Leng Lim: Choosing Attention, Balancing Humanity

Leng Lim’s path spans theology, business, and executive coaching. Born in Singapore in 1964, a year before the country’s independence, he went on to study at Princeton, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Business School. An ordained Episcopal priest for 30 years, Leng later shifted into executive and family business coaching. His work centers on supporting individuals and families to grow in both inner life and outer accomplishment, balancing material success with values, spirit, and enduring legacy.

For Leng, investing in kindness comes down to attention and choice. “What you attend to, you give your life force and energy,” he said. Investing in kindness means choosing to direct one’s attention toward kindness, intention, and action, even when it is difficult. He has seen how context influences that choice. While leading senior executives on a leadership program, he described individuals hardened by corporate culture, some even mean. Yet, a visit to an orphanage shifted something. Seeing children opened their hearts, softening their defenses. “Circumstances are helpful to elicit making that choice,” he noted.

His analysis of corporate life traces back to history. Leng highlighted how corporations evolved from colonial systems designed for extraction and profit, often indifferent to human cost. He pointed to the Dutch colonization of Indonesia’s Banda Islands, where local relationships and fair trade were destroyed (through a massacre) in pursuit of a monopoly on nutmeg. That legacy, he argued, still shapes today’s corporate culture—where speed, competition, and profit are often valued over accountability. “Accountability is not just a check list. It has to do with having a spirit where you value other beings. We have to invest in the structures that will promote kindness, or respect or dignity or humaneness. Call it what you will,” he emphasized.

Culture, Leng explained, deeply influences how kindness is expressed. In Bali, kindness is woven into daily life. He described the traditional tooth-filing rite of passage, a ritual meant to symbolize mastering destructive emotions before entering adulