About David
As a leader in the corporate world, I saw firsthand how powerful teams could be when they became greater than the sum of their parts. I once believed that happened when people found their true calling, but I came to realize it wasn’t about finding a calling at all. It was about making meaning and becoming a leader in one’s own life.
When individuals connect their work to what matters most to them, they contribute more fully, and in turn, their teams thrive.
Inspired by Khalil Gibran’s words, “Work is love made visible,” I help people identify the work where their love shines and the collaborators who amplify that work. As a result, these people don’t just find fulfillment. They join - and sometimes lead - teams that are truly greater than the sum of their parts–teams capable of solving the world’s biggest challenges.
In my 20s and 30s, I cycled through moments when I was convinced of my calling and other moments when I felt utterly lost. When I left college for the seminary, I thought I’d been called to be a priest. When I left the seminary for Seattle, it was on a wing and a prayer with $400 in my bank account. When I left Seattle for NYC, I thought I’d been called to be a corporate leader. And when I left NYC for the Bay Area, I was winging it again based solely on intuition.
It was a volatile time after I entered the corporate world. Sometimes exciting, often lonely. Whenever anyone asked me about my career plans, I said I was rolling with the punches.
After I became a people leader, which became a specific focus of mine, I enjoyed setting the vision and strategy for my teams. I also enjoyed making decisions without having all the information. Most of all, I loved helping people make sense of their own careers.
Meanwhile, people around me had opinions about what I should do for my own career, though few of them were equipped to help me do what I did for others.
On our trip from NYC to the Bay Area, I asked the friend who came with me if I was making the right choice. He replied, “This isn’t about choosing a right or wrong path; it’s about choosing to turn on the right or left path.” That moment reshaped my understanding of purpose. It’s not about finding a single, undeniable calling; it’s about making meaning with our values, strengths, and skills.
That insight became the foundation of my choice to become a coach. And since that decision, it became even clearer to me how I might support people in making their own meaning and joining those teams where they can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Since completing a two-year intensive coach training program in 2017, I’ve coached hundreds of professionals through thousands of hours. I hold a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential through the International Coaching Federation and draw on a diverse range of training, including Crucial Conversations, Hogan Leadership assessments, Lean Six Sigma, and mindfulness meditation instruction.
I’ve driven across the country (coast to coast) four times, with each journey having a different pace—the first in three days, the second in four, the third in six, and the fourth in five.
I spent two years in a Roman Catholic seminary in Boston studying to be a priest. I received a degree in philosophy and also learned classical Latin.
Even though my mother played guitar since I was young, I didn’t pick it up until a week after I left my last corporate job in June 2019.
On my first trip to Cambodia back in the 2010s with my best friend, we ate three deep fried tarantulas. It took us about twenty minutes–ten minutes for fretting about eating it, two minutes for breaking it apart so it didn’t look like a tarantula anymore, and the other eight minutes - with many pauses in between – for eating the legs (crunchy and didn’t taste like much) and the body (chewy and tasted like a cross between chicken and frog). We couldn’t bring ourselves to eat the heads.
I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at least 20 times since I was about 10 years old.
I enjoy nut butters so much that I’ll eat them by the spoonful as a snack. Peanut, cashew, walnut, almond; all are fair game. In recent years, I’ve even started making my own.
Throughout the almost 20 years that I played baseball and softball, I played every position except shortstop.
