I did not build this work from a classroom. I built it because I needed it before I had it.
For a long stretch of years, my life did not look like the future my grandmother had spoken over me. I spent two decades drifting inside the gap between who I was told I was and who my behavior was training me to become — drifting, drinking, breaking promises to myself.
It didn't start with a plan. It started with a single, unbreakable five-minute promise to myself — one commitment I refused to break, no matter how small. That promise became a daily prototype, repeated and refined against real life, and that daily prototype is what eventually evolved into the MINE Framework and the DESIGNER Protocol. MINE was lived before it was ever taught to anyone else.
Built from a Life, Not a Theory
The Power of "The Knowing" and MeMaw's Belief
Growing up, there was always a quiet, persistent voice inside me that I came to call the knowing — the deep awareness that I was made for more than my daily behavior was reflecting.
That voice was placed in me young by my grandmother, Mary Sue Collins. We called her MeMaw. Long before I had the clinical language for what was happening, her absolute belief in me became a permanent part of my internal architecture. The gap between the person she saw and the person my repeated choices were creating is the exact gap I built MINE to help other people close.
Architecting the Curriculum
As I climbed out of that gap, I realized inspiration wasn't enough — I needed a structural system, not just self-help. So I stepped into the role of architect and engineered two core systems: the DESIGNER Framework, the master blueprint that shifts a life designed by default to one consciously engineered by choice, and the Toolbox Protocol, the behavioral engine that equips people with the stress-resistant sequencing skills to regulate, dissect old habits, and choose a better response in real time.
Together, these form the architecture of everything we teach across three generations through our nonprofit arm, Community MINE — youth learn it as DESIGNER, in school; seniors live it through Mining for the Jewels Within, where their stories and hard-earned wisdom get carried forward instead of lost. Different ages, same ladder — the one I used to climb out myself.
