I came to this work the hard way, and I never got to clock out of the other one.

After the death of my daughter Kailey, the strategies that had built my career stopped working. I had spent years leading large operations, eventually running a $170M business, and I thought I understood pressure. Grief was different. It did not yield to grit. It did not move on my timeline. For a long stretch, I was just trying not to drown, while still showing up to run a store full of people who needed a manager, not a man falling apart.

What pulled me back was an unlikely tool. Tony Robbins’ RPM framework, Result, Purpose, Massive Action, had been a business tool for me for years. After my loss, I started using it on the only thing left that mattered: getting up tomorrow. Slowly, it gave me a way to put my hands on a day again, one I could still bring to a leadership meeting the next morning. Years later, I was featured in Tony Robbins’ official RPM transformation campaign telling that story.

Out of that work, I built the Living Legacy Path Method, a cyclical framework for healing after loss that does not ask the grieving to “move on” or “reach acceptance,” and does not assume you have the luxury of stepping back from your life to heal. Instead, it gives you a path you can walk again as grief changes shape: through year one, through the first anniversary, through the day you laugh and feel guilty for laughing, through the year you finally rebuild, all while you keep leading your team, raising your kids, and showing up for the people who need you.

Today, I coach bereaved parents one-to-one, mostly other leaders and parents who don’t have room to fall apart either. I write every week, more than 100 blog posts so far on grief, healing, identity, and the long, slow work of building a life around an unfillable absence. I run marathons. I still lead at the day job, a $170M operation, full time, while I build this. I still miss my daughter every morning.

I am not an expert because I read the books. I am a practitioner because I lived it, and am still living it, on the clock, without ever getting to fully step away. If you are walking this, and still holding everything else together too, you are not doing it wrong. You are doing the hardest thing a human can do, with none of the space most people get to do it in.

There is a path. I will walk it with you.