The Foundational Coaching Vault

What’s more dangerous: a divided team searching for the right problem, or a unified team solving the wrong one?

Leaders aren’t just problem solvers. They create space, provide direction, and empower people to understand, frame, and solve the right problem – together.

Drawing on behavioral science, executive coaching, and more than two decades of leadership experience leading people through complex, uncertain, and high-risk environments as a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran and NATO strategic advisor, I explore why the most effective leaders don’t rush to solve problems. They create the conditions for better questions, divergent thinking, and shared understanding.

Vultures… a message for both you and them.

Welcome back inside The Vault.

“Put your mask on first!” 



There are two sides to every coin. Today, I sit down with Dawny Hill as she offers clarity and levity to this ever-elusive coin of rest.

This is our last episode inside The Vault for a season. I’m honored that Dawny’s voice is the one that will challenge, comfort, inspire, and linger long after the last spoken words fade.

To those who have listened in over the past two years, thank you for letting me be a part of your life’s journey.

This is the last Power of Framing before I enter a sabbatical for a period.

I trust this season offers you rest as you continue to build a virtuous life, team, and culture around you.

Virtue is always caught before it’s taught.

Rest is always received, not achieved.

The pregnant pause.

The fullness of time.

Patience.

Today's virtue holds the key to unlocking transformation.

I'm honored to share the story and insight of my brother and fellow Marine Corps officer, Ryan Tice.

This conversation is shaped by leadership under pressure, grief and endurance, faith refined through suffering, and the slow, often unseen work of transformation when the process feels endless and the end remains out of sight.

For anyone caught in the space between promise and fulfillment, slow down. Sit with us.

This one will change you.

The weight of the wait.

This week, we step into patience.

This is our 40th virtue inside The Vault, and 40 holds significance. The fullness of time required before transformation takes form.

I invite you to explore why patience is often the final proving ground of faith, not its absence.

This is not an episode for those in a hurry.

It is for those standing in the space between promise and fulfillment.

The question is simple, but costly:

What character and hope can only be reaped on the other side of suffering long in love?

“Prudence is the capacity to sense consequences and their impact, and then choose in a way that protects what is most sacred.”

This week, I sit down with my cousin, Saragine De Amorim, for a conversation spanning from Brazil to Norway that is as tender as it is piercing.

This is not a conversation about fear or timidity.
It is about discerning when to hold on, when to loosen your grip, and when prudence demands that you let someone walk their own road.

From bullying and self-discovery, to art, language, and the sacred tension of protecting without suffocating, Sara offers a framework for prudence that is earned, embodied, and from deep inside the well of the most beautiful of hearts.

This episode is for parents, leaders, creatives, and anyone standing at the edge of a season they cannot control, but must choose how to walk through. But most of all, it is for our beautiful daughters.

Family. Wisdom. Presence.
This one stays with you.

Sara, I love you and am so grateful for the gift of you.

More often than not, I find that prudence is provocative.
It gets the people going.

What voice is attacking what’s been entrusted to only you, and how do you find it, fix it, and finish it?

In this week’s framing question and story, we revisit a moment where prudence demanded decisive action, not silence, and explore why wisdom sometimes requires us to confront the voices that threaten our purpose, protection, and people.

This episode isn’t about violence.
It’s about responsibility.
And knowing when restraint ends and action begins.

In this first episode of Back 2 GoOD for 2026, Fred and I sit with what it looks like to model faith in the space between, when the future is still unclear, and when fear and doubt try to have the loudest voices.

Regardless of your worldview, your faith is being formed and passed down as a byproduct of your actions in the home, workplace, and circle of chosen people.

From parenting and prayer to courage and conviction, this conversation invites you to begin the year anchored, honest, and hopeful.

Welcome to the first episode of Off the Hinges for 2026. I have the profound joy and honor of sitting down with my mother, Sandy Marano. We talk about faith through the lens of family, grief, gratitude, and the quiet strength required to love well through life’s hardest seasons.

This conversation is about legacy. About voice. About what is passed down when words are lived long before they are spoken.

First for my wife and daughters. And also for the rest of you.

Mom, I love you and am so grateful to share your voice of faith with any and all who will listen.