About
My son Sam taught me to listen.
Forty years teaching leaders. Twenty years learning to hear my son. Both feed the same work now.
Where it started
Four decades on the sales floor and the stage
I spent forty years in sales leadership and organizational development, presenting to groups of five to five thousand. My Cutco and Vector sales background includes eight National Championships and a Hall of Fame induction. I run Leadership Lighthouse Consultants, where that experience turned into training and coaching for other leaders.
What Sam taught me
A symposium, and twenty years I’d misread
My son Sam is an unreliable speaker with autism and apraxia. For twenty years I read his limited speech as limited understanding. In 2018, I sat in a symposium and watched a nonspeaking teenager spell out sentences most adults couldn’t write. That was the moment I began to understand how much I had missed.
Sam communicates by spelling on a letterboard and an iPad that speaks his words aloud. Learning to truly hear him taught me more about listening than four decades of leadership work ever did.
That same skill is behind HeartMind Leader: presume competence, listen first, and use AI to add context and care, not to replace them.
The book
Sam and I told the rest of the story in Real Words with Sam: A Father and Son Navigate Autism, Apraxia, and Unexpected Intelligence, which reached #1 on Amazon after its 2026 launch.
More about the book— J Brad Britton