Name what is real
Clarify the situation beneath the polished narrative: the competing obligations, unspoken fears, system pressures, and identity stakes shaping the moment.
Mortality-Aware Executive Coaching
Coaching for the decisions that cannot wait.
Confidential one-to-one work for executives in transition, grieving, or caught between who they were and who they need to become.
Book a Discovery Call →
When leadership gets complicated
The title does not make the decision easier.
Senior leaders are often expected to project certainty precisely when the situation is asking them to think again. Coaching creates a private place to examine what is actually happening, what fear may be disguising as strategy, and what a decision will require of the person making it.
This work may fit when you are:
- Entering, leaving, or redefining a consequential role
- Carrying personal or organizational loss while others still depend on you
- Facing a decision whose costs cannot be reduced to a spreadsheet
- Questioning the identity that formed around a title or institution
- Preparing for succession, retirement, or a next chapter
- Trying to lead with courage without pretending fear is absent
The engagement
Structured around your actual leadership.
There is no generic curriculum imposed on the work. The engagement begins with the decisions, relationships, losses, and responsibilities already in front of you.
Examine the decision
Test assumptions, distinguish urgency from avoidance, and consider what wisdom, evidence, ethics, and finite time ask you to do next.
Lead what follows
Translate insight into decisions, conversations, boundaries, and practices that can survive contact with the organization around you.
The mortality-aware lens
Your time is finite. That fact can narrow leadership into panic—or clarify what is worth deciding, building, repairing, and leaving behind.
Death matters because life matters.
Mortality-aware leadership is not a fixation on death. It is the practice of refusing the fantasy that there will always be another quarter, another role, another conversation, or another chance to become the leader you meant to be.
A practical discipline.
The work draws on Seth's experience as a hospice chaplain, along with adaptive leadership theory, virtue ethics, Stoic philosophy, contemplative theology, and decision-making psychology.
Why Seth
Theory tested against real human stakes.
Seth David Clark is a Board Certified Coach, leadership scholar, pastor, speaker, and former hospice chaplain. He founded Life, Death, and Leadership in 2025 after more than two decades of work where identity, ethics, culture, loss, and responsibility meet.
He holds a Doctor of Ministry, an MBA, an MTS, and an MATS, and is pursuing a PhD in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. His research examines high-impact leaders in retirement: identity reconstruction, influence, mattering, and relevance after a title.
Questions
Executive coaching with Seth
Who does Seth coach?+
Seth works one-to-one with executives and senior leaders navigating transition, grief, identity change, succession, or high-stakes decisions.
What can coaching address?+
The work begins with the decisions, relationships, losses, identity questions, and responsibilities already in front of the leader.
How does the work begin?+
A discovery call is a chance to clarify the situation, determine whether coaching is the right form of support, and see whether the working relationship fits.
Do you offer coaching for ministry leaders?+
Yes. Seth offers a separate no-cost coaching option for ministry leaders.
Explore the question in front of you
Different leadership moments need different language.
Meaning after success
Retirement and succession
Ethics and power
High-stakes decisions and the responsibilities of authority.
Bring the decision you cannot delegate.
Private coaching is $1,000 per 60-minute session. A discovery call is a chance to clarify the situation and see whether the working relationship fits.