In The Nouns^™

Severe asthma has nearly killed me multiple times. I spent over two years in a hospital away from my family, starting at age four, often struggling with my body, to breathe. Asthma chased me through childhood, pre-teen, and early teen years until I broke free by getting into skiing and gymnastics, which led to me becoming a champion skier. Those crises taught me the first lesson: when survival depends on it, you figure out what actually works. Breathing became something I had to deeply understand, not something that just happened.

As a Canadian national freestyle skiing champion, I learned that relentless preparation creates unshakeable confidence under pressure. In the years developing my business career I was immersed in helping build technology companies, inventing technologies, and selling multi year multi-million dollar deals that doubled and tripled the size of companies, generating tens of millions in revenue. My many experiences through this demonstrated to me how pattern recognition is a critical skill to develop. This skill that I developed in breathing, skiing, personal and business relationships informed me how to recognize repeated patterns in people. This led me to the key to deep understanding, and ultimately successful relationships, actions, and projects.

But the real laboratory was acting. Training with Michael Shurtleff, Larry Moss, David Rotenberg, and Vincent Chase, along with over 25 other acting coaches, and one-on-one sessions with more than 40 Los Angeles casting directors. Performing in 100+ professional jobs and ultimately, training 3,500 actors over 27 years. That’s where everything converged.

I have always been fascinated by how art and science are interrelated and how they work together when it comes to acting. It was the scientist, Edward O. Wilson, whose approach to simplification inspired me immensely, and this directly led to many of my discoveries, and my entire noun-based investigation system. This bridged art and science. Beyond the acting tradition, Wilson’s simplification provided the framework for investigation, so that I could break complex ideas into parts I could easily understand.

What I discovered through noun-based script work, is that when an actor fully unpacked the possibilities for the deep meaning In The Nouns this exponentially elevated their performance. This was the operational framework for what the masters taught intuitively. When Stanislavski says “investigate given circumstances,” what you’re about to learn gives you an even more powerful script interpretation method. When Meisner says “live truthfully,” In The Nouns shows you how to be more receptive. When Strasberg says “access emotion,” this training system gives you the emotionally intelligent steps. The masters created the foundation that propelled me to build the staircase that everyone can climb.

What You’re Going to Learn

In The Nouns presents 10 evolutionary discoveries that extend 125+ years of acting training: 8 breakthroughs in performance methodology and 2 in optimal living. These aren’t replacements for what the masters taught. This is the accumulation of my research, testing, application, and evolution.

The Eight Acting Discoveries

• PERGE™, The script interpretation framework developed by me through many thousands of hours working with actors, helping them book roles, and elevating their performances on set. PERGE (Premise, Emotion, Relationships, Goals, Environment) that creates a visceral bridge in Stanislavski’s given circumstances.
• WorldView™, Character life mission statement that serves every decision.
• GoMoment™, Energizing statement that extends traditional objectives by focusing on what energizes action.
• Nouning™, Investigation of people, places, events, and things at the deepest of levels.
• Verbing™, Obstacle-informed action where the obstacle becomes the path.
• Presence Training, Essential Seven framework: Study, Listen, Feel, Move, Train, Trust, Leap.
• ARMES™, Emotional intelligence training which combines and amplifies Awareness, Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, Sustainability.
• Space, Universal phenomenon between stimulus and response where authentic choice exists. Like when we’re quick to confirm feedback with the word “okay.”

The Two Life Methodologies

• Intelaging™, A word I created to honor what I discovered that was causing my body and mind to age intelligently through conscious development and choices that encompass: Food, Environment, Athletics, Technology, and Soul wellness. Aging intelligence ages a human being like a fine wine.
• Collabication™, A practice born out of what pattern recognition discoveries taught me about the vast potential in people, and how I could help heighten and focus collaboration, communication, and commitment to succeed at nearly anything in life.

What You’ll Be Able to Do

Emerging actors: Analyze scripts, create authentic presence on demand, access genuine emotion, build a sustainable training practice, develop characters with a complete view of their world and the present moment.

