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formerly Diamondpoint Coaching, got its start as I was completing a major life goal: an era of experiential living off the grid. I had studied psychology informally from high school onward, with an avid appetite for self help, depth psychology and wisdom traditions.
After earning a degree in English from the University of Houston, I came west to Park City, Utah to pursue experiential and off-grid living. I subsidized this goal by working in the service industry, where I had subsidized all my life goals up to this point. Throughout ten years serving in Park City's lucrative restaurant and hospitality industry, I continued developing pros and cons non-judgmental observation, readings in depth psychology, and experiential understanding of stress in an international tourist destination town, host to world renowned skiing, the Sundance Film Festival, the 2002 Winter Olympics, and The Kimball Arts Festival.
In 2005, between hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when the U.S.'s national consciousness was deeply impacted by the damage and fallout resulting from the devastation of New Orleans, I had the opportunity to serve families who had had the opportunity to fly out from the Gulf Coast on the eve of hurricane Rita. At this same time I was culminating a variety of meditation practices, including visual point meditation, sitting meditation (Soto Zen), and a version of the Dalai Lama's meditation on Love, with equanimity.
Out of this nexus of knowledge, observation, practice, and understanding arose an opportunity to provide something unique in the form of an analytical approach to stress awareness and management. Recognizing the deep impact that stress had on our clientele in 2005 and throughout my tenure in the restaurant and hospitality industry, on co-workers throughout my tenure, many of which, had their plight been understood, would have performed much better, remained sustainable throughout their work lifespan, and still would have retained a high quality of life, I sought to do something about it that would be fitting to a western way of life, that would provide for corporate and organizational needs as well as individual worker and client based needs.
I pursued an AS in Psychology from a community college for credentials, to become familiar with research and the scientific method, and to remain close to those who were either in or from the service industry. I focused each of my classes on some aspect of stress in order to deepen my academic, theoretical and research based understanding of a set of problems and understandings for stress in the workplace for which I had 26 years of combined field understanding and experience.
While the research path is the path of greatest security, with the comfort that a research psychologist provides with statistics and a highly specialized view of a very minute element of a given problem, I have chosen a larger approach, taking my wisdom and my knowledge from years of observation and the cultivation of a therapist's approach to individual(psychological) and social(sociological) health and wellbeing into a more broad based learning approach through for instance Environmental Studies, which sheds light on macrocosmic stressors all of us will be facing in the current century. Environmental Studies allows me to sit with urban stressors, with the environment's potential for balancing stress with health and wellbeing (see Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods) and to sight a better masters program, one suited both to the big picture, as well as open to more in the department of scientific rigor and psychology.
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