“always leave a person better than you found them”
My Story
In 2016 I decided to walk away from a successful career in corporate America. I was at peace with that decision but had to lean on my faith more than at any other point in my life. I made the difficult choice not to remain on the same familiar path, and instead chose a path filled with purpose but one that would also be dotted with uncertainty. I chose to spend the rest of my life serving others doing something that matters.
I wasn’t afraid of failure. I was afraid of being successful at something that didn’t matter.
“The two most important days in a man’s life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Meet Anthony…
“He’s one of those people who when they smile it seems to come from their soul.”
Before I tell you about me, permit me to tell you first about Anthony. He is the reason I am here and why I do what I do.
I had everything but was too blind to see any of it. Too caught up in a world of hurry, pinning my future happiness on just accomplishing the one next thing so that I could relax and be satisfied. But it never came. It never does. My happiness was rooted in external circumstances and caused stress daily because my life didn’t match what I envisioned.
Anthony had nothing. His entire belongings amounted to what he pushed down the street in his shopping cart, yet he was the happiest person I had seen in years. What did he have that I didn’t? His joy was rooted in his internal reality not his external circumstances. It didn’t matter that he had nearly zero possessions. It didn’t matter if it was cold and raining. It didn’t matter if he had food to eat or even a roof over his head. His joy was internal. Infatiguable. He’s one of those people who when they smile it seems to come from their soul.
On my way home from work I would see him pushing his cart and waving at people as they passed by. Not in a “hey will you help me?” kind of way but in a genuine “I love people and I am happy to see you” kind of way. Here was a guy with next to nothing that was blessing and enriching many people’s live each day just by loving them from afar with a wave and a smile. Literally changing the flow of their thoughts and the course their day. It was profoundly simple and effective.
One cool autumn day I was driving home from my well paying job, in my great looking Jeep, to my awesome house, to the wife and family of my dreams. Yet here I was. Angry. Frustrated. Again. I don’t even remember why, but it was probably rooted in some little pity party because my boss didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate my efforts. And there was Anthony doing his thing. He waved and smiled at me regularly and enjoyed the fact that I would wave and smile back and give an occasional honk of the horn just for fun. But today was different. His smile penetrated me in a way it hadn’t before. It smacked me upside the head and said “you are an idiot” and “I love you” all at the same time. This day Anthony’s smile went past my angry countenance, around my selfish little heart, and straight into my soul. I couldn’t take it any more. I stopped. Went down the block and did a u turn and came back to introduce myself. Not even sure what the goal was, I just wanted to say hello in person and tell him how much I appreciated his wave and his smile. I wanted to make an introduction, ask if he was doing okay, and see if there was some way I could help him. To connect. I suppose at a deeper level there was a selfish motive to try and see what he had that everyone else didn’t. I wanted some of that.
We didn’t talk long that day, but it felt like I had a new friend. I would continue to stop a few days a week when I saw him and chat for just a minute or two. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist but had a way of making you feel better by just being with him. That pattern continued for over a year. The course of my afternoons would be changed every time I saw him. I would shift from my thoughts about me and what I wanted or didn’t have, to the needs of others. How can I serve them better? How can I love them more? God used Anthony to change my heart and put a calling in my life to do more. Not do more of the same, but to do more of what He created us to do. To love and to serve others.
Over the next 18 months I became growingly frustrated at the disconnect in my life. I wanted to spend my time and my energy doing something that matters. Yet there I was spending 10 hours a day making some corporation and its shareholders lots of money and making their dreams come true while ignoring what I felt called to do. I didn’t fully understand it then, but the passage of time has provided clarity of what I was feeling. I now know that God had a purpose for my life and I was not living out that purpose. It was subtle at first. A simple unrest. But it gradually grew over time and became impossible to ignore. At some point I knew what I was supposed to do but couldn’t do it. I could feel it but couldn’t quite label it. Then it struck me. Fear! “The only thing keeping me from doing what I know I am called to do is fear!” That did not feel good. I had spent my adult life leading people and making difficult important decisions that affected many lives and millions of dollars, but don’t ever recall being afraid. I lived with that fear for a few months until one day at a time and place that are etched in my memory, I had peace. I knew what I needed to do and finally found peace in knowing that everything was going to be okay. That peace was a result of faith. Faith that even though I would be faced with all kinds of uncertainty around how I could continue to provide for my family, we would be okay. So on May 2, 2016 after 30 years at the same company, I quit my job. With no idea how it would turn out, I took a literal leap of faith into the future. I choose to follow God’s purpose for me and my gifts and spend the rest of my life serving and loving others. The path over the next few years was filled with some bumps and curves and even some dead ends, but as time went by my path continued to get clearer. It led me to coaching and teaching residents at the local rescue mission and to getting certified as a Functional Medicine Coach. Those two things may not seem related at first glance, but both are an expression of my commitment to love and serve others. Eliminating unnecessary suffering and helping people be the healthy, flourishing version of themselves that God intended. Helping people live longer and live better. My intention is to spend the rest of my life coaching and teaching others. Inspiring them to seek God’s purpose for their lives and enjoying the physical, mental and spiritual health that comes from embracing His design for how we are intended to live.
