Mortality-Aware Leadership
What changes when leaders stop pretending they have forever—and how finite time can clarify decisions, relationships, courage, succession, and legacy.
Keynotes · Talks · Workshops
Tell the truth about mortality, failure, and power.
Research-grounded speaking for leaders and organizations ready for language and frameworks they can use after the room empties.
Inquire About Speaking →
The approach
Not a motivational speech.
Seth does not ask audiences to perform optimism. He tells the truth about mortality, failure, identity, and what leaders owe the people who follow them.
The work is research-grounded but personal, drawing on leadership science, philosophy, theology, cross-cultural organizational life, and first-hand experience as a hospice chaplain during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Every engagement is built around the needs of the organization, audience, and moment.
Core topics
Signature
Power
Ethics
Transition
Culture
Custom
Conversations leaders usually postpone.
What Hospice Taught Me About Power
Lessons from dying patients and families about identity, control, presence, loss, and the responsibilities that remain when status does not.
Virtue Ethics for Leaders Under Pressure
How character becomes practice when competing obligations, limited information, and organizational stakes make a clean answer impossible.
Identity, Retirement, and What Comes After
What happens when a title ends, influence changes, and a powerful leader must decide whether relevance can take a different form.
Leading Across Cultural and Geographic Divides
Lessons from multicultural, cross-border leadership about power, belonging, interpretation, conflict, and faithful presence.
A Talk Built for the Moment
A research-grounded engagement developed around the organization's actual leadership challenge.
From talk to practice
Talk or keynote
Half or full day
Multi-day
Choose the depth the room requires.
Create shared language
Introduce a consequential question and give an audience a framework that can continue into their own leadership conversations.
Work the question
Combine teaching, reflection, structured dialogue, and application to the decisions and pressures participants already carry.
Practice what follows
Create space for deeper work on identity, ethics, loss, resilience, culture, or transition with a context-specific design.
About the speaker
A scholar-practitioner with real stakes in view.
Seth David Clark is a mortality-aware executive coach, leadership scholar, pastor, former hospice chaplain, author, and speaker. He is a Board Certified Coach and founder of Life, Death, and Leadership.
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 coaching practice has served more than fifty clients across five continents, and he has spoken nationally and internationally.
Keynote engagements begin at $20,000, plus agreed travel expenses.
Planning an engagement
What to include in an inquiry
- Organization, audience, and approximate attendance
- Event date, location, and format
- The leadership moment or question the audience is carrying
- Desired session length and level of interaction
- Any cultural, spiritual, or organizational context Seth should understand
Next step
Start with the room.
The first conversation is about fit: what the gathering needs, what Seth can responsibly offer, and which format will serve the audience well.
Bring the conversation your leaders cannot keep postponing.
Share the audience, date, format, and leadership question. Keynote engagements begin at $20,000, plus agreed travel expenses.