About Coach Alexander T.

Coach Alexander T.

Alexander T. McPherson

Founder, Odyssey Early Learning & Development

I'm Coach Alexander T. I coach people through fear: children and adults, in the water, on land, in conversation, and in a room. I grew up in Portland, in Irvington, and I have spent nearly two decades in youth development: community development, education, fundraising, higher education. Through all of it I kept one foot in the water. It fed my heart and my mind long before I understood it was the work itself.

The Work

Fear wears many faces.

A subject at school. A career or a life change. A body that has never felt like home. The water. I work on the fear, not the face it wears, and I meet a person wherever they can be reached. Fear is what happens when mind, body, and breath come apart. Confidence is what happens when they come back together.

The water is where the work revealed itself, because nothing hides there: the body braces, the breath is held, the mind races. Week after week I watched people cross from fear into confidence, and understood that this was the work itself, in the pool and far beyond it. Odyssey is what happened when I stopped treating it as a skill I brought to a job, and found a way to do it completely.

In every role I have held, the part that was mine was walking beside someone as they crossed. In the original Odyssey, Athena takes the shape of Mentor to walk beside Telemachus and guide him home. That instinct was mine long before I named my own journey.

What Grounds the Work

Practice, Not Theory

I don't ask anyone to cross a threshold I haven't crossed.

Thirty Years in the Water

Swimming for over thirty years. The water is where the work revealed itself, and where it is clearest.

Ten Years of Meditation

Ten years of daily sitting. The calm before you try that I teach at the water's edge, practiced long before it became a cue I say out loud.

Movement as a Practice

Three years of yoga, and movement as its own discipline rather than exercise alone: the same union of mind, body, and breath, on land.

Ongoing Mentorship

A Mentor I stay under, deliberately. The inner work is not something I finished before starting this. It is a practice I keep, the same as the people I work with.

And Spirit. Everything I do begins and ends with self, and with Self. A person arrives whole. A condition is not a constitution. I hold that for the people I work with because I have had to hold it for myself.

All of it is one work: helping people face fear and move through it, to confidence and to coherence. Underneath that, teaching people to love themselves through mind, body, and breath. The age we live in runs fast. I mean to be the slow thing in it.