ABOUT — THE MISSION
ChoiceUp didn't start as a strategy.
It started as a question one person couldn't stop asking.
Here's where that question came from, and what it turned into.
The Origin
Years earlier, ChoiceUp founder Michael Prues and his family lived two miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. By December 2012, they had moved back home to Cincinnati, but when the shooting happened, it still landed like it happened next door.
Michael didn't respond with anger. He responded with a question: what if we thought more carefully (and much earlier) about the choices that lead to a moment like that one?
The question didn't go away. Somewhere in trying to answer it, Michael landed on something simpler and bigger at once: an idea about how deeply our choices shape us, and reach past us. That realization became a name — ChoiceUp, and over the decade since, a philosophy, a set of activity books for kids, a nonprofit, and a structured framework called the Authentic Decision Field (ADF).
The philosophy, translated
Michael has spent years chasing the science behind how we got here — the atoms, the elements, the forces that had to align long before any of us existed to make a single choice.
What he found there is an idea simple enough to hold in one hand:
We are our choices.
Not one decision. The whole pattern of them, stacked over a lifetime.
It's the seed the name grew from, and everything after it. And those choices don't stay put: nothing is as separate as it looks.
The same forces that turned stardust into atoms, atoms into elements, and elements into every person reading this page are still at work in how we treat each other. Michael calls it the thread. Pull on one part of it, and something moves somewhere else.
That's the belief underneath ChoiceUp: your decisions don't stay contained to you. A reactive choice — made from fear, from pressure, from something nobody ever helped you name — becomes a pattern. That pattern becomes someone else's problem to inherit. ChoiceUp calls this human-influenced suffering: harm people cause not because they're broken, but because no one ever handed them a way to choose differently.
Underneath most reactive choices is the same driver: ego. Not ego as arrogance but ego as the part of us built to protect and survive. It's essential; you couldn't get through a day without it. But it's built to guard you, not to connect you. When it takes over a decision, it does so at the expense of something quieter underneath (call it spirit, or innocence) the part that knows we're bound up in each other. Let ego run unchecked and it starts to eat that quieter part alive. You can't make an authentic choice while ego is the one choosing.
That's why the Authentic Decision Field doesn't ask what someone did wrong. It asks what's been driving the decision all along. A framework that judges people rarely reaches them. One that separates the person from what drove them has a chance to.
One Framework, Three Populations
Michael built the Authentic Decision Field to work in the places where our decisions carry the most weight:
schools, corrections and rehabilitation programs, counseling rooms.
One framework. Three settings.
Not three different programs wearing the same name. It is the same method, examined through whoever is in the room.
That's also why ChoiceUp doesn't narrow to a single age or a single group. How we decide is worth understanding at five and at eighty alike — the framework has to hold at every stage, or it isn't holding the idea it's built on.
Who ChoiceUp serves.
See how the Authentic Decision Field works across schools, facilities, and practices.
Explore ProgramsWant the fuller story?
Learn more about the milestones and the moments that kept Michael going.
Visit About at ChoiceUp.comThe ChoiceUp Leaders & Board of Directors
We are honored to have the expertise and leadership of our board.
Michael founded ChoiceUp® to bring attention and awareness to decision-making. He developed a decision-making methodology called the Authentic Decision Field™ or ADF. The ADF is an evolving recursive process for strengthening decision-making. Its agentic mechanism adapts to any age and station in life. Michael sees each person as an extension of himself and believes the ADF can help bring personal wholeness to others and more cooperation in humanity.
Michael Prues
President, Founder, and Chief Visionary Officer
Andrew is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and has served in court administration for over forty years. He has seen the consequences of unsustainable decision-making that has led to a person’s loss of freedom and independence of life. He has served on numerous civic boards contributing with his peer members to social functioning. Andrew is honored to serve as a trustee with the goal of benefiting humanity in a constructive way.
Andrew Conlon
Secretary & Board Member
Michael is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and has a M.B.A. from Xavier University. He had a forty-year career in accounting with a major consumer products company. He has been married for over fifty-six years and enjoys retirement with his children and grandchildren. Michael enjoys using his life’s experiences to help others.
Michael Peeden, M.B.A.
Treasurer & Board Member
Tammy is a graduate of Xavier University with a Masters in English Literature. With twenty years of impactful marketing and communications experience across multiple industries, Tammy has built a reputation as a versatile and results-driven professional able to position organizations for enhanced visibility. Ms. Reasoner holds a strong passion for nonprofit and educational organizations. She has held professional positions in both in-house and consulting roles with highly visible charitable organizations in the Greater Cincinnati region. With her commitment to creating strategic, targeted messaging aimed at achieving revenue growth and driving customer engagement, she is a strong asset to the ChoiceUp® Board.
Tammy Reasoner, M.A.
Board Member
Stephen is a practicing attorney and adjunct educator at the University of Cincinnati. He demands and displays preeminent ability, and very high ethical standards from himself and the Board of ChoiceUp®.
In 45 years of practicing law and as a teacher, he knows fundamentally that choices made by individuals from cradle to grave have a tremendous impact on the individual and society. Sustainable choices can only be made with knowledge and understanding, and must be made in consideration of others.
Stephen Schuh concentrates on transactional law and teaches business law and transactions. He is admitted to practice in Ohio, Kentucky and before the Supreme Court of the United States as well as multiple federal district and appeals courts.
A graduate of Ohio University he obtained a Juris Doctorate from Northern Kentucky University. He is an active member of multiple bar associations and professional organizations and is a past president of NKU Chase Law School’s Alumni Board.
Stephen J. Schuh, Esq.
Board Member