Working professionals: Improve booking rates, prepare roles faster using a complete investigation, eliminate automatic response patterns, build sustainable careers, and transfer skills to the business of acting.

Acting teachers: Access 160 organized exercises across eight disciplines, build curricula producing measurable results, and bridge traditional training with contemporary discoveries.

Anyone seeking authentic communication to create genuine connections under pressure, and develop a complete presence that will serve you in business and life.

How the System Is Organized

Four integrated phases:

• Phase 1: Foundation (Presence, Craft), Complete presence training, and deep craft exploration.
• Phase 2: Application (Scripts, Integration, Characters), Thorough text analysis, empowering integration foundation, and immersive role development.
• Phase 3: Professional Practice (Auditions, Career), Real-world implementation.
• Phase 4: Optimal Living (Intelaging and Collabication), Performance training extends into life mastery.

160 exercises across eight training disciplines: PR Presence (12), CR Craft (61), SC Scripts (11), IN Integration (6), CH Characters (41), AU Auditions (9), CA Career (14), OL Optimal Living (6).

How to Use This Book

For complete mastery: Progress sequentially from Presence through Optimal Living. Each chapter builds on previous discoveries.

For specific challenges: Use domain-coded exercises to find exactly what you need. Struggling with emotional access? Jump to ARMES (PR5). Need character work? CH1-CH32.

For immediate impact: Start with the Auditions chapter, learn the booking methodology first, then work backward to understand the foundation.

For teaching: The eight-domain structure provides a ready-made curriculum organization. The Table of Contents lists all 160 exercises with domain codes for complete navigation.

The Promise

Whether you’re an aspiring actor, seasoned professional, curriculum developer, or anyone needing authentic communication under pressure, these tools work.

“Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.”, Konstantin Stanislavski

Stanislavski’s words hit me hard because his books were among the first I’d read from the great acting educators. He taught me something critical: you have to investigate deeply. You can’t leave a stone unturned.

But across my journey, I kept sensing something he couldn’t name. There was a relationship between art and science, something woven through everything I was discovering. I didn’t understand what that meant yet, but I knew it existed.

So I investigated. And what emerged changed everything you’re about to experience in this methodology.

Before we dive into the training system, let me share how my unified art-and-science discovery makes this all work. The movement starts with the noun. Let’s begin.

Over fifty years of coaching athletes, business professionals, and, for the bulk of that time, actors, teaching classes, working in rehearsals, and being on set, I discovered something that changed everything. Art and science aren’t two different ways of understanding human communication and the human experience. They’re the same investigation: break things down to essential parts, see how they work together. What emerged for me is a complete toolkit for authentic presence, character creation, and genuine human connection.

The breakthrough came from recognizing that the same investigation was expressed across different domains throughout my life. But I couldn’t see the pattern until I realized that art and science use the same base methodologies to achieve optimal outcomes.

Art Kidnapped Me: The Laboratory Years

Grade six. I’m spread across the living room carpet with colored pencils, obsessed with replicating Nova Scotia’s coastline. Not just drawing it, investigating it. Every inlet had to curve exactly right. Every precise angle of Halifax Harbor had to match the atlas. Every detail of Cape Breton Island required accuracy.

I’d spend hours on a single peninsula, checking my work against geographical reality, redrawing until the coastline investigation was complete. This wasn’t artistic expression. It was an investigation applied to geographical reality. Breaking down complex continental structures into essential visual elements and then reconstructing them with obsessive precision.

The train set I built during this period became my laboratory. Creating entire environments required both artistic vision and engineering. Every piece served the whole. Every track connection worked precisely. Every building existed in a proper relationship to the landscape. When a locomotive derailed, I investigated the track, the electrical connection, and the weight distribution.

“In The Nouns is my grown-up train set”, the same precision applied to human communication.

Acting Claimed Me: The Recognition Moment

Spring 1991. Michael Shurtleff’s workshop in Toronto. Eighty actors in the theatre, and Shurtleff who cast legendary actors including Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman demonstrated investigation-based character work through the application of his Guideposts.

“Don’t tell me what you think about your character,” he says. “Show me what you’ve discovered through investigation.”

