Who I am — Musician, Teacher, Coach
A professional musician for over 40 years, I’ve held the position of principal trombone in many wonderful orchestras: Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, PACT Symphony (Pretoria) and, since 1985, Bern Symphony Orchestra. I’ve also had the privilege to play with many illustrious ensembles such as the Toronto Symphony, RSO Frankfurt, Tonhalle Orchestra and Opera Zürich, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Halle Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. I’ve enjoyed chamber music activities with groups such as the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, International Brass Soloists and Le Group de Sept.
In 1987, I was awarded the Silver Medal in the International Prague Spring Festival Competition, which led to numerous engagements and international tours with orchestras, wind ensembles and brass bands. I’ve recorded extensively on radio and CD with piano, Brass Bands, Wind Ensembles as well as the Ernst Bloch Symphony for Trombone and Orchestra and the world premiere of Klaus Cornell’s “The Legend at Mary’s Peak” with the Bern Symphony.
Currently, I’m a professor at the Zürich University of the Arts, teaching trombone, chamber music, and Performance, Mental and Audition Training (Audition Boot Camp). An NLP Practitioner and Hypno-coach, RMT Strategic Intervention Life Coach, and wingwave® practitioner, I give master classes, seminars, and private coaching worldwide for musicians, dancers, actors, sports and businesspeople in performance training. My other great passion is helping people to change their restrictive, non-serving, self-defeating stories, their negative state, and to help them to proactively become the best person, the real person they were meant to be.
How I Got Here — My own Journey from “stuck” to “flow.”
I’ve always been fascinated by great performers, be they hockey players, ultra-marathoners, musicians, actors, teachers, doctors, businesspeople, parents…the list is endless. What is it that makes them so good at what they do? How can one translate that special something into any sort of endeavour?
I wouldn’t discover the answer to those questions without going through my own difficult journey. It started after my wife left me and I fell into a deep depression, fuelled by copious quantities of alcohol and self-pity.
Looking for a way out, I happened to notice an advertisement for Strategic Intervention Coach Training, offered by The Robbins-Madanes Institute. The course involved a lot of self-work, working with relationships, with generations, what self-talk does to us, and a whole lot more. I’d really forgotten what “schoolwork” was, so the year-long course was a real eye opener!
During that year I was drawn to another program — Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), which forms the basis of much of Tony Robbins (the Robbins of Robbins Madanes) work. I signed up for the introductory weekend course and was instantly hooked. I finished my Practitioner training the following year, followed by my Hypnocoach NLP certification one year later. In November 2020, I became a certified Wingwave® Practitioner (More about these fascinating subjects at a later time).
I got my life totally turned around thanks to what I’ve learned in these years, and now it’s my turn to help others (maybe you?) to get to their desired state.