Facing My Mortality Changed My Understanding of Trust

What surviving an aortic dissection taught me about leadership under pressure.

The idea for The Trust Transformation did not begin in a hospital room. But a hospital room is where its meaning became unmistakably clear to me.

It began more than a decade earlier.

In 2007, I started working on a concept I called Outrageous Trust. At the time, I had spent years observing leadership teams and organizations wrestling with the same invisible problem.

Decisions were made in meetings, but later they unraveled.
Alignment appeared strong on the surface, but beneath it, people hesitated to challenge one another honestly.
Accountability was often unclear, and leaders frequently carried the weight of important decisions alone.

What I began to realize was that while most organizations valued trust, they thought that highlighting it in mission statements or culture presentations was enough.

But trust is actually something much more powerful.

It is an operating system.

Just as the operating system in a computer determines how everything functions beneath the surface, trust determines how decisions hold up, how relationships function, and how organizations perform under pressure.

Over the years, that idea continued to develop.

Then in 2017, something important happened.

Working alongside leaders at AdventHealth and collaborating with Dr. Omayra Mansfield, we launched what would become The Trust Transformation as an evidence-based employee training program.

Through an Institutional Review Board study, we examined how people experienced trust before and after the training. What we discovered was encouraging.

Participants began to shift their thinking about trust. Instead of seeing it as abstract or aspirational, they began to recognize it as practical and observable. Something that could be intentionally designed into leadership and culture.

The data showed measurable positive changes. People began to see trust less as a vague cultural value and more as a system that shaped how leaders made decisions, communicated with one another, and worked through conflict.

It confirmed something I had believed for years. Trust is not simply a leadership virtue. Trust is a leadership system.

But two years later, that idea became deeply personal. In 2019, my life changed suddenly and dramatically.

Kim and I had spent what felt like a perfectly normal evening together. We went out to dinner at our favorite sports bar, checked off a few things on the weekend honey-do list at Home Depot, and ended the night watching a movie together on Netflix.

Eventually, Kim went to bed while I stayed up to watch another movie.

At some point, I fell asleep on the couch.

Around two o'clock in the morning, I woke up from the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.

It felt like someone was punching a hole through my chest and ripping my heart apart.

I ran into the bedroom and woke Kim up.

"You need to get me to the hospital, I think I’m having a heart attack," I told her.

We jumped into the car and drove to the hospital. We did not call 911, which in hindsight feels like the first of many miracles that night. Driving ourselves meant we got there faster.

On the way to the hospital, I suffered a stroke and became unresponsive.

When Kim pulled up, she had to run inside and get nurses to come outside and pull me from the car and rush me into the emergency room.

A CT scan revealed the cause. An acute aortic dissection.

The inner wall of my aorta had torn open. Blood was forcing its way between the layers of the artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body. It is one of the most life-threatening medical emergencies a person can experience. A 2-3% survival rate.

Within minutes, the medical team began preparing me to be transferred to AdventHealth Orlando for emergency surgery.

The last thing I remember is a nurse giving me a shot of morphine before loading me onto the helicopter. Then everything went dark. Seven days later, I woke up.

During those seven days, surgeons had worked for hours to repair the damage and replace portions of my aorta. My body fought through the trauma of the surgery and the complications that followed.

When something like that happens, your perspective changes.

The noise of everyday life fades quickly.

The things that once felt urgent lose their grip.

And the relationships that matter most come into sharp focus.

But recovery forced me to confront something else as well.

Some aspects of my life were out of sync with my purpose.

Healing was not only physical. It was deeply personal.

I had to learn to trust myself again. I had to rebuild trust in relationships that had been strained by the pace and pressure of life. And I had to learn, in a very real way, what it means to trust others in moments when you cannot control what happens next.

The theory I had spent years developing suddenly became visceral.

I experienced firsthand what pressure does to a human being.

And I experienced how essential trust becomes when life places you in moments you cannot manage alone.

That experience reinforced something I now often tell leaders.

When you are called to lead, you will be tested.

Leadership inevitably brings moments that feel overwhelming. Moments when the stakes are high and the consequences are real. Moments when you are forced to confront difficult truths about yourself, your relationships, and the people you lead.

Those moments can feel like disruption. But often they are something else. They are alignment. They clarify purpose and call us to lead differently.

My recovery became one of those moments. It reshaped my perspective and clarified the direction of my work.

Since then, I have fully committed my career to helping leaders and organizations understand trust more deeply. Not simply as an idea, but as a practical operating system that shapes how people work together.

Because when pressure arrives, trust is no longer theoretical.

It becomes the difference between stability and fragmentation.

Between decisions that hold and decisions that unravel.

Between leaders who carry pressure alone and teams that move forward together.

Crises do not create culture. They reveal it.

The leaders and organizations that navigate pressure most effectively are the ones who have built strong foundations of trust long before the crisis arrives.

They have learned how to challenge one another honestly, align around shared purpose, and hold decisions with clarity and accountability.

Trust was not assumed.
It was intentionally built.

Looking back, my aortic dissection transformed my life. It reinforced a lesson I now share with leaders everywhere. It is one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

Build trust before the crisis.

Because when pressure inevitably arrives, trust is what allows people to hold together and move forward.

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The Trust Transformation

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I help seasoned leaders turn chaos into clarity—building trust-driven teams, lasting culture, customer value, and peace at work and home.

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