About the Positive Psychology Institute
Coaching for the Whole Person
Built for serious adult learners who know coaching must meet the full complexity of a human life.
Modern coaching cannot stop at goals, strengths, mindset, or accountability. Those matter. They also sit inside a larger person: history, ambition, body, relationships, values, wounds, identity, meaning, shadow, and possibility. That is where our work begins.
True flourishing requires wholeness.
Every person brings a whole life into the coaching conversation, more than a productivity problem to solve, a set of goals to optimize, a nervous system to regulate, or a mindset to reframe. To coach well, a professional learns to see more of that life while staying inside the ethical boundaries of coaching.
Our work brings together professional coaching, positive psychology, depth psychology, executive leadership, human performance, breathwork, adult development, wisdom traditions, and responsible artificial intelligence. The aim is simple and demanding: form coaches who can work with real adults living real lives.
One Method, Three Strands
The flagship Whole Person Coaching Certification is a 140-hour pathway that integrates three forms of professional formation: the craft of coaching, the science of flourishing, and the psychological depth many programs never reach.
Foundations of Coaching
The craft: presence, listening, the coaching relationship, powerful questioning, adult development, session structure, ethics, scope, and professional identity.
Positive Psychology Coaching
The science of flourishing: wellbeing, strengths, resilience, values, meaning, self-determination, and second-wave positive psychology.
Depth Psychology Coaching
The patterns beneath the patterns: persona, shadow, projection, complexes, symbolic life, dreamwork, suffering, and individuation.
The Institute refuses the shallow split between evidence and depth. Coaches need both: the discipline of the coaching conversation, the science of human flourishing, the psychological sophistication to recognize deeper patterns, and the ethical clarity to know what belongs in coaching and what requires referral.
AI-Forward, and Human-Forward
The Positive Psychology Institute is AI-forward because the future of learning, reflection, and professional development will be shaped by artificial intelligence. It is also deeply human-forward, because AI must never become an excuse for weaker judgment, thinner presence, or outsourced wisdom.
Used well, AI can help coaches study more deeply, think more clearly, notice patterns, and stay connected to the questions that matter. It does not replace ethical responsibility, embodied awareness, relational presence, professional judgment, or the human capacity for wisdom.
Why This Training Is Different
Many coaching programs draw from one school of thought: skills, or positive psychology, or business, or somatics. The Positive Psychology Institute was built from a wider premise. Its core contribution is the integration of four domains rarely held together in one coaching curriculum: the craft of professional coaching, the science of human flourishing, depth-oriented psychological insight, and responsible AI-enhanced learning.
A fifth domain supports them all: embodied performance. Breath, attention, nervous-system regulation, and disciplined practice are treated as part of the work, taught with respect for coaching scope, consent, ethics, and referral, and used as developmental support, never as clinical diagnosis or treatment.
That boundary is not a disclaimer buried in fine print; it is part of the ethics of the work. The Institute is a coaching education organization. It is not therapy and it does not train coaches to diagnose or treat. It forms coaches who can pursue excellence without bypassing suffering, support goals without flattening the soul, work with depth without overreaching, and use AI without surrendering discernment.
About Our Founder and Lead Instructor
Our Founder and Lead Instructor
Board Certified Coach · HBS Executive Fellow · IOC Professional Fellow
Our founder brings an unusual convergence of academic, entrepreneurial, coaching, technological, and embodied-performance experience to coaching education. He is a Harvard MBA and an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, part of the Harvard Business School AI Institute community, a doctoral-level psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, a Board Certified Coach, and a Professional Fellow of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital (a Harvard Medical School affiliate).
His mentor Dan Millman once gave him a simple challenge: hard-won wisdom benefits no one if it is never shared. The Positive Psychology Institute is one answer to that challenge.
