Qualifications, certifications, experience and education

Hopefully, I can provide you with sufficient information about my experience and knowledge to help you feel confident working with me. If nothing else, I hope you enjoy this moderately entertaining story and find a few good books to read later.

Each qualification or certification is a piece of the much larger jigsaw puzzle. I have become accustomed to seeing long lists of certifications designed to impress potential clients. In the last twenty years, I have seen a massive upswing in the number of courses and certifications in just about everything imaginable. People then adopt the course title as an identity, as in, “I’m a breathwork coach, or, I’m a personal trainer.” In this section, I will show you where I learned each skill and who taught it to me. I believe that is important. I believe it is hugely important to honour the legacy of our mentors, including the ones we never met face to face.

Educational history is essential, in my opinion. I have a lifelong love of learning and enjoy discovering new concepts and ideas. Not all my learning culminated in a graduation certificate, but it still shaped and influenced my perspective. Education gave me a framework for integrating new concepts with established knowledge. I fell in love early with the scientific method and have spent a lifetime curiously exploring ideas, testing norms and beliefs, and running experiments that place me ahead of the curve, most of the time. Sometimes, it just makes me sound crazy.

I am not about to say the books I’ve read count as courses, so I’ve created a page of top reads to show how I arrived at some of my conclusions. You can find the bibliography here.