A trained coach and retired NCIS Special Agent. I’ve guided people through change, and I’ve made this kind of reset myself.
I spent a career leading and coaching people inside one of the most demanding institutions in federal law enforcement, and I’ve lived the reset I now coach. You get both: real coaching skill, and someone who knows the ground firsthand.
Associate Certified Coach (ACC), International Coaching Federation
NCIS Special Agent (Ret.) · U.S. Navy Veteran
Active member, International Coaching Federation Hawaiʻi Chapter
The Navy first. Then 22 years at NCIS, a federal law enforcement agency with a global reach. I was a senior leader, close to people carrying serious weight inside serious institutions. I watched what misalignment does over time. It doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as burnout, as drift, as doing the job well while knowing something is off.
Along the way I led diversity and inclusion strategy for the agency, coached and mentored leaders, and got certified as a coach through George Mason in 2022. The frameworks were built inside the work.
But the badge was never the only identity I carried. Navy veteran. Military spouse. Mom. Each one ran alongside the others, sometimes pulling opposite ways. When the career ended, none of the others automatically filled the space. They just made the question more layered: which one of these am I, now that this one is gone?
If I’m no longer this, what exactly am I now? That’s the question that surfaced when the chapter closed. The drive that had always had a direction was running at a different tempo than the life I wanted to build. Giving that drive somewhere new to point, and letting it settle into the pace this season is asking for. That’s the work.
I paddle. A standup board, the six-person outrigger canoe with a crew, a surfboard when the day gives me one. The water is where I feel the alignment, from the top of my head through my toes, and a clear sense of who I am and what I’m connected to.
It’s also where I practice the thing I coach. The ocean’s energy is enormous, and none of it asks my permission. What I get to control is whether I stay calm, whether I move through the fear that says I’m going to fall, whether I stay present enough to find the next safe move and keep going.
Kaizen means change for the good. Kai is change, Zen is good. But I hear something more in it.
Kai is also the ocean, in Japanese and Hawaiian. The ocean’s energy is enormous and none of it asks permission. That’s the uncontrollable: the wave, the current, the career that ended, the identity that shifted. The ocean is the path, not the thing in the way of it.
Zen is the practice of meeting it. Staying calm. Facing fear and doubt without letting them run the show. Staying present enough to see the next move. That’s the part you can control.
Kaizen is what happens when the two meet. Small, intentional resets that move you toward where you want to be. You notice what’s real, you align to it, and you take one honest step. Then the next one.
It’s what I do with a client when the career is gone and the fear asks who am I now. I don’t hand you a plan. I help you get steady enough to read the map you’ve already drawn, and take the next honest step from where you are.
A free 20-minute call. No pitch, no pressure. We find out whether the fit is real.
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