“I’ve thought about the next chapter long enough. I’d like to start living it.”
Authorship by Design™ is sixteen weeks of private work with James: you decide what you want from the years ahead and what you’ll change to get there, and you start putting those decisions into practice.
You build a written plan for your next chapter, then start on it while James is still working with you, so the first steps are taken with support. That might mean renegotiating a responsibility, creating space for something you want, or taking the first step toward a bigger decision.
Working with James means less time weighing the same possibilities and more time acting on what you’ve decided. Most of these decisions touch each other. In twelve private sessions, he helps you put them in an order you can act on, and after each step he goes through with you what happened. The final five weeks are yours to use the plan in everyday life, with WhatsApp support throughout and a final private review.
You leave with a direction you’ve chosen and the first steps already taken. You decide what to keep, what to change and what needs more thought. Where you can, you try a small version of the change first and let what happens decide the next step.
Your Authored-Life Blueprint brings those decisions together: what matters to you, what you want your next chapter to hold, and what you’ll do over the next ninety days.
The result will look different for each man. It could be a responsibility shared, a commitment deliberately kept, or time set aside for something you’ve wanted to do. We work from your circumstances and account for the relationships and responsibilities involved.
You may already know what you want. You may have several possibilities and need to work out which one to pursue.
Either way, a change can touch several connected parts of your life. A different work schedule affects time at home. A move raises questions about relationships and money. Creating space for something new may mean changing an existing commitment.
We work through those decisions in an order you can act on. Keeping something, once you've thought it through, is a decision too.
For years I saw my daughter two or three times a year. I wanted time with her to be the first priority of my life, rather than something that fit around the rest of it. In 2019 I held an estate sale, sold the house, and on the day it closed I drove away in an RV with one deadline: Orlando by the fifth of December, for her birthday.
That was my change. Yours may be much smaller, or something else entirely.
Look at how you’re living now and what you want the next two years to hold. Your calendar, recent experiences and core values give us specific material to work with. You identify what needs attention and what you want to protect.
Examine the commitments, roles and expectations that stand in the way of what you want, or support it. The Subtraction Method® helps you decide what to release, renegotiate, redesign, keep or investigate. If changing a role raises questions about who you are without it, The Continuity Method® helps you identify the qualities and relationships you want to carry forward. Week 6 is a review of what has changed, before the design work begins.
Develop a picture of the next chapter, with its first two years in detail, across five areas of life: Meaning, Time, Freedom, Vitality and Connection. Put possible changes in order, including what can happen now, what depends on someone else, and what needs further exploration.
Bring the decisions into a ninety-day plan and continue putting them into practice. Weekly coaching runs through Week 11. The final five weeks are more self-directed, with a weekly checkpoint to James on WhatsApp and a final session to review what happened and what comes next.
You won’t wait sixteen weeks to start. There’s about ninety minutes of preparation before the first session, so we start on your life, not on introductions.
Through the program you bring real situations and decisions into the sessions. We agree the next action, or the question to look into, and then we look at what you learned. By Week 4 you’ve agreed one specific action and the date you’ll review it. By Week 10 you're making a change from your own Change Map and recording what actually happens.
Most sessions are sixty minutes; the opening session and the Week 11 session are ninety. James asks questions, tells you plainly what he sees, and checks it against what you know about your own life. What you do with it, you decide together.
Your Authored-Life Blueprint contains six tools you build in your own words:
You also write an Anchor that captures why the work matters to you, consider what you want to carry forward as roles change, and prepare conversations where a change needs someone else’s agreement.
The complete 146-page fillable workbook guides the work. You work through it in stages, alongside four short preparation videos and the private sessions. You keep it as a reference for future decisions.
These five weeks are yours to run, and they’re part of the sixteen. You follow your plan in your real week, stop at the reflection checkpoints, and note what works and what needs adjusting.
There are no weekly calls now, but you’re not on your own. Each week you send James your checkpoint on WhatsApp, and he answers it. Between those, the line stays open for quick questions, and if you want him to look at something in the workbook, send it to him. If the plan starts to go wrong in your real week, say so: that’s what these five weeks are for.
