Additional Expertise
Specialties
About Russell Heath
This is what you need to know about my professional biography: I was still a teenager when I rode my thumb from Philadelphia to Fairbanks, Alaska and spent the winter in a cabin on the banks of the Tanana River reading great books and chopping lots of wood. It was neither my first nor last time slipping the bonds of convention, but it’s the most archetypal.
In my twenties, I lived in Italy and then traveled overland across the Sahara, through the jungles and over the savannas of Africa and into southern Asia; I've sailed alone around the world in a 25 foot wooden boat; written novels; and, when I left Alaska, I bicycled the spine of the Rockies to Mexico. I've worked on the Alaska Pipeline, as an environmental lobbyist in the Alaska Legislature, and run a storied environmental organization fighting to protect Alaska’s coastal rainforests.
Some chase happiness, I chase awe and wonder and the sense of being in the presence of something achingly vast and far beyond myself.
Along the way, I realized that I had a gift of leveraging people out of their grayness and their stuckness and I formalized it by becoming a life and leadership coach. I work with people who want more out of their lives, their careers, their relationships. People who want to make big things happen.
A good coach has had to do his/her work. I can’t coach you into territory that I haven’t already brushed out myself. Yes I have been rigorously trained, yes I have the distinctions, know the litany, and work to deepen that knowledge—it’s important stuff—but, I have traveled (am traveling) the path. I have beaten myself bloody against the walls of myself.
This is what I offer my clients: A formal rigor, a varied experience of the world, a willingness to step out of bounds, an irreverence, and--I have done my work.
