For as long as I can remember, my brother and I were always working out ways to get things done faster.
A system for hauling in wood. A system for weeding the garden. A system for mowing the lawn. After all, the sooner we did our chores, the sooner we could get to playing. But looking back, we turned everything into a sort of game — and that made what seemed unbearable and completely unfair at the time a little more bearable while we were inside it.
That's when the systems thinking started.
By the time I had my own paper routes — three of them — I was constantly tinkering. Bike or walk? Fold the papers as I went or fold them all before I left? Could I train my customers to leave the money out for me so I wouldn't have to come back and collect? Each route was a system. Each system had loops in it that wanted to be closed. Each loop had a status. I didn't have any of those words yet, but I had the instinct.
I was eight years old the first time I heard Pink Floyd. The album was Animals.
I didn't have language for what happened in me when I heard it. I just knew something in that music was asking me questions nobody in my eight-year-old world was asking. Questions about power. About who the dogs, the pigs, and the sheep actually were. About why the adults around me seemed to be living inside a play nobody had written down.
I've lived with those questions my whole life.
And the strange thing — every time I come back to that album, or to The Wall, or Dark Side of the Moon, or Wish You Were Here, or The Division Bell — I'm faced with new questions. Not the same ones in different clothes. New questions. Questions I wasn't ready to hear the last time I listened.
That's what a great piece of music does. It doesn't finish with you. It keeps opening.
Somewhere in there I fell in love with physics and economics. Both are systems disciplines, and to this day I still read in both. Physics gave me the architecture of how things actually work. Economics gave me the architecture of how people behave when systems shape their incentives. The two together became the lens I used to look at everything else — including the people I was being paid to develop, decades later, inside corporate America.
I started inside corporate leadership development — at FedEx, GE, and Suburban Propane — teaching what I called Conversational Leadership. I built a pedagogy of language distinctions: pairs of words that, when held against each other, sliced through to what a person was actually wrestling with. Information vs. Transformation. Owner vs. Victim. Worry vs. Concern. That work changed lives, and it changed mine.
But I was building systems for other people's job descriptions. Not for my own life.
Then my own life cracked open.
The thing nobody tells you about functional burnout is that alcohol gets there first. Not as the cause. As the cover. Functional burnout is the slow accumulation of carrying more than was ever yours to carry while still showing up the way the world expects. Alcohol is what you reach for at the end of those days — to soften the edges, to turn the brain off, to make the bracing feel like rest.
Except it isn't rest. It's anesthesia. And the more you need it, the further you've drifted from the body that's been trying to tell you something for years.
I walked through both. The functional burnout that looked like high performance. The drinking that looked like winding down. And the long process of putting myself back together once I admitted that the system I was inside — corporate, cultural, personal — was never going to give me a way out.
I trained in trauma-informed coaching and learned what the corporate framework couldn't give me: the body keeps a record the mind cannot reach.
That's when the systems thinking I'd been doing my whole life finally turned around and looked at me.
I started writing Rewilding Your Soul: A Rebel's Guide to Being Human in a World Gone Wild. The book was the doorway. The EchoSystem is what came out the other side.
The EchoSystem is the distinctions I taught for thirty years, finally given the somatic and trauma-informed register they were always missing. For people who want it, it can also be grounded in objective biometric data so the part of you that prefers the story has something to argue with.
It is what I needed when I was lost inside my own life.
It is the first system I've ever built that actually worked. The reason is simple: it's the first one I built for my own life, not for someone else's job description.
It is what I now build, collaboratively, with the people who walk through this door.
It has roots. It is not a coaching trend.
— Gary