Oh, and Anthony?… God’s still using him to change the lives of those who pay close enough attention to what he is doing. He still has Anthony cross my path occasionally to share a hug and a smile and to remind me of why I do what I do.
My Health Journey
Like many others, my passion for a healthy lifestyle is rooted in my own health challenges. My “why” for health coaching is to eliminate unnecessary suffering through teaching others, and helping them change behaviors that lead to suffering. My own suffering started in 2016. I quit my job of 30 years and was going to have the best summer of my life. That didn’t happen. May of that year started a cycle of debilitating vertigo that would go on for 6 months. Not the “oh I feel a little dizzy” kind of vertigo. The “face down on your hands and knees on the public sidewalk puking” kind of vertigo. The literal “can’t stand up because I don’t know which way is up or sideways so I crash into the walls and fall down” kind of vertigo. The episodes would come on in a matter of minutes with no apparent cause. I couldn’t take medication for it because anything I swallowed came back up, so off we would go to the emergency room for a couple of IV’s of meds to keep the world from spinning. My beautiful and sometimes patient wife would say all of the right comforting things to make me feel loved but I knew I was a burden. The next few days would be spent in a slow moving funk and by the time a few weeks had gone by and I was beginning to feel human again it would start all over again.
Multiple doctors and practitioners didn’t make a difference. No one could tell me why it was happening. Perhaps like many of your own stories, traditional medicine was failing me. All they wanted to do was give me some pills to treat symptoms. No one was interested or capable of getting to the root cause. The system that prioritizes profits over people is built to diagnose the problem (name it), explain the problem (blame it), and prescribe a pill for the symptoms (tame it). Why was no one interested in helping me identify the root cause so I no longer have the symptoms? That summer’s experiences just validated my already low view of the healthcare system and confirmed what I already knew. I needed to take responsibility for my own health because no one else was going to. So I went to work. I went head first into researching vertigo. Medical journals, published research, podcasts, videos were all game and were mildly helpful. Eventually all paths kept leading me back to functional medicine (also known as integrated medicine). I studied, learned, and applied the principles that I found and slowly but steadily started feeling better. The details are too long to share here, but I eventually solved my vertigo issues and healed myself for good. The short story is that I changed my habits and my behaviors and it gave me my life back. I used food and exercise as medicine to heal my body when doctors and pills couldn’t. That experience taught me the power of functional medicine and demonstrated how vital diet and lifestyle are to our physical, mental, and spiritual health. I could have read a story like that and even believed it but never really “known it” without having been through that difficult chapter of my life. In addition to that painful wisdom gained, I believe the experience gave me an empathy for the suffering of others that I would not be capable of without it. It created a deeper passion to help others and to help them make changes in their lives to avoid current or future unnecessary suffering.
In the darkest moments there was maddeningly awful yet beautiful clarity about how important health is. I had always been the person who wanted to help others and had just quit my job to devote my life to serving others and now here I was helpless. Unable to take care of myself let alone help anyone else. Lying face down on the bathroom floor, I found purpose in my suffering. That purpose found was a tenfold understanding of how critical health was to everything I wanted to do in my life. All of the people I wanted to help and serve, and all of the plans that I had made, were dependent on me taking the best care of myself so that I could be the resource that I wanted to be for everyone else. Perhaps some part of this rings true for you as well.
My decision to pursue functional medicine coaching and become a certified coach went beyond the pursuit of health and wellness. It felt as if something deeper was happening. The more I learned about functional medicine the more I learned about truth, and the harder I looked for truth, the more difficult it was to find. I realized that this was no longer just about the pursuit of health, it was the pursuit of truth, and freedom and a better life. In an effort to better understand these truths, I attempt to simplify them down to the most understandable basic elements. In a world filled with complication and confusion, what we need more is profoundly simple ideas. Simplifying is a necessary step to fully understanding truths and applying them to our daily lives (wisdom). I have developed a philosophy that goes something like this. Seek truth, find truth, understand it, simplify it, apply it (wisdom), share it (love). My reason for health coaching and life coaching is to share truth and wisdom and help people apply it to their lives to restore their physical, mental and spiritual health. I hope we get a chance to travel this journey together so I can help you live longer and live better but if not, I wish you success on your own journey hope you find peace, purpose and health.
Godspeed,
Will
“Wisdom isn’t the accumulation of knowledge, its the application of truth”
For more “about” my background click here and scroll to the bottom of the page.
