Some clients arrive through the meaning drain. The career 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 the portfolio, and they’re drawn to the deeper questions — how to live well, what we owe to others, what kind of legacy is worth building. Some are weighing whether to start something new, and what it should be for.

Others arrive through the relational side. They’ve built something impressive and have no one they care deeply about to fully share it with. Dating life is shallow. Friendships are convenient, not deep. True intimacy — vulnerable, honest, lasting — turns out to be harder than anything they did professionally. Some come after a divorce; some inside marriages intact on paper but hollow in practice. It’s the aspect most are slowest to name, but often the one that matters most.

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 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 and deliberate. It starts from the recognition that professional success, on its own, never answers the bigger questions behind what a person has built — least of all what he wants the whole of it to add up to.

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.