At the end you meet for the Activation Check-In, your twelfth session, sixty minutes: what happened, what to refine in your Blueprint, and what comes next. WhatsApp support ends there.
For the complete sixteen-week engagement. Included are twelve private sessions, your workbook and four preparation videos, your Authored-Life Blueprint and 90‑Day Plan, WhatsApp support throughout, and the five-week Activation Bridge with its final review.
Plan on about three focused hours a week through Week 11, the session included. Weeks 2 and 11 run longer, and the opening week also includes the preparation exercises. The final five weeks are lighter. We talk the workload through on the Clarity Call, so you can decide whether it fits what you’re already carrying.
The work is all twelve sessions (a rescheduled one counts), every exercise in the workbook, the five Activation weeks, and the questions you bring along the way. If you do it and finish without the clarity and the practical path you came for, tell James by email within seven days of your last Activation date. He’ll give you up to sixty more days of support at no cost, in the form that will help you most: further sessions, written feedback, a review of what you’ve put in place. It’s added support, not a refund, and it doesn’t promise what your life will look like after.
The one refund is the 72-hour window: ask by email within 72 hours of payment and before your first session, and you receive the amount paid less the card-processing fee, about three percent.
The full conditions are in the Refund Policy.
Authorship by Design is for men who want to work through several connected decisions about their next chapter and begin acting on them. You're willing to look hard at the commitments you have, do the work between sessions, and hear a view that isn't your own.
If you want to begin with one manageable change, Precision Realignment may be the more useful starting point. You can also come directly to Authorship by Design. You don’t need to complete another program first.
This is coaching, not clinical care. If you’re dealing with a recent loss, a health crisis or a big upheaval, tell James in the application. It won't decide on its own whether you're accepted; it helps him think through the timing with you.
The RV wasn’t my last change. I’ve redesigned my life more than once since, and lived for about a year or more in six countries. Every one of those decisions reached into my work, my money, my health and the people I love, and I didn’t make all of them well the first time. I know what these decisions ask of a man because I’ve made them with my own life.
For my last ten years in the Air Force I was a senior instructor pilot and an evaluator pilot, the one who gave the checkrides, and I spent three more years teaching in the simulator after that. That work taught me to tell a man plainly what I see, against a standard he agreed to before we started, and then help him meet it. That’s how I’ll work with you. You won’t have to translate yourself for me.
I’m also a trained clinical and rehabilitation counselor. Decisions about the next chapter reach into marriage, identity and what a man believes he owes the people around him. I can go into those things with you without backing away, and I keep the work practical: a decision made, and a step taken.
I work privately with a small number of men at a time, and I read every application myself. For sixteen weeks, when you take a step, I’m the one who goes through what happened with you. The next chapter stays yours.
Apply to work with James. He reads every application himself and writes back within forty-eight hours. If the work fits, he invites you to a private thirty-minute Clarity Call about your situation, the time involved and the terms.
If you both decide to proceed, James sends you a private enrollment link. When you enroll, your Welcome and Program Guide and your booking link open straight away. Your workbook and the session modules open on your fourth day.
No. Working that out is part of Clarify. You can arrive with a specific change in mind or with questions about what comes next.
Precision Realignment is five weeks with James and a small group of men at your stage to choose your first move toward the life you want, and start making it in your actual week. Authorship by Design is sixteen weeks of private work with James, for when several decisions about your next chapter are tied together and you want to make them and start acting on them.
You keep the tools, your written plan and a record of what you learned by using them. The workbook guides a ninety-minute review every ninety days, about six hours a year for those quarterly reviews. Acting on the plan, and using the tools for everyday decisions, takes time beyond those reviews. Ongoing private coaching isn’t included after the engagement, apart from anything the Show-Up Guarantee adds.
No. Some decisions are substantial. Others involve sharing a responsibility, setting a boundary or using an hour a week differently. The work helps you choose, and act, in a way that respects your circumstances and the people in them.
Yes. Within 72 hours of payment and before your first session, you can ask by email for a refund, less the card-processing fee, about three percent. After that, the Show-Up Guarantee applies. The full terms are in the Refund Policy.
Every time, you make a decision and take the first step.