A Life in Practice

My work began long before it had a name.

I grew up in rural New Brunswick, in a place where life moved slowly enough for people to notice one another. The world felt large and far away, yet it instilled something I’ve carried ever since: a belief that the measure of a life is not the noise it makes, but the steadiness it keeps.

I left home early, hungry to understand how the world worked. Economics was my way in. I studied first at Western, then transferred to a smaller university when the scale overwhelmed me. That move changed everything. My discipline returned, curiosity opened, and I completed two degrees with perfect marks — achievements that led to the University of Cambridge, where I earned a graduate degree at Gonville & Caius College, the same college as Stephen Hawking. Cambridge was the turning point of my life. It humbled me, stretched me, and taught me how to learn for myself instead of performing for grades.

Later, in London, the Middle East, Hong Kong, and across Canada, I began to see the world not only through models and forecasts but through people — their anxieties, stories, blind spots, and fears. As a pension investment analyst and consultant, I learned that most financial decisions are not about numbers. They are about doubt, pressure, and human psychology. Behaviour often mattered more than data. What clients needed was not information; it was steadiness.

Teaching the CFA Program, across decades and continents, reinforced that insight. Candidates were brilliant, disciplined, and hungry for success — yet often terrified of being wrong. Fear of imperfection became a quiet epidemic. Many passed by memorizing; others struggled because they could not find the confidence to think out loud. Brilliant minds, tightly armoured. I taught the curriculum, but the real work lay just beneath it: helping people find composure and the courage to inhabit their own thoughts.

After nearly twenty-five years of travel and consulting, I reached a breaking point. Everything looked successful on paper, yet I felt a growing exhaustion that I could no longer outrun. I stepped away. What began as a pause became a three-year sabbatical — a season of solitude, loss, faith, restoration, and rediscovery.

I sailed alone through the Gulf Islands and Georgia Strait. I learned to read weather, raise sail, drop anchor, and turn back when necessary. I lived for stretches on my classic sailboat, diving into cold Pacific water, watching orcas break the surface at dawn. And in the quiet, I built the humanities degree I never took formally — reading nearly one hundred and fifty books in philosophy, psychology, literature, and Scripture. Not for letters. For enlargement. For balance. For the widening of a life that had become too narrow.

On Vancouver Island, I befriended people far from the world of finance — paramedics, civil servants, nurses, retirees — people whose dignity came from service, not ambition. They reminded me that leadership is not status; it is stewardship. They helped me soften. They helped me return to God. They helped me see more clearly what my life was actually about.

When I eventually returned to Toronto, I felt it immediately: this was where I was meant to work.
A city of intellect, urgency, and ambition — and therefore a city where presence matters most.
Where people wear credentials like armour.
Where loneliness hides in plain sight.
Where brilliant professionals live without space to breathe.

My work now brings all these threads together — global experience, technical understanding, behavioural insight, faith, sailing, solitude, and the slow repair of my own life. I lead quietly, sitting with people at the pace human beings are meant to move. I guide without force. I help others become the steady, clear, unhurried leaders they were always capable of being.

This is not performance. It is not a program. It is the way I live.

And if you sense that something in your life is ready to shift —
not dramatically, but deeply —
the next page opens the door to how we might begin.