About
Mac Ling. Executive coach. Human being.
A strategic partner to high-achieving leaders navigating the complex intersection of personal identity and professional pressure. Founder of the Coaching Collective. Dually based in Hong Kong and Chiang Mai, working across Asia-Pacific.
The practice
Mac's practice is dedicated to the inner game. He works with people who have mastered the mechanics of business and now face the deeper challenges of expansion: leading through uncertainty, the isolation of senior leadership, and evolving beyond the habits that created their initial success.
His work is grounded in vertical development, focused on expanding a leader's internal capacity to hold complexity. He believes true growth is not about learning more tactics, but about becoming a more grounded, self-regulated version of the person doing the leading.
As a trauma-informed practitioner, Mac brings a rare depth. He helps clients examine the shadow aspects of their leadership, the unconscious survival patterns and defenses that served them in the past and may be sabotaging their future. His style is compassionate candor: a judgment-free space to drop the mask, and the honest feedback senior leaders rarely receive from their own teams. Clear is kind.
How Mac sees
Most problems persist because someone is looking through the wrong lens.
Mac works through an integral lens: interior and exterior, individual and collective, held at the same time. Much of what keeps leaders stuck is a construct they have stopped seeing as a construct. His job is to help them notice it, and then to choose differently.
That view is not only theoretical. Since 2018, Mac has run a weekly men's group devoted to the same conviction: what is unaddressed inside a person eventually shows up in how they lead. That work has grown into a broader focus on mental health initiatives, currently centered on Asian American communities.
Background
Earned from the inside, not just studied.
- Former corporate leader at Sprint, now T-Mobile, and a serial entrepreneur who launched seven ventures. Mac understands the weight of responsibility leaders carry, first hand.
- Over 2,000 hours of coaching experience.
- Master Executive Coach, Association for Coaching. ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC).
- Certified in Hogan and the iEQ9 Integrative Enneagram. Trained in Compassionate Inquiry. Certified in the Harthill Leadership Development Profile, Leadership Growth Profile 360, and Shifting Horizons assessments.
- MBA, University of Virginia (Darden). BS, Cognitive Science, UC San Diego.
- Founder of the Coaching Collective. Author of the forthcoming memoir Nobody on the Other Side.
The human
Mac splits his time between Hong Kong and Chiang Mai and is a father of two. He is an American who has built his life and work across Asia, at home in the space between cultures rather than settled in one.
His first book, Nobody on the Other Side, is a memoir of coming apart and staying whole. It is the clearest statement of what he actually believes: that people are whole underneath the stories that tell them they are not, and that the work of a life is subtraction down to what was always there.
Work with Mac
Referral-only, by design.
Coaching, speaking, or a conversation about the book. It all starts the same way.