Why I became a coach

Why I Do This Work

I grew up watching my mother live with a difficult man for 54 years. My father was angry and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled our home. We never knew what mood he would be in when he came home from work. My mother spent decades losing herself to keep the marriage going, and I watched what that cost her.

I wanted to understand why he couldn't stop living like that. And why my mother stayed. Those questions led me to this work.

For more than 30 years, I've studied psychology and what helps people change.

What I didn't see in myself

For a long time, I thought being nothing like my father meant I'd escaped my parents' dynamic. I didn't recognize how much I'd taken on my mother's role, keeping the peace and putting my own needs aside to make relationships work. I was the giver, the easygoing one who never needed much. The nice guy.

I didn't realize how much of my identity depended on being needed, or how little I knew about myself outside that role. Being needed kept me safe and gave me a sense of worth.

There was a self-righteousness in it, too. Being the one who gave more let me think of myself as the good one, and made it easier to blame the other person for what wasn't working between us.

That's when I understood that losing yourself isn't just a woman's story. We men do it too.

The giving can be sincere, but it can also come with an unspoken bargain. If you're helpful enough, agreeable enough, generous enough, the other person is supposed to appreciate you, stay happy with you, and give you the love you haven't asked for directly.

Understanding why someone else behaves the way they do can only take you so far. At some point, you have to turn that attention toward yourself and take ownership of your life.

Your life begins to change when you stop making everyone else's happiness more important than your own.

What people taught me at the end of their lives

For ten years, my partner was a hospice nurse. She came home with stories about people at the end of their lives seeing with brutal clarity what had mattered and what hadn't.

One man told her to get rid of her "gonnas." He was gonna take his wife to Europe, gonna spend more time with his children, gonna do all kinds of things. And now he was out of time.

Again and again, the regrets she heard were about the life someone had meant to live but hadn't. Living the way someone else expected. Never saying what they actually felt. Letting the people who really mattered disappear.

Those stories stayed with me. We don't have forever to start living our own lives.

Rule Number One

People come to me for all kinds of reasons, but underneath many of them is the same problem. They've spent so much time trying to keep other people happy that they've lost touch with themselves.

You're not responsible for someone else's behavior, but you are responsible for deciding what you'll accept and what you'll do next. It means looking at what you've been tolerating, what you've been avoiding, what you've been afraid to say, and what you've been getting from staying the way you are.

Many of those patterns began for good reasons. They helped you belong, stay safe, feel valuable, or keep relationships you couldn't afford to lose. The work is getting honest about what those patterns are costing you now, and learning to make different choices.

I'll help you understand what's driving your choices, including the fears and emotions underneath them, so you can decide what you want to do instead of letting fear decide for you.

I've seen how much changes when people begin treating themselves with the same care, acceptance, and compassion they've spent their lives giving everyone else.

That's the heart of what I call Rule Number One: Take care of yourself first. Love yourself first.

"Doug has this rule he calls Rule Number One: you're number one, take care of yourself first, love yourself first. It sounded selfish at first. Then I began to realize that most of the problems in my relationship were happening because I wasn't taking care of myself first." — Robert H.