Co-founder of Betweenward & Publisher of What Time Binds
I work with people whose sense of who they are was built inside a role: a rank, a title, a seat on the org chart. When the role ends, the skills stay and the words for them go missing. I help people find those words and build the next thing on ground that holds.
Specialties: Identity After the Role | Military-to-Civilian Transition | Job & Graduate School Applications
Where I Come In
People usually reach me when someone asks, “So what do you do now?” and the answer won’t come. The uniform came off, or the title went away on someone else’s schedule, or the résumé started to read like a stranger’s. Some arrive with a deadline: a job posting, a graduate program, a first interview in a field that speaks a different language. In the language of María’s Ripple Journey, I often meet people at the Drop.
I start with the question most coaches skip: why does your body resist the change your mind already wants? Once we answer it, we pin the word you use for yourself (“retired,” “former,” “just consulting now”) and decide together whether it still fits.
The Way I Coach
I coach the way I was trained to build. A combat engineer walks the site before anyone breaks ground, so we start with what is still holding, what has shifted, and what you can build on this month. The order matters. We work on feeling safe first, then on connection, then on purpose, because goal-setting stalls until your nervous system stops reading the change as a threat.
From there the work gets practical.
Translating your experience. We rewrite rank, billet, and title in the words people in your next field use, and we name what each skill was and where it went.
Applications. You work in one of the two workbooks I built: Map the Job for a role, Map the Program for a graduate program. For every requirement, you answer two questions in your own words: what do I bring, and what would I do once I’m there. We also find the magnet words in the posting, the phrases that could mean three different things, and plan the question that pins down which one they mean. You write every line that proves you belong, and no tool writes them for you. I pressure-test them.
A written closeout. At the end you get a record of what we did, what you now run on your own, and what is still open.
One habit to know up front: I tend to answer three levels deeper than the question. So I ask early, short version or the full walk-through, and you set the depth.
Also offered: I help writers and coaches build and grow a Substack publication.
What Shaped This Work
I spent twenty-three years in the Marine Corps as a combat engineer: demolitions, construction, facilities, and project management. On recruiting duty, I was named Recruiter of the Year in 2001. Twenty-five years later, one of my recruits found me on LinkedIn. He had earned a commission and outranked me. I answered as the man I had become instead of the recruiter he remembered, and he did the same. I call that Personization.
Nine years in corporate facilities and business continuity followed. When I left that work in 2025, I sat up at 2:00 AM with a question my résumé could not answer: who am I without the role? The pattern I had seen in the Marine Corps and in corporate work showed up in my own crossing. People keep their skills and lose the words that connect those skills to who they are next.
I built the first version of Map the Job in 2016, a two-column worksheet for my own move from the Marine Corps into a facilities role at SCAN Health Plan. I have refined it with clients for ten years since.
My doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier gave me the research behind what I had lived: reinvention runs on biology, identity, and community together. Today I teach at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and I publish What Time Binds, where I write about how institutions bend words and how the record holds them to account.
If You’re Ready to Talk
If you are carrying a question your résumé can’t answer, a conversation is the place to start.
Email info@betweenward.com and write: “I’d like to explore coaching with Jerry.”
You’ll hear back from me personally, and the first conversation carries no obligation.