Most people arrive at a significant moment carrying a version of themselves that was built for the life they led in the past, not the one they lead today. The adapted self is real — it worked, it got them here. When people outgrow the situations this adapted self was built to perform in, the question of who they actually are becomes unavoidable.

I work with people who sense this gap but can't quite name it. People who have built something real — a career, a craft, a family— and find themselves at a threshold where the next obvious move doesn't generate the energy it should. Or where the strengths that carried them this far have quietly become the thing in the way.

My background sits at an unusual intersection: years working at the leadership level in public sector organizations, and a parallel formation in Tendai Buddhism as an ordained practitioner. That combination has given me an unusual amount of practice bringing traditional frameworks to bear on the kinds of decisions and identity questions that contemporary professional life actually produces. 

The primary framework I work with is BaZi, sometimes called the Four Pillars of Destiny. This is a classical Chinese framework for understanding a person's personality, relationships, ambitions and vulnerabilities. This system emerged from a broader understanding of how natural cycles — elemental, seasonal, temporal — shape constitution and inform timing. Applying that understanding to modern professional and personal questions is the analytical work at the center of this practice. Rather than a questionnaire, BaZi works from birth data to create a profile of your constitution similar to how an acupuncturist assesses a patient's physical and mental health.

What this produces is not a personality type you share with a quarter of the population — no MBTI category, no StrengthsFinder theme, no Enneagram number. It's a specific account of your constitutional makeup: how you process pressure, where you characteristically overextend or withdraw, what kinds of environments bring out your best work, and why certain patterns keep recurring regardless of how much you understand them intellectually. It also maps how that configuration shifts across time — something static typing systems don't address at all.

My analysis is produced as a written report that you keep to reference whenever you need. The session is a conversation that informs how you can understand and work with the report. Neither will tell you what to decide, but both will give you a clearer picture of the inner architecture that shapes who you actually are.