About David Kincaid
David Kincaid is a life and leadership coach for high performing professionals at major life and identity crossroads. Drawing on decades as a U.S. diplomat, White House nuclear trade adviser, and modern pilgrim, he helps clients see clearly, choose courageously, and create lives that are aligned, alive, and deeply their own.
A global background, a grounded guide
From nuclear diplomacy to inner clarity
For years, David moved in some of the most complex rooms in the world. He served as one of the top civilian nuclear trade analysts and advisers in the U.S. system, working with governments and industry on issues that carried real consequence. He later became a diplomat and Southeast Asia’s first Digital Trade Attaché, helping shape how countries approached technology, trade, and regulation across borders.
His work spanned more than fifty countries and countless cultures. Colleagues knew him as a clear thinker, a skilled negotiator, and someone who could read both systems and people. From the outside he looked like a model of achievement and influence. On the inside, a very different story was unfolding.
The Story Beneath the Resume
David grew up in a conservative religious community in Florida. As a gifted student and classical pianist, he was seen as a future pastor and leader. At the same time, he carried a secret that felt impossible to share. As a gay man in a context that did not accept him, he learned early to fragment himself in order to belong.
When his sexual orientation was exposed at his Christian university, he lost almost everything at once. His enrollment was revoked, his church membership was stripped by petition, and his relationship with family and community imploded. A stretch of homelessness, survival work, and addiction followed.
These experiences did not break his capacity to love or to lead, but they did give him a deep, lived understanding of shame, fear, and resilience. They also seeded a lifelong question that runs through his work today: what does it mean to live in integrity when the structures around you punish authenticity.
A Breaking Point and a Different Path
Years later, while serving overseas as a diplomat, David reached another personal edge. The combination of high stakes work, constant travel, and unprocessed trauma finally caught up with him. Sitting on the floor of his apartment in Jakarta, he could no longer ignore the gap between the life he was performing and the life his inner truth was asking him to live.
He chose to step away from the diplomatic track and into a different kind of journey. David left his post, walked the Camino de Santiago as a pilgrim, and devoted himself to understanding how clarity, conscience, and courage can reshape a human life from the inside out. That season involved therapy, spiritual practice, recovery work, and a willingness to question every story he had been given about power, identity, and belonging.
What emerged was not a rejection of his past, but an integration of it. David began to see how his policy background, spiritual hunger, and lived experience of loss could serve others who were also standing at the edge of change.
How This Shapes David’s Work
David’s clients are often people who understand responsibility. They lead teams, manage organizations, run businesses, or carry influence in their communities. They cannot simply walk away from everything they have built, yet they also cannot keep living in ways that betray their inner knowing.
In coaching conversations, David brings together several threads:
The strategic clarity of a former adviser and diplomat
The emotional and spiritual insight of someone who has done deep personal work
A grounded, practical respect for real world constraints
His approach is slow enough for truth to surface and structured enough for change to actually happen. Sessions may include somatic awareness, inner dialogue work, guided inquiry into old stories and beliefs, exploration of values, and the creation of concrete next steps that fit each client’s life.
Who David Works With
The people who seek David out are not all at the same stage of life - but they are asking the same deeper questions.
Some are high-achieving professionals who have done everything “right” and reached a quiet breaking point.
Their lives look stable and impressive from the outside, but inside they feel restless, constrained, or split.
They are navigating career direction, leadership identity, relationships, and spirituality all at once - and they can’t pretend anymore.
Others are younger international travelers, creatives, and unconventional thinkers who decided early that they didn’t want the lives they watched their parents or grandparents build.
They are intentionally designing a different way of living - globally mobile, values-driven, and unconfined by traditional paths - but they are often doing it without mentors who have actually lived this way and stayed grounded.
Both groups share something essential:
They are thoughtful, spiritually curious, and allergic to quick fixes.
They want clarity without dogma.
Freedom without chaos.
Depth without pretension.
They are not looking for someone to tell them what to believe or who to become.
They are looking for a guide who has walked widely, lived unconventionally, and learned how to stay steady inside complexity.
David’s work resonates with people who want to:
Make meaningful decisions without burning down their lives or numbing out
Integrate spirituality into real-world choices
Live outside prescribed boxes without losing their center
Think clearly in a noisy, polarized world
Build a life that actually fits who they are becoming
If this feels familiar, the Coaching page outlines the ways to work with David - from short-term clarity intensives to deeper mentoring relationships and guided experiences.
Beyond Coaching – Speaking and Media
David also shares his perspective through speaking and media. Event hosts and podcast producers invite him into conversations where nuance matters and audiences want more than slogans. His talks often explore themes such as clarity at the crossroads of career and identity, leadership in a polarized world, the cost of hiding, and how personal healing shapes organizational culture.
Featured in the Best Selling Book Cracking the Rich Code
David is a featured co-author in Cracking the Rich Code (Volume 11), the bestselling anthology curated by Jim Britt and Kevin Harrington. In his chapter, “The Camino of the Self,” he shares a powerful, personal story of stepping away from conventional success, leaving a high-impact diplomatic career, and embarking on a year of travel and reflection, including walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago.
Through that pilgrimage, David turns lived experience into practical insight: how to create a favorable decision-making environment, how to meet life with acceptance (his lesson to “let the rain in”), and how our outcomes are shaped by thousands of daily choices, many of them unconscious.
The result is a grounded invitation to return to what’s real, align actions with the future you want, and rediscover clarity as an inside job, not something the world can hand you.
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