From a prison cell to the front of the room.

For years, I looked like a success. I was a social worker, a policy insider at the Texas Capitol, and a father. Underneath, untreated mental illness and addiction were pulling me apart, until they led me to commit robbery. Ultimately, I spent six years in Texas prison.

That is not the part of my story I hide. It is the part that taught me everything I now teach.

In prison I learned what leadership actually is. It is the willingness to take radical responsibility for your life and to lift the people around you. I taught sexual assault prevention inside those walls. I rebuilt myself from nothing. And when I came home, I stood at job fairs where no one would take a chance on me. That is exactly why I refuse to let anyone's past be the end of their story.

Today I am the award-winning author of The Path of Rocks and Thorns: Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell. I have served as a policy expert at the Texas House of Representatives and as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, where I took leading roles on campaigns that lowered incarceration, expanded diversion and treatment, and opened doors to employment and occupational licensing. I spent more than eight years as an adjunct professor of social policy at the University of Texas at Austin, where I also earned my masters in social work, and I hold a coaching certification through Erickson Coaching International with an emphasis in trauma-informed practice.

I work with everyone from people fresh out of prison to senior executives. It takes little time for them to arrive at the same place: a clear vision, a plan of action, and trust in their own capacity to lead. I hold every person's history, the patterns that serve them and the ones that have cost them, as a strength we can use to move forward with courage.

I live in Austin, Texas, with my wife, our three adult children, and three rescue dogs.