Meet Robert Feeney

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Robert Feeney a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Robert, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience Through Hardship: From Grief to Mission

I lost both my brothers—my younger and my older—to suicide.

There’s no elegant way to say that. It’s a sentence that lands heavy. And for years, I didn’t know how to carry it. The pain, the questions, the feeling that something inside me shattered and wouldn’t come back together.

But eventually, I realized something: my life had a question hanging over it—and I had to answer it with action.

The question was this: How do we help people take on a behavior that makes their life work—no matter how they’re wired? That mission became the foundation of everything I’ve built since. It’s why I created Ringorang. It’s why I founded Knowledge as a Service. And it’s why I wake up every day focused on helping people fulfill their human potential.

I didn’t set out to become a resilience story. I set out to make sense of the senseless. To create continuity where there was none. And in that, I learned something powerful: most of us aren’t lacking potential—we’re lacking continuity.

When someone tries to get a job and fails the interview, they spiral. When a marriage ends or a path falls apart, people withdraw. What we call “giving up” is usually just a break in continuity. A moment when someone couldn’t see the next step.

So, I built a system to deliver that next step—right when people need it. We call it “nano-coaching.” It’s behavior change, in the flow of life, in just minutes a day. It’s not about making people better. It’s about helping them get back into motion.

The greatest act of resilience I’ve ever taken wasn’t bouncing back. It was choosing to build something for others while I was still grieving. To turn a personal loss into a public solution.

That’s how I got back up. That’s how I stay up.

And if someone reading this is in their lowest moment right now, I want them to know: You don’t have to fix it all. Just take one step that creates continuity. Do that enough times, and you’re no longer surviving. You’re building something.

And that’s where resilience becomes purpose.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

What I Do and Why It Matters

I’m the founder of Knowledge as a Service, and the creator of Ringorang®—a pocket coach designed to turn knowledge into behavior.

Professionally, I’m focused on solving a $2 trillion workforce crisis. Not with another training program—but with a habit-formation engine that delivers real behavior change in just 3–5 minutes a day.

Here’s what I believe: most learning fails because it forgets the human. It forgets how we actually change. How we build habits. How we need reminders, not just ideas. So Ringorang was built to fix that. It’s patented. It’s clinically validated. It’s been used by the U.S. Air Force, Fortune 500s like IBM and Verizon, schools across 22 states, and workforce programs that help returning citizens reenter society.

But what excites me most isn’t who’s using it. It’s why they’re using it.

We’re helping people become who they want to become—one nano-action at a time. That includes young people who don’t believe they can succeed. Veterans facing transition. Workers adapting to new technologies. We’re not giving them content. We’re giving them continuity.

The brand is simple: You already have the potential. We give you the path.

Right now, we’re expanding into new verticals—healthcare, financial services, and first responders. We’re launching new AI-powered content tools that cut development costs by 80% while personalizing learning at scale. And we’re raising capital to scale that vision into a global platform.

At its core, Ringorang isn’t about software. It’s about calling your shot—and hitting it. That’s what we help people do, every day.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Three Qualities That Changed Everything

Looking back, three qualities shaped everything in my journey—especially in the hardest moments and the biggest moves.

1. Workability Over Perfection
I used to chase the “right” answer. The perfect pitch, the flawless plan, the ideal version of myself. But life doesn’t reward perfection—it rewards what works. That shift—from right/wrong to workable/unworkable—freed me to take real action. My advice? Stop asking if it’s good enough. Ask if it moves the needle. If it does, keep going.

2. Cutting Complexity in Half (Twice)
Clarity is a skill. You earn it by cutting through noise—your own and others’. I learned to boil down anything complex into what’s essential, usable, and actionable. That became a leadership habit. If you want to grow fast, learn to simplify without losing substance. Every great vision has a clear next step.

3. Calling My Shot
The turning point in my journey was when I stopped waiting for clarity—and started declaring it. I began with a vision of who I wanted to become and reverse-engineered my way there. That’s what we now coach others to do: Call your shot, then build the path backwards. That kind of intentionality rewires your confidence. You become someone who follows through.

Bottom Line: You don’t need more credentials. You need more clarity, more action, and more repetition. That’s how transformation sticks. That’s how you build a life—and a legacy.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

I’ve had multiple mentors shape my life—but the most impactful was Dr. Michael Broom, my executive coach.

He didn’t just help me become a better leader. He helped me get over myself.

His approach is rooted in human systems. He helped me see that most of what we call “problems” aren’t problems at all—they’re patterns. And if you learn to see the pattern, you can break it. You can move. That changed how I built teams. How I coached. How I lived.

At a time when I couldn’t afford him, I proposed a trade: we’d build his methodology into our product, and he’d run his coaching live with my team. That offer changed everything. It gave me a front-row seat to mastery—and gave our company the heartbeat it needed.

Because of that partnership, our culture became something we could scale. Not a set of values on a wall, but a way of working together that actually moves things forward. That’s what Michael gave me. And I try to hand that forward in every coaching moment I offer now.

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