I spent 13 years in Fire and EMS, including 8 years as a licensed paramedic. I knew how to perform under pressure. I knew how to walk into chaos and do the job. I knew how to compartmentalize what I saw, push it down, and get back in service.
What I did not know was how to stop carrying that way of living through my own front door. I was the paramedic who showed up to every call and went home to nothing. Three jobs deep, closer to 300 pounds, numbing out with whatever worked so I could make it to the next shift. I was physically present and completely absent. My wife was carrying more of our family than she ever should have had to.
I got sober in 2020. That's when I stopped blaming the job and started owning the choices I'd been making underneath it. But there was another part of the story I wasn't telling yet: inappropriate conversations and emotional infidelity with coworkers, hidden from my wife, years into our marriage.
In August 2023, three words hit me: live in the truth. A few months later, I sat in my kitchen and told my wife everything. There was no guarantee after that conversation. No promise she'd stay. Just the truth, and the decision to stop being the man who looked like he had it together and start becoming the man who actually did.
That's where the Six Pillars became real. Not as content. Not as a product. I needed a system that forced me to look at the whole man - my body, my presence, what I believed my life was for, how I handled money, what I noticed instead of what I thought was owed to me. I built it because my own life required it. I lived it before I ever taught it, and I'm still living it now. Down 100 pounds. A marriage that's stronger now than it was before any of this happened.
In 2024, I got fired. Officially for a social media policy violation. Unofficially because a coworker didn't like me talking openly about my own struggle with obesity and mental health. I didn't get fired for being wrong. I got fired for being uncomfortable to have around.
Out of all of that, I built Mission Beyond - not The Roll Call specifically, but the whole thing: the coaching, the six pillars, the brotherhood. The Roll Call is where that work lives for men who want it every week, with other men working the exact same climb instead of doing it alone.