His most recent work with AI, reflected in the AI Daimon and the AI for Coaching program, has been shaped by Harvard, through the Harvard Business School AI Institute and the Human Flourishing Program, and by his engagement with the International Positive Psychology Association. His connection to MIT sits squarely on the technology side, its artificial intelligence ecosystem, where he has served as a mentor in the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. The result is a teaching voice that is academically serious, psychologically sophisticated, commercially realistic, ethically careful, performance-informed, and current with the frontier of artificial intelligence.
His coaching path began in 2016 through ICF-aligned training. He now holds the Board Certified Coach credential and has spent roughly a decade building a deliberately boutique executive practice, limited at any time to a small circle of multi-year clients: founders, leaders, and individuals of broad influence whose decisions affect organizations, capital, communities, and families.
As a licensed EMT and first responder, he has seen how quickly human distress can move from private struggle to urgent consequence. Coaching is not therapy or crisis care, and the boundaries matter. But done well, coaching can serve as an early line of support: a place where people are seen sooner, asked better questions, and referred responsibly when the work belongs elsewhere.
The Origin of the AI Daimon
That private practice gave rise to the AI Daimon, first built to help serious clients sustain insight, remember context, and stay connected to deeper questions between coaching conversations. It was designed as an intelligent reflective companion, never a generic chatbot.
The name reaches back to the ancient Greek daimon: the inner guiding voice that Socrates trusted, what the Romans called the genius, and what Carl Jung later described as the force that pulls a person toward becoming whole. The AI Daimon carries that lineage forward, joining ancient wisdom and psychological depth to the best of what today’s technology can offer.
Students in the Whole Person Coaching Certification are given it as a disciplined learning companion for reflection, synthesis, and professional formation, not as a substitute for study, judgment, practice, or human presence.
Performance, Breath, and the Body
His background extends deeply into performance and embodiment. His breathwork training began as a mentee of Wim Hof and grew to include the Oxygen Advantage method and extensive work in the holotropic tradition associated with Stanislav Grof. He is the first BCC-certified Heroic Performance Coach to emerge from the Heroic movement, a Level 2 Oxygen Advantage Instructor, and a serious student of breathwork, contemplative practice, and modern performance science.
This is not theory alone. He applied these methods under extreme conditions during his successful 2024 summit of Mount Everest, a reflection of the teaching principle at the center of his work: transformation must eventually become embodied. Breath, attention, mindset, physiology, and disciplined self-regulation stop being abstractions when the margin for error narrows.
Credentials and Affiliations
The training, credentialing, and performance qualifications behind the method.
Board Certified CoachCertified Executive Coach, Center for Credentialing & Education
Professional FellowInstitute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate
Heroic Performance CoachThe first BCC-certified Coach from the Heroic movement
Level 2 Oxygen Advantage InstructorFunctional breathing for performance
The Unbound Roots
The roots of the Positive Psychology Institute reach back to the Unbound documentary and the larger Unbound body of work, an inquiry into body, mind, and spirit with one deeper question underneath the usual language of self-improvement: what does it mean to become more fully human?
The film carried wisdom from Wim Hof, Dan Millman, and the archival teachings of Ángeles Arrien, each a different doorway into human development. As part of the project’s ten-year anniversary, the film was taken out of circulation in January 2026 so the focus could shift to the next integration of the work.
Unbound Academy is now being rebuilt as the broader educational home for that next evolution. The Positive Psychology Institute is the coaching and flourishing branch; Unbound Academy is the wider wisdom and transformation platform; the AI Daimon is the frontier learning companion. Together they belong to one larger educational ecosystem, carrying a single throughline: human beings are capable of more than adaptation. They are capable of transformation.
The Larger Vision
How can the best of psychology, wisdom, coaching, performance, and emerging technology help human beings become better humans, without losing the capacities that make us most human? That question runs through everything we build.
It is why our programs take science seriously, honor depth, teach ethics, include AI, and keep the actual craft of coaching at the center. The aim is to form coaches capable of presence, discernment, ethical judgment, depth without overreach, and performance without bypass, coaches able to help another person move toward a more integrated and fully inhabited life.