The word that stops everything: Investigation. The exact process I’d applied to maps, to skiing, and to sales, now applied to human behavior. I recognize immediately the obsessive attention to specific detail, the refusal to accept generic assumptions, the breakdown of complex reality into essential elements.

At this moment I understood that deep investigation must be applied in acting. Working with Shurtleff and later with Janine Manatis, I developed the investigative skills that would lead me to discover what was missing for me as an actor and teacher. I was searching for a framework that could make this investigation replicable for any actor, not just naturally gifted actors.

Science Completed the Framework: Wilson’s Bridge

Preparing for a scientist role in a really whacky Sony film known as Zombie Strippers, working with Robert Englund, I was immersed in Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson’s reductionist methodology is breaking complex systems down to essential elements and understanding how they interact, and this was precisely what I’d been doing across all disciplines.

Wilson’s talking about reductionism (complex simplification), breaking complex systems down to essential elements, understanding how they interact, and I’m reading this thinking, “Holy shit, this is exactly what I’ve been doing my entire life.” The map obsession, the skiing breakthroughs, the business pattern recognition, the acting investigation: it’s all the same process, I just didn’t have the language for it. Then I hit Wilson’s famous line: “The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” What this means is Wilson was proposing that art celebrates the mastery of creation, not the analysis of it, and science investigates complex systems.

I disagreed and it stopped me cold. My map drawings were deep reductionism investigations applied to geographical reality. Wilson gave me the intellectual framework I’d been searching for, but he also showed me where his thinking bridged into mine and made me go further. Art and science aren’t different approaches. They’re the same investigative process applied to different subjects. You break things down to understand how they actually work, whether you’re studying ant colonies or building characters. Wilson’s reductionism, put another way, breaking things down to their essential elements, became the foundation that led me to create PERGE, a major foundation for how you will approach script interpretation which we will fully explore later.

The statement created immediate conflict in the beliefs of everything I’d discovered. Wilson distinguishes between art and science, but everything I’d experienced suggested they could share the same methodology. Wilson provided the intellectual framework that helped me articulate what I’d been discovering. His distinction illuminated a crucial point: what if the scientific approach he described for science could also enhance artistic development?

Wilson gave me the language for what I’d been building. His framework enabled me to see that the same scientific approach could also serve the very best in acting. Using universal principles you break things down to their essential parts, see how those parts work together, test what you think you know against actual reality, then adjust based on what actually happens.

Here’s what matters: the deeper you investigate, the more powerful your communication becomes.

What Comes Next

In the Presence chapter, you’ll receive training in the Seven Disciplines: how each element develops, how they integrate authentic communication in any situation. Each of the eight training disciplines works standalone. Together, they provide mastery that serves every aspect of authentic human communication.

The train set is built. The investigation is complete. Now it’s time to make it run.

The movement starts with the noun. The training begins with understanding that art and science are one investigation applied with precision.

A few years ago, I went through a deep challenge that shook me. My guard was down, my boundaries dropped, and my intuition was foggy. I had invested so thoroughly in something that when I lost it, the ground I stood on cracked open.

It hit every part of my life: my business, my teaching, and my ability to trust myself. Simple decisions felt impossible. I questioned everything I’d built over decades of investigation, my years of training actors, years in business development, and even the years of coaching athletes.

Hitting the wall, feeling boxed in and, for the moment, optionless, something fantastic also happened. I felt a familiar energy returning, the same force that had propelled me through decades of training, teaching, and discovery. I became fully present again. By being tested to my limit, I became deeply present, and out of that grew a resurgence of presence.

Building and maintaining Presence is a necessary foundation for everything we do in acting. Without presence, the technique can feel robotic, emotions can seem fake or out of reach, and the genuine truth becomes inaccessible. With presence, every moment offers a chance for true connection and growth.

For our purposes, In The Nouns defines full Presence as: the ability to show up as your real whole self in mind-body-spirit, on purpose, every single time, especially when the stakes are high.

Why does full presence feel so elusive for most people, even seasoned performers? There are many answers to that question, but before we dive into full presence training let’s examine why we don’t listen like we used to. Where listening is the key to effective human communication.

