it started as a road trip. It became a mission.

That road trip taught us something about how to engage in difficult conversations. We learned that by listening, we were listened to. By asking questions, questions were asked of us. By beginning to understand the ‘other’, we were beginning to be understood. We became more human to each other. Our different perspectives, when shared, did not die on the other’s vine. There was a chance they would at some point yield fruit.

When we returned home I wanted to share with others what we’d learned from our trip — how it’s possible to communicate and connect with people we feel at odds with. So I created a one-day workshop called Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together. I offered the workshop for free, and found myself working with community and business leaders, high schools and universities, religious congregations, non-profit volunteers, and more. Every time the feedback on the workshop was overwhelmingly positive. More importantly, I saw real change occur. A few examples:

• A young woman who did not want to interact with a Trump supporter, changed her mind after she discovered they had something in common more important than ideology.

• A man who was leading an effort to recall two city council women he found too liberal, decided after the workshop that he’d been trapped in his own echo chamber, and chose to advocate for dialogue instead.

• Two city leaders who were having an argument that was playing out in the local newspaper, decided after the workshop to meet face to face to hash things out. Doing so “completely turned their relationship around.”

• A business leader at odds with other segments of his community on how to address the city’s homelessness problem, stood up at the end of the workshop and declared: “I know why we’re not making progress. I’m not listening.”

Because of stories like these, I wanted a way to go beyond the workshop to reach more people. So after three years, I turned it into a book of the same name.

A life-long passion.

My focus on relationship building did not begin in 2017. My whole adult life I’ve been involved in efforts to bridge seemingly unbridgeable divides. In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, I was a Fellow with the Beyond War Foundation, a multi-national effort to educate people on the obsolescence of war in the nuclear age, and the imperative of improving US/Soviet relations. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and relations between the superpowers dramatically improved, Beyond War became the Foundation for Global Community. I joined the board of the new enterprise, and throughout the 1990s we expanded our focus to address a wide range of social and environmental issues. Again the means was education, and as a board member I helped create and lead the foundation’s workshops and seminars, which sought to illustrate that all our challenges share a common root: A lack of understanding of the fundamental unity of life, and that what we do to others and to the planet, we ultimately do to ourselves.

In the 2000s, the Foundation for Global Community sold its assets and became a funding foundation. One of the efforts it funded was mine. In 2005, after leaving my job as the vice president of communications at a major technology firm, I helped launch Global Mindshift: A non-profit social network offering online educational programs to develop the personal skills we need to live in an interconnected and interdependent world. While hundreds passed through our courses, to be viable we needed tens of thousands to do so. After five years we closed our doors.

But then, as is often the case, another door opened. Earlier I’d met the founders of FeelGood, a non-profit that engages college students in the mission to end global hunger and poverty. The two founders were followers of Global MindShift, and invited me to take the educational program we’d created and incorporate it into FeelGood’s program. Together we adapted it to their online curriculum, and made it a central component of the organization’s annual retreat.

Eventually FeelGood was handed over to a new generation of leaders, and the two founders and I launched a new non-profit initiative: A consulting firm specializing in helping organizations build empowered communities of youth leaders. Called Crew 2030, it’s still active today, serving dozens of organizations that in turn serve hundreds of thousands of youth. While I still serve as a consultant, the 2016 presidential election shifted my priorities and my mission, bringing me to the work I’m doing today.

Some people will say their mission is their life, and that’s mostly true for me. But I do have a family that also absorbs my loving attention: My wife of 40-plus years, who’s a high school English teacher; and our two adult sons who traded the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the more reasonably-priced, and some say more beautiful, Pacific Northwest. One son makes a living as a PR consultant, the other as a wine, beer and food enthusiast.

Other than my work and family, I love to read, play pickleball, get better at meditating, and travel. In fact, it was traveling that probably had the biggest impact on my life’s direction. In 1983 my wife and I moved to China for two years to teach English at a small engineering college in Kunming. When our tour in China was over, we spent another six months traveling in Southeast Asia and India.

Throughout our travels, the beauty of the people and the landscape was overwhelming. But so too was the poverty, and the contrast between that and our life in the United States was impossible to overlook. It changed our lives.

When we came home, we told ourselves that no matter how much money we made, we wouldn’t follow the path of continually increasing our material standard of living. Instead, we’d live more simply, save money, earn our financial freedom faster, and devote the majority of our life’s energy to helping make the world a better place for everyone.

Considering that when we came home we had $10 to our name, my wife was pregnant and I had no job or insurance, it was a fairly audacious commitment. But happily, it all pretty much worked out.

More particulars: I hold a BA in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles, and live with my wife, Amy, in Mountain View, California.