David Higa

I spent years in life insurance sales management, a fully commission-based, 1099 world where results were the only currency and nobody was coming to save you if you didn’t produce. I recruited and trained agents, built and rebuilt training systems from the ground up more than once, developed managers underneath me, and kept writing my own personal business the entire time. I was never just managing from a distance; I was still in the arena myself.

I really learned how to work the numbers and put in the hours, because there’s no shortcut around volume when you’re trying to build something real. How to navigate a hard conversation, usually because I got it wrong the first several times and had to learn a better way through the discomfort of it. How to build a referral engine and a sales process that actually converts, instead of one that just looks good on paper. And maybe most useful of all: how to take apart something that’s broken (a system, a process, a team) and rebuild it so it actually works, rather than just patching over what isn’t functioning.

I was promoted to regional manager and ranked top five in the company at one point. I also carried 95% retention on my own book of business, meaning the vast majority of my clients stayed. Just as important to me: I had higher-than-average retention of the agents I recruited and led, in an industry where most people struggle to keep either clients or teammates around for long. Retention, more than any single big sale, has always felt like the real proof that something is working.

Exceptional coaching should uncover blind spots and blockages and change the way someone thinks and operates, not just hand them a to-do list. The moment I live for is when a client realizes the way they’ve been doing something simply isn’t working, and they start making real progress on a journey that’s just getting started, with a lot of runway still ahead of them.

If there’s one word clients use most often after working with me, it’s perspective. I help people see through the eyes of the people around them — their clients, their team, their leaders, their spouse, their kids. Once that perspective creates real connection, communication gets easier, and everything downstream of it, sales, hiring, retention, building a business, gets easier too.

I’ve watched this play out with a business owner who could never build a team she could sustain. The real shift didn’t come from a better interview process alone; it came from her learning to see her own office manager’s perspective, which changed how she trained him, related to her team, and held people accountable.

Curiosity. It’s the whole engine behind everything I do. It’s what lets me see a client’s perspective clearly enough to help them discover a perspective they couldn’t see on their own; not hand it to them, but help them arrive at it themselves, because it sticks so much better that way.

In practice, that looks like this: most clients come to me asking for a fix to a symptom. My job is to get underneath that to the actual root, which is slower and harder work, but it’s the difference between a fix that lasts a few weeks and a shift that lasts years. Along the way, I build custom analogies designed specifically for that person, help them voice thoughts they’ve never quite been able to articulate on their own, and break down complex, tangled problems into something simple enough to actually act on.

It’s all backed by a real, ongoing study of natural language processing, emotional intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and communication; not because I’m collecting credentials, but because I’m still one of those curious people trying to understand people better.

I wanted to keep growing, and I saw a group of people ahead of me doing exactly that: genuinely curious, genuinely growing people I wanted to learn from. In 2011, as a young salesperson barely making money, I made my first investment in personal development, around $200, to attend a company convention, and it reignited a passion for learning that had gone quiet since college. In 2018, after outgrowing leaders at a previous company who kept shooting down every idea I brought them about growth and development, I came back to that world for good.

But it was never about having it all figured out and handing down answers from above. In almost every hard conversation with a client, I’m not just talking to them; I’m recognizing something I need to work on too, and telling them so. It’s “here’s what I’m working on, here’s how I’ve approached it, let’s figure out how it works for you, because my way doesn’t have to be your way.” We grow together, and share the wins and the losses along the way. That mutuality is why this work matters to me; it’s never just about them.