I have never been interested in the average. The people I work with aren’t either.

Where the work started

As an undergraduate philosophy major, I learned to think and express myself through language rather than act through emotion - a discipline largely foreign to my blue-collar upbringing in Trenton. I was the first person in my father’s family to finish high school, so education was never abstract. It gave me access to a language and a world I did not come from.

A brief detour through corporate America clarified something quickly: I was driven by meaning, not money. After work, I took off the suit and trained people in the gym at night. Coaching felt closer to the truth. It was teaching, but more personal. The questions that mattered to me were not in that building.

Why the body came first

Staying only in the mind did not get me close enough. Ghost in the machine. The body was carrying information the intellect could not reach.

Graduate study in applied physiology at Columbia University, continued at Long Island University, deepened that grounding. I became a strength and conditioning coach and certified exercise physiologist, studying how stress, fatigue, arousal, and pressure show up physically. The limiting factor was rarely only physical.

Where performance became concrete

That led me to Temple University and doctoral work in sport and exercise psychology under Dr. Michael Sachs, one of the early researchers studying altered states of consciousness in athletes, including what became known as runner’s high.

Four seasons as Director of Mental Performance with the Washington Nationals brought the work into sharper focus: elite athletes, public stakes, consequence, and the recognition that even the highest performers carry patterns that skill development alone cannot reach.

Never only theory

The academic work mattered. It still does. But I was never built to stay in the tower.

I have been working since I was twelve. That shaped me. Work was practical, physical, and accountable. You showed up. You figured things out. You learned what held up when conditions were not clean.

That is still how I think. I respect theory, but I do not worship it. Ideas have to survive contact with people, pressure, and consequence.

My work has always been tested directly - in the room, on the field, in organizations, and with individuals who cannot afford abstraction.

The classroom gave me language. The work gave me proof.

Why clinical depth mattered

Clinical training came in stages, beginning at Yeshiva University’s Ferkauf Graduate School and completing, years later, at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in New Jersey. I pursued it because the work kept forcing deeper questions.

Why this became personal

Before I had language for any of this, I had baseball.

Baseball gave me structure, discipline, and a place to belong at a time when the world around me could have pulled me elsewhere. Some of the people I grew up with went down roads I was close enough to understand. Baseball put me on a different path before I fully understood what that path had protected.

By junior year, the perfectionism that had driven everything stopped working. I took a break. I did not talk to anyone about it because I did not think anyone would understand. Years later, therapy gave me language for what I had been carrying - and for what performance alone could not resolve.

That experience shaped how I work. Not because my story is the point, but because it taught me something I still believe: high performers are rarely struggling because they lack discipline. More often, the same structure that helped them succeed has started to cost them something.

Performance is never just performance.

Twenty Years

Over twenty years, I have worked with All-Stars, World Series champions, elite international athletes, and high-performing professionals across sport, business, law, medicine, and leadership. I spent four seasons as Director of Mental Performance with the Washington Nationals.

Individual work includes athletes, executives, physicians, attorneys, and senior leaders from organizations including the New York Giants, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the Department of Defense. Direct consulting engagements have included Meta, Ropes & Gray, Gotham FC, Sony, and the United Nations. Work spans elite sport, military and tactical performance, corporate leadership, medicine, law, and mental discipline in high-consequence environments.

The clients are private. The work carries consequence.

Clinical work in New York through Union Square Practice and in New Jersey through the New Jersey Consultation Center (NJCC), under approved supervised arrangements.

Teaching

Co-leading a weekly Neuropsychoanalysis course at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis - NJ, working with a cohort of advanced clinical candidates at the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and affective neuroscience.

Co-teaching Applied Sport & Performance Psychology for Therapists with Dr. Tim Herzog, Ph.D. - an APA-approved continuing education course for licensed clinicians seeking to work with athletes and high-performance populations.

Previously served as adjunct faculty in the Departments of Psychology and Exercise Science at St. Joseph’s University (formerly the University of the Sciences) and Georgian Court University.

Currently mentoring graduate students and early-career sport psychology consultants and therapists entering high-performance and clinical practice.

How I Work

I listen for what repeats before I listen for what is wrong.

I look at physiology before assuming the issue is psychological.

I treat symptoms as information, not defects.

I work directly, but carefully - and with the understanding that how you relate in the room is often part of the same pattern that brings you there.

Education

Credentials & Licenses