The OK Discovery: Cultural Programming

Why We Don’t Listen Like We Used To

Over 27 years teaching 3,500 actors, I noticed a pattern everywhere, classes, film sets, casting rooms, daily life. People constantly interrupt with verbal confirmations: “OK,” “uh-huh,” “I got it,” “yeah.”

The speaker needs almost no confirmation to complete their thought. But the listener’s need to confirm creates a devastating cycle: saying “OK” interrupts their own listening. They stop hearing to prove they’re hearing.

This happens most when people feel nervous or need to prove understanding. The pattern becomes automatic, a reflex that breaks the listening connection before comprehension completes.

The result: listeners don’t fully hear what’s being said, and speakers can’t complete their thoughts without interruption. Both sides lose the very connection the confirmation was meant to create.

The problem: Instead of confirming complete understanding (“all correct”), we default to abbreviated acknowledgment (“OK”) without verifying genuine communication occurred. This isn’t just linguistic evolution, it’s a cultural pattern that interrupts authentic presence before it develops. Presence requires what I call the “pre-okay moment”, that brief space before automatic deflection begins, when genuine reception and authentic response are possible.

We live in a culture that has gradually trained us out of being present. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post published “OK” as a humorous abbreviation for “all correct” meaning, complete reception and understanding verified. Five years later, when telegraph technology emerged, operators adopted “OK” for transmission efficiency under crushing time pressure.

The pattern embedded itself through generations: telegraph brevity, phone conversations, business communication, SMS character limits, Twitter’s 140 characters. “OK” became a universal shorthand, completely replacing “all correct” with abbreviated acknowledgment.

185 years later, this cultural programming is everywhere. Watch actors take direction: the automatic “okay,” “got it,” “sure,” “mm-hmm” that deflects instead of engages. This isn’t a personal flaw, it’s inherited programming from when shortened communication was economically necessary.

It starts early. Mom says “Annie, clean your room.” Annie responds “OK.” The pattern embeds itself young and becomes an inescapable listening interruption throughout life unless identified and fixed.

But presence demands the opposite. Instead of confirming complete understanding (“all correct”), we have become a society that adheres to an abbreviated acknowledgment (“OK”) which in itself, disrupts genuine communication.

OK: Cultural Reprogramming

In my first three years coaching actors, a pattern emerged: the best performers were excellent listeners. They stayed present in scenes and received feedback without defensiveness.

But 50-75% of actors weren’t truly listening. They’d interrupt with “OK,” that automatic deflection born in 1839 when telegraph operators shortened “all correct” into a quick acknowledgment that killed real listening.

That OK discovery became the catalyst. Make no mistake, there were many reasons I developed complete presence training: actors indicating emotion instead of feeling it, rushing through script analysis without investigation, performing objectives rather than living them, treating auditions like performances instead of conversations, relying on tricks instead of craft, separating their “actor self” from their authentic self. But the OK moment revealed the root issue. Without presence, none of the other training could land.

You need space between stimulus and response, even just a second, to actually receive what’s happening, process it, and choose your action.

Presence training interrupts you from interrupting yourself so you can become unstoppable. This is why Presence is the first discipline we teach in this book.

Pre-OK Moment Mastery: The moment before you say “OK,” stop. Ask: “Do I actually understand what’s being communicated, or am I abbreviating to move on?” This interruption creates space for authentic listening. In acting and human communication in general, it means investigating thoroughly before making choices. In acting and in life, it means a genuine connection rather than surface acknowledgment.

That’s where everything becomes possible.

The Essential Seven Presence-Discipline Framework

Here’s my evolved approach:

Study, Step-by-step observation of genuine response patterns.

Listen, Breaking through cultural programming to achieve real hearing.

Feel, Accessing emotion beyond automated reactions.

Move, Physical authenticity replacing habitual body patterns.

Train, Gradually developing authentic response skills.

Trust, Building confidence based on evidence rather than external validation.

Leap, Taking authentic action from your entirely genuine self.

We will delve into each of these essential seven in great detail.