I was one of those "non-traditional" students in high school. Non-traditional meaning I barely went to class and barely graduated. Which did not leave me many prospects. So at seventeen I enlisted in the Navy, spent four years on active duty aboard the USS Detroit, deployed overseas twice, and qualified as a surface rescue swimmer.

I went straight from the service to school, which made me non-traditional again: twenty-one years old, four years in the Navy, and a freshman. A bachelor's in acting and directing from DeSales University, then an MFA in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, where I studied with William Esper, Deborah Hedwall, Israel Hicks, Eileen Blumenthal, J. Allen Suddeth, and Earle Gister.

Rutgers is where the rest of my life got its shape. Bill Esper was a protege of Sanford Meisner, and the program runs three years. In the first one you are not allowed to act, not in the way most people mean it. No memorizing lines and handing them back. They take your habits away from you first, and then they give you a technique. It works. I have watched it work for more than twenty years.

Meisner understood that acting is not about words, it is about behavior. Bill put it to me this way: if acting were about words, Charlie Chaplin would have been an idiot. Charlie Chaplin was a genius.

Three things from that room are still with me, and they are what I teach now:

Behavior over words. What you do tells people who you are long before your sentences get a vote.

A predictable structure and an unpredictable delivery. The scene is set and the circumstances are known, and still you live it one unanticipated moment to the next, with no idea where the next one goes.

A point of view, visible in your behavior. You let people see how you actually feel instead of working to keep it off your face.

John Cleese said that nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. I have never seen that proved more plainly than in a first year Meisner class, and I do not think it stops at creative. Nothing will stop you from being anything so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. I also believe we are most ourselves when we are at play, and whatever room I am in, the job is the same: get the best in somebody to come out and play.

I moved to New York City after Rutgers and called it home for more than twenty years. I fell into portrait photography and made a living at it for over a decade. Thousands of people sat in front of my lens, and everything I had learned about behavior turned out to belong there too.

Eve Arnold, one of the first two women to join Magnum Photos, wrote: "If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument." That is the sentence I have worked from ever since, in every room I have walked into since I put the camera down professionally. The instrument is not the tool and it is not the technique. It is the relationship.

Like most working artists, I needed a survival job. Mine turned out to be an education. For ten years I worked with the CIO Strategy Exchange, which brought twenty-five chief information officers from Fortune 70 companies together twice a year, behind closed doors, to work on the biggest problems facing their companies. I was close enough to watch how those people talked so that others listened, and how they listened so that others talked. I learned that much of what I was taught as an actor was being practiced by the most successful people in those rooms.

So I started coaching founders on those two skills. That work took me to the University of New Hampshire, where I taught communication at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics for five semesters. That course was the pilot for the workshop I bring into companies now.

Twenty years in the field taught me one thing I could not put down: you cannot separate a person's psychology from the way they communicate. I understood the art of it. I wanted the science. As a result, I decided to go back to school, non-traditional one more time, for a second Master's in clinical mental health at Northwestern University.

These days I divide my time, happily, and every piece of it feeds the others.

Most of it goes to the Communication Dynamics Lab and the workshop: How to Talk So People Listen. (And Listen So People Talk.) Athletes have the practice field. Actors have the rehearsal room. The rest of us never got a place to work on the thing we do all day, which is talk to each other. That is what the day is for.

I am the CEO of SoHo Creative Studio, a virtual video production company for financial advisors, attorneys, and business owners who want people to trust them before the first meeting. Same job, different room.

I still act, less than I used to. Photography went back to being a hobby. And I am writing a book with the same name as my workshop: How to Talk So People Listen (And Listen So People Talk).

I have never found the right word for a path like this one. Non-linear. Multi-hyphenate. None of them fit, and I have stopped trying to make one.

But if there is a line underneath all of it, it is this: What is most personal is what is most universal. The thing you are certain is only happening to you is the thing everybody in the room recognizes the second somebody says it out loud. That is the result I am after, every time, in every one of these rooms: a person walks out knowing they are not alone (and that there is hope).