Over nearly two decades, David has worked with clients across more than eighty countries, including founders, investors, CEOs, artists, and athletes. Many come to him not because the career failed, but because it succeeded. And in succeeding, it revealed something they hadn’t anticipated: that professional achievement, no matter how significant, doesn’t build a personal life of depth. Instead, it often prevents one.

Some arrive after a divorce, trying to rebuild intimacy with the same seriousness they once brought to building a company. Others come because their marriages are intact on paper but hollow in practice… and they know it. Some want to understand why the work that once gave their life meaning no longer does. And some are drawn to the philosophical questions underneath all of it: What is a good life? What does it owe to others? What remains when the striving stops?

David’s own path into this work was shaped by 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 first to strategies—particularly in the world of dating and attraction—eventually becoming a well-known coach in that field. From the outside, it looked like mastery. Internally, 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.

The turning point did not come through achievement or technique. It came through relationship. While helping raise his goddaughter from infancy, David experienced love flowing from him that was not contingent on anyone’s performance or outcome. That experience reframed how he understood motivation, connection, and what people are ultimately seeking beneath success.

He returned to his research with an evolved orientation — integrating his philosophical training with advanced study in multiple psychotherapeutic approaches, including IFS Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Robbins-Madanes Coaching, and existential methods. These were integrated with his expertise in Asian philosophical traditions and decades of close work with clients under real pressure.

Today, David works privately with a handful of clients and leads select small-group programs. The work is rigorous, deliberate, and grounded in a simple premise: that the personal life deserves the same seriousness, the same intentionality, and the same depth that built the professional one.

He wrote about this moment in After the Climb.

Outside his professional life, David is a devoted husband and loving father. Parenthood, in particular, has deepened his interest in questions of continuity, responsibility, and the legacy people leave behind. Much of his work now centers on helping achievers build lives where achievement does not crowd out connection, and where success does not come at the cost of fufillment.