“I like to help people realize how much they already know,””

You matter. Keep going.

Reading Ben Sanford’s four-word mantra might leave you feeling a bit exposed. It’s straightforward and unmistakable, perhaps even uncomfortable.

But Sanford, 48, has been where you are, and his business, Tribal Edge, exists to remind people of why they matter, and where they’re going.

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Sanford has a deep history of place with his surroundings. Catching up after the work day early in the new year, Sanford touched in on his life work.

“I’m third generation here, and family’s here, and I am, as much as a Caucasian person can, feel I belong here,” he said.

“I grew up here on the Olympic Peninsula,” he said. “I was kinda a wild kid.”

For Sanford that looked like playing outside coupled with a fascination for learning, and reading: “mentorship through books,” he called it.

“The Peninsula has just patterned who I am,” he added.

But the classroom was not where he felt at home. “I was desperately seeking alternative ways of learning because school didn’t work for me,” he added.

As a teen, Sanford found his way martial arts, and on to Tom Brown Jr’s Tracker School in New Jersey. A “primal worldview” made perfect sense to him.

Tribal Edge, at its core, is “a collection of skills, disciplines, and practices about what humans have always relied on.”

“I put a lot of emphasis on the journey,” Sanford said. “Our focus is on training, and training is a process.”

Sanford offers four-day vision quest experiences, a traditional-style solo forest quest, heightened by a four-day fast from food and distractions.

“It’s a way of doing a deep reset,” he said.

Sanford sees each human as possessing seven key aspects: the tracker, the survivor, the healer, the protector, the shadow, the leader, and the visionary. During a seven-week session, Sanford helps each student learn a combination of skills and tools to support each facet.

“It’s training that’s authentic and deep,” he said. “It can take years to be excellent.” (Case in point, Sanford  is an instructor in the martial art of Sikal and  holds ranks in Tae Kwon Do, and Ninjutsu.)

The kind of practices Sanford offers are self-selective.

“They’re skills, you can just buy them,” he said. “They are transformative, they end up transforming your life.”

And along the journey of Sanford’s own life came his first business, Tarzan’s Tree Service, followed by finding his partner.

“We kind of have a Tarzan and Jane story,” Sanford said, a smile in his voice.

“I had long hair and was an arborist, she was from L.A.”

“She’s a soul guide,” he said of his wife Victoria Jazwic-Sanford. “She kind of has this deep nurturing.”

“We do offer some coaching together,” he added.

“To me, the bottom line to any of our solutions is education,” Sanford said, emphasizing the difference between knowledge, with deals with facts, and wisdom, an ethos or quality of experience. Now that he’s taught informally for nearly 20 years, Sanford is working on getting an associate’s degree in education from Western Governor’s University.

“I like to help people realize how much they already know,” he said.

“I’ve always just followed my passion.”