Professional competence and self-knowledge are different capabilities, and excelling at the first develops little of the second. Someone can read markets, incentives, organizations, and other people accurately while remaining unclear about whom they should trust and why, what produces anger out of all proportion, why the same relationship problem recurs with different partners, how money and position changed the feedback they now receive, or whether their ambition is borne from conviction, habit, fear, or a mixture they have never separated.

None of that is a failure of intelligence. It simply costs more as responsibility grows.

Clients tend to arrive through one or more of three doors.

Consequential decisions while still building. As the company is growing, the decisions have become larger, but the advice nearest to hand has become more partial. They want one place to reflect honestly about what is driving them and what their choices mean for the rest of their lives.

Love, partnership, and family. They may be dating without getting anywhere, deciding whether to marry, repeatedly choosing relationships that end the same way, going through a divorce, trying to make room for a family, or finding that intimacy asks for capacities their career never required of them.

Direction and the larger life. Another achievement is available, but it’s no longer obvious whether the work is worth it. They are deciding what deserves the next five or ten years, how ambition should sit alongside family and friendship, and what they want all of it to serve.

Most carry some of all three.

David’s own route here came through disruption rather than design.

He grew up in a conservative Chinese Christian household in Canada, where the structure of a good life was clear and orderly. He followed it closely — marrying young, excelling academically, and securing a coveted academic post. When his marriage ended, that structure collapsed. What followed was not insight, but searching.

He turned to strategy, and spent years studying attraction, mating, and intimate relationships in practice rather than in theory, eventually building a large public practice as a dating and relationship coach. That period put him in direct contact with what people actually do when they want something badly, and with the material successful people rarely discuss anywhere else: rejection, sex, shame, obsession, jealousy, fear of commitment, betrayal, loneliness, dependency, and marriage. Advisers to people at this level seldom have that exposure. It is part of why he can see the whole person rather than just the professional sphere.

From the outside it looked like mastery. Inside it was fragile. When a long-term relationship ended through betrayal, the dissonance became unavoidable. Years of striving for validation and control gave way to despair, including periods of serious suicidal ideation.

What changed it did not come through achievement or technique. It came through a relationship in which nothing was owed to him. While helping raise his goddaughter from infancy, David experienced love flowing out of him that was contingent on nothing she did, and could not be earned, deserved, or lost. He had spent his adult life trying to become somebody worth loving. Philosophy had explained the mistake to him accurately for years but never once made him feel it.

He wrote about this type of transitional period in After the Climb.

He returned to his research with a different orientation, adding advanced therapeutic training to his philosophical background, principally in Internal Family Systems Therapy and several other evidence-based methods: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Robbins-Madanes Coaching, existential methods, psychodynamic therapy, among others. He then tested all of it against nearly two decades of close counsel with clients under pressure.

David is a Brown University Certified Leadership and Performance Coach, a Level 3 Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (Internal Family Systems), and an ICF Certified Coach (ACC). Earlier in his career, he was a tenure-track university professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, specializing in moral psychology, Asian philosophy, and ethics. He holds a Ph.D. and two Master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, and multiple degrees from the University of Toronto. He has held academic fellowships from Harvard, Princeton, Peking University, and Tsinghua University, among others.

Today David works privately with a small number of founders, senior leaders, and high achievers, and leads select small-group programs. An engagement can begin with a relationship, a major decision, a transition, or a question about what deserves the next chapter. It may then range across career, intimate life, family, identity, ambition, responsibility, and meaning, because those parts do not stay separate in the person living them.

His role is not to help clients get what they already want more efficiently. The counsel may also examine what is worth wanting, what their choices are costing other people, where fear or self-deception is influencing judgment, and who they are becoming through what they build.

The aim is not less ambition. Rather, it is clearer judgment about what should deserve it.

Outside his practice, David is a loving husband and proud father. Nothing teaches someone his own mortality like raising a person who will bury him. And nothing shows him more plainly what a legacy is. It is what the child carries out of the house, in his hands and in his habits, long after the man who put it there is forgotten.