Guide · Coach · Hypnotherapist
About Dusty Sylvanson — Life Coach & Hypnotherapist
I'm a man who spent his life learning to find his own bearings — and now helps others do the same.
I was born on a leap day, which meant I was counting my life in four-year chapters before I understood why that would matter.
As a boy I built forts in the forest behind my parents' house, mostly because that's where I felt most comfortable in the world — and where I could hear myself think. That's the thread running through everything since — a lifelong practice of listening for the quiet signal underneath the noise other people wanted me to follow. In my teen years, I picked up a hammer and started learning the carpentry trade, for the love of building things — a tool belt I've carried ever since.
That took me into the wilderness of North America, and, for a time, as far as India and Nepal. I guided trips and taught wilderness medicine — principles people could use to read a situation, trust their own judgment, and respond skillfully, for the benefit of themselves and others.
Eventually the tool belt became a business. I founded Straw & Timber Craftsmen and ran it for twenty years in the Gunnison Valley — testing homes as a building science professional, evolving natural building technique through my design-build process, and training the builders who worked alongside me as we built dozens of homes with a lower-impact, higher-efficiency model.
And through recovery — over twenty-two years of it now — into being a husband and a father.
And back into training again: Mindful Life teacher, life and Ikigai coaching, and most recently transpersonal hypnotherapy, found, fittingly, on a leap year birthday.
None of it was a straight line. All of it was practice.
I work with people who are ready to stop living someone else's story and start authoring their own — to become their own author-ity. This work is built from my own years in recovery, running a business, and guiding men's inner work, and while my specialty runs deepest with men, this door is open to anyone ready to find their way back to themselves.
I'm not the authority. You are. My job is to help you find it.
Certifications & Training
Certified Life Coach
Certified Ikigai Coach
Certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist
Certified Mindfulness Instructor
Wilderness Medicine Instructor
NOLS Instructor
This isn’t therapy. What I offer is a guided journey — grounded in deep experience and a genuine belief that every person who finds their way here already carries the intelligence they are looking for. My job is to help create the conditions in which that intelligence can be heard.