David Limiero, PCC, CPLC

In the early 2000s, a church-planting organization called Stadia assigned David Limiero a coach and a mentor. He couldn’t have told you the difference between the two roles. He just knew he needed help. Planting a church will do that to you.

David spent years as a church planter, then joined Stadia’s staff, where he began coaching other planters himself, and eventually overseeing the coaches who coached them. None of it was ICF coaching. He was self-taught, piecing together a framework from faith-based writers like Bob Logan and Tony Stoltzfus, picking up what he could from the occasional seminar. He wasn’t chasing a credential. He was trying to make sure the planters under his care felt as supported as he had.

The push toward formal training came, of all places, from a pay scale. In late 2022, while performance coaching with Michael Hyatt and Company, David learned non-ICF-trained coaches would eventually be paid less. While he was grandfathered in, the news sent him looking into ICF training in earnest. A fellow coach, Ruthie Slingerland, pointed him to Professional Christian Coaching Institute. He started his training in February 2023.

That’s when the real work began: not the classwork, but the unlearning.

David had spent years handing people frameworks. As a Full Focus coach, he had a toolkit full of them, and his instinct was to diagnose a client’s issue quickly, then assign the solution and explain it. It’s a mistake PCCI has a name for: “tunneling through the mountain.” David was a textbook case.

Training changed that, slowly and unevenly: not in one dramatic moment, but call by call, class by class. He learned to sit longer in the discomfort of not knowing. To ask instead of answer. To notice that the problem a client opened with was rarely the real one. Frameworks didn’t disappear from his coaching, but they became something he offered with permission, not something he handed over on arrival.

He’s coached roughly 90 clients and logged just over 1200 hours since he started calling himself a coach in August 2021. He went on to earn his PCC and Certified Professional Leadership Coach credentials. Today his practice runs in two directions: Orthodox clergy navigating explosive growth and the pressures that come with it, and founders wrestling with the particular loneliness of scaling something they built.

Ask David for the moment that captures what coaching actually does, and he doesn’t reach for a success story. He reaches for a hard one.

A priest came to a session furious—a longtime parishioner was doing real damage to the church, and the anger was justified. Two-thirds of the way through the call, David asked one question:

“How do you think God views this situation?”

A long pause followed. Then the priest arrived, on his own, at something David hadn’t been steering him toward: his own need to repent, to seek forgiveness, and to see the man causing him so much pain not as an obstacle, but as a brother in Christ. David didn’t hand him that insight. He just asked the question and stayed quiet long enough for it to surface.

“That resonates because it came so deeply from the client’s own values,” David says. “It was his awareness that created the transformation. I just got to witness it.”

David doesn’t lead with his faith when he introduces himself to clients, and he doesn’t hide it either. He sees every client—Christian or not—as someone carrying the image of God, worthy of being coached with excellence regardless of what they believe. But he’ll also tell you, plainly, that he believes the Holy Spirit shows up in his sessions. Questions arrive that he didn’t plan. He calls it being “downloaded from heaven.”

He joined the PCCI faculty in 2026, something he says was on his bucket list from the moment he took his first class, though he never pursued it directly. It found him instead, the way a lot of his best opportunities have.

His advice to anyone wondering if they’re ready to start:

“God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.”

You don’t become a coach the day you finish your classes or perfect your website, David says. You become a coach the day you decide to call yourself one, first to yourself, then to others. Everything after that is practice.