had brought home from London started to fade almost the moment I stepped back into the rhythms and responsibilities that had exhausted me in the first place.
I still had the notebook. I still had the four words. What I didn't have was the courage, or maybe the urgency, to actually apply them.
The Hospital
On June 1, 2025, I ended up in a hospital with chest pains.
It wasn't a heart attack. It was enough of a scare to send me through a series of tests. And it was more than enough to force a question I had been putting off for months.
Sitting in that hospital room, waiting on results, I understood something I had been avoiding since London.
Insight isn’t the same as change.
I had come home from sabbatical with clarity, and I hadn't done anything with it. I knew what I needed to release, and I hadn't released it. I knew where I needed to realign, and I had stayed misaligned. I had the framework, and I hadn't lived the framework.
That's the difference between what London gave me and what the hospital gave me. London gave me the map. The hospital made me start walking.
The Return
Over the year that followed, I did the work I had been postponing.
I stepped back from responsibilities that no longer aligned with what I was actually there to do. I had honest conversations that had been overdue for months. I released roles I had been carrying that were never really mine to carry. I began journaling regularly again. I worked with a time management coach, Samantha Lane, who helped me see that my exhaustion had less to do with volume than with alignment.
And I started using the 4R Process with other leaders.
Pastors, business owners, executives, and church staff who were sensing the same drift I had lived through. What surprised me was how consistently the framework resonated. It turned out that the specific words I had scribbled in a London notebook were describing something more universal than my own story.
In July of 2026, I launched Strategic Reset Co. to bring that work to more leaders. I still serve as Director of Communications for Holston Conference on a part-time basis, which gives me runway to build the coaching practice thoughtfully. But my primary work now is with individual leaders who feel the same drift I did, and who are ready to consider what to do about it before their own hospital moment forces the question.
What I Bring
My background is a blend of executive leadership and pastoral ministry.
I spent years in sales and marketing before feeling called into ministry. Even after that call, I stayed bi-vocational for a stretch. I later served in full-time pastoral leadership and moved into denominational leadership at Holston Conference, where I have led communications, operations, and staff for close to a decade.
That mix of business, ministry, and leadership shapes how I coach. I understand the pressure of executive responsibility, the weight of leading people, the tension of trying to live in alignment with something larger than the job, and the peculiar exhaustion of trying to do all three at once.
About Me
I was born and raised in East Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. It's still home. Brandy and I have raised two children here. Both are now finding their own paths as adults, which is its own strange and beautiful adjustment for a parent.
I have been coaching in one form or another since I was in college. Back then it was middle school and high school basketball summer leagues. As a parent, I coached my kids in basketball, football, and eventually soccer. It took me longer than it should have to notice the pattern connecting those Saturday morning experiences with the rest of my life, but eventually I did. What I loved most was watching people grow. Watching a young player master something they had struggled with. Watching a team begin to believe they were capable of more than they thought. The growth was always the point.
London, Still
I still get back to London whenever I can.
If Brandy and I could live anywhere, London is where I’d choose; although, I’m still trying to talk her into it. The pub life. The Premier League. The layers of history you can walk through in an afternoon. The diversity of people. The way the city holds the old, the new, and the still-becoming all at once.
Every leader has a place that helps them come back to themselves. London is mine.
The Reset Begins With One Conversation.
If the drift I'm describing sounds like your own, a Strategic Reset Call is a good place to start. Thirty minutes on a video call. No cost, no pitch.