From Poway to the floor -
and back to something real.
I grew up in Poway, California. Good neighborhood, good parents, baseball every weekend in the backyard. To anyone watching, everything looked fine. On the inside, I never felt like I was enough. That gap between the outside and the inside - that's where everything started.
At fourteen, a broken ankle and a Vicodin prescription opened a door I would spend the next fourteen years trying to close. What followed was a life I never would have chosen for myself and couldn't seem to stop.
Seven arrests. Five treatment programs. Crossing the US–Mexico border daily to sustain a heroin addiction. An overdose in a bathtub. A three-story fall from a balcony in Mammoth that I shouldn’t have walked away from.
I want you to understand something about that time: I wasn’t someone who didn’t care. I cared deeply. I wanted to be different. I tried to be different. Over and over. What I didn’t understand was that willpower was never the problem. Identity was.
“God, I can’t do this anymore. Please. Help me.”
At twenty-eight, alone, I made one honest prayer. Not a religious performance. Just the most real thing I’d ever said. Then I called my dad. He came. No lecture. No conditions. He just showed up. And for the first time in fourteen years, I walked into treatment and meant it.
What recovery actually taught me.
What happened after wasn’t a dramatic overnight transformation. It was slow, humbling, daily work. And what I found in that work wasn’t just sobriety. It was the man I’d been performing around for my entire adult life.
I found out that I’d built every identity I ever had on something external. On what people thought. On what I achieved. On how well I was holding it together. And when those things were stripped away, there was almost nothing left that I recognized as actually mine.
That realization - that the inside work is different from the outside work - became the foundation for everything I now help men do.
Restored Ministry -
where the program was tested.
Before MIR™ existed as a private coaching offer, I built and led Restored Ministry at Awaken Church for over eight years across multiple campuses. What started as one small group became a ministry that has served thousands of men in recovery, men in marriage crisis, men who were high-functioning on the outside and empty on the inside.
The curriculum, the framework, the language of identity over behavior - it was all tested there. At scale. With real men in real pain. What you enter in MIR™ is not an experiment. It is a proven system delivered at a higher level of personal access than any group model can offer.
The man I am today.
I’ve been married to Kimmie for over a decade - a marriage built on honesty, not performance. I coach my son Sebastian’s baseball team and drive him to school every morning. I run my own company from home. I lead a ministry that continues to grow.
I am the same man in every room I walk into. Not because I have it all figured out. Because I stopped needing to pretend I did. That’s the work. And it changed everything.
The reason I do this isn’t strategy. It’s that I know what it costs a man to stay hidden. I know what it costs his wife. I know what it costs his kids. And I know it’s not the only way.
