New behaviors are not created through new insights.

New behaviors are created through new experiences.

Understanding the problem is rarely enough to change it. But we have never been asked to be more performative than we are right now, which means it has never been harder to have an authentic experience. The meeting that is somehow also an audition. The pitch that is somehow also a screen test. The Zoom that is somehow also a stage. Most people are good at what they do and quietly exhausted by the version of themselves they run while doing it. The cost is trust. Trust does not arrive from polish. It arrives from presence.

We do not think our way into presence. We experience our way into it. Drop the Act™ is the body of work built on that fact. One methodology, lived in different rooms.‍ ‍

The Communication Dynamics Lab™ is the rehearsal room. Athletes have the practice field. Actors have the rehearsal studio. Professionals have the Lab: a psychologically safe room to practice the highest-stakes thing they do, talking to other human beings. Full-day labs and ongoing labs that turn one breakthrough day into a monthly practice, for teams who want confident, clear, and compelling communicators in front of clients, on stage, and on Zoom. Applied psychology and conservatory training, delivered as experience, not theory. The Lab has run for Red Hat, Soho House, and Blockchain Capital.

SoHo Creative Studio is the camera room. For law firms, financial advisors, and consultancies, the website is the first room their next client walks into. SoHo is the trust-building video system. We handle the recording, production, and publishing. The professionals show up and share what they know. More clients. Better fits. Shorter sales cycles.

The presentation is the keynote, Drop the Act: The Power of Presence in a Performative World, for conferences, leadership offsites, and executive education. The deepest version lives in a fourth room, my private therapy practice, where the act can come down because the room is sealed by confidentiality.

How I got here. Former U.S. Navy Rescue Swimmer. Conservatory-trained actor, MFA in acting from Rutgers University. Portrait photographer with work in The New York Times and on Comedy Central. A decade producing the CIO Strategy Exchange, the off-the-record community of Fortune 70 Chief Information Officers. Communications Professor at the University of New Hampshire Paul College of Business. Currently completing a second Master's in Applied Psychology at Northwestern. Three decades being present with people under pressure.