A Brief Assessment to Clarify Your Next Area of Focus
To identify where clarity is most needed next
David Tian, Ph.D., is Private Advisor to Founders, High Achievers, and Senior Leaders, Brown University Certified Leadership & Performance Coach, Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (L3), ICF Certified Coach, devoted husband, proud father, and former university professor — helping build lives of connection, meaning, and fulfillment through Asian philosophy, psychological insight, and relational depth.
LATEST FROM OUR BLOG
Why You’re Never Satisfied No Matter What You Achieve
You won. But it didn’t feel the way you thought it would. The numbers that used to keep you up at night have stopped doing that. And yet you cannot rest, you cannot stop competing, and when you win, what arrives first is relief — not joy. This essay is about the question that arrives sometime after the win, and what the people who hold up over decades have done with it.
What Is Emotional Mastery?
The phrase “emotional mastery” hides an assumption.
Mastery requires a master. When you set out to master your emotions, you commit yourself to a picture of two selves living inside one person — the self who governs and the self who is governed.
For twenty years, the arrangement worked. It built the career and the money. It did not build the partner who was supposed to be there by now, or the children who would have followed.
A new essay on what emotional mastery actually is, and why the forties are when most people first notice the cost of the version they have been practicing.
Why Success Feels Empty After You’ve “Made It”: What Aristotle Saw About Eudaimonia
What if the hollow after the exit was always going to happen — not a personal failure but a model failing right on schedule? Aristotle’s word for what this smart, driven person was actually after — eudaimonia, the activity of a life lived well, seen as a whole — names the diagnosis the post-exit founder did not know he needed. He has been pursuing, with extraordinary discipline, the wrong target.