About Brian

What I've Actually Done

Today, I work as a career coach — for people trying to understand why nothing they've tried yet — another certification, another round of therapy, sheer force of will — has actually answered the question.

I spent a decade in software engineering — graduated first in LSU's College of Engineering, built products, led teams, became VP of Engineering.

Along the way, I built something else: a practice of weekly 1:1s built around structured reflection — what I called a Career Development Journal — with the engineers and managers I worked with. Not a framework I read about. One I built from scratch, with real people, over years.

What actually happened, honestly — not every outcome was clean, and I'd rather tell you that than oversell it:

• One engineer went from a new grad to senior, promoted, within a year.
• A separate engineer was struggling as a mid-level developer. Instead of pushing harder in a role that wasn't fitting, we found an adjacent role that actually matched his strengths — he moved into it and succeeded greatly, promoted to senior there. He messaged me, unprompted, two months after I'd left the company: "I did most of my career under your guidance."
• A third went from senior to tech lead, over two years.
• Not everyone's story ended that clean. Some of what I saw — real burnout, real crises — I couldn't fix with a journal and a 1:1. That's part of why I do this differently now, on my own terms, for people who choose it directly instead of having it handed to them by an employer.

Why I Can Actually Help With This

Because I had to learn to see my own patterns too, not just other people's.

I didn't arrive at this from nowhere — pieces of it go back years, long before I called any of it a practice. But 2024 is when it became disciplined: a near-daily practice of structured self-reflection and pattern-tracking, plus body-based work to catch what the logging alone couldn't. I've run more of my own experiments on myself since then than I could list on a page like this.

I've built and walked away from more directions than I want to admit — each one a version of the same pattern, seen only in hindsight. What changed wasn't finding one more clever idea. It was learning to see the pattern underneath all of them, in my own life, the same way I'd already learned to see it in other people's.

That same instinct was already showing up in how I supported others — first as a manager, then as something deeper. They didn't need seven tricks to get promoted by the end of the year. They needed someone to show them how to sit with who they really were — someone practiced enough not to let them run from the parts of themselves they hadn't yet admitted. Once they understood what they actually wanted and needed, the career objectives followed — role shifts, promotions, people starting their own projects.

I'm not a therapist or a licensed counselor. I'm someone who put in the actual hours on his own patterns before ever asking someone else to look at theirs. That's the credential, not a license.

How I Actually Work

I ask questions most people don't get asked, and I hold the same standard here I held as an engineer: not a feel-good conversation, but a real deliverable — a pattern named, a decision made, a next step you'll actually take. I use your own words back to you until it's undeniable. It's uncomfortable sometimes. It works.

Wherever You're At

Whatever stage you're actually at — still finding out what's overloaded, rebuilding what's missing outside work, finding what you're built for, choosing between options, getting hired or landing the internal move, or already excelling in the seat you chose — that's what we work on. Not a generic conversation. Yours.