Some clients arrive through the relational side. They’ve built something impressive but have no one they care deeply about to fully share it with. Dating life is shallow. Friendships are convenient, not deep. Building true intimacy — vulnerable, honest, lasting — feels harder than anything they’ve done professionally. Some come 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.

Others arrive through the meaning drain. The work still produces results, but the sense of purpose behind it has thinned. They want to know what their life adds up to beyond the exit or portfolio. They’re drawn to deeper, philosophical questions — about how to live well, what we owe to others, and what kind of legacy is worth building. Some are wrestling with whether to start something new and what it should be for. Others are trying to understand why the work that once gave their life meaning no longer does.

Most carry some of all of it.

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. But internally, it was fragile. When a long-term relationship ended through betrayal, the dissonance finally became unavoidable to him. 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 from success.

He wrote about this period in After the Climb.

He returned to his research with a different orientation, integrating his philosophical training with advanced study in multiple psychotherapeutic traditions: Internal Family Systems Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Robbins-Madanes Coaching, existential methods, among others. These were brought into dialogue with his earlier expertise in Asian philosophical traditions and with decades of close work with clients under real 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 clients and leads select small-group programs. The work is rigorous, deliberate, and grounded on the premise that the inner life is what shapes the outer one… and that no amount of professional achievement will bring the satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy they’re really after, or the clarity to point the next decade at something worth pointing it at.

Outside his practice, 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 meaning.