I learned about lenses the hard way.

I am not a psychologist, a neuroscientist, or an academic. I am a founder, a business owner, and an executive coach with degrees in Philosophy, HR Leadership and Human Behavior (ABD). I have led large teams, advised people through their hardest career seasons, and spent years trying to help them find a way through conflict in their workplace that did not cost them who they were. I am a father to four amazing children. My faith is important to me, has always shaped how I see people, and it shaped how I came to see this.

For most of my life, writing a book was nowhere on the list of things I expected to do. Then a few years ago I lived through a season that sent me looking for answers I did not have. I wrote about that season in the introduction, so I will not retell it here. What matters for this page is what I did and continue to try and do with it.

“I've been the hero. I've been the villain. Most importantly, I've learned that those labels are often assigned by whoever gets to tell the story.”

So I read. For years, and more carefully than I have ever read anything. Hundreds of psychology and neuroscience articles on how perception and memory actually work. I talked with professors and psychologists. The research on the quiet pull toward seeing ourselves as the wronged party. Studies on how stories move through families, friendships, and institutions, and what they lose along the way. I filled different note-taking apps. I followed the questions wherever they led, including into the parts that did not flatter me.

At some point I stopped trying to win an argument and started trying to understand something true enough to be useful to a stranger. That work became this book: ten chapters, three parts, and a long stretch of time spent making sure each one earned its place. It was eventually accepted for publication in a way that it could stay exactly the book I meant to write.

I do not write as someone who figured it all out. I write as a coach, not a guru. As someone who has been the hero in his own story and the villain in someone else's, and who wanted to understand how both could be true. The Villain in Someone Else's Story is my first book. I wrote it for anyone who has ever been misread, made mistakes, or has been the one doing the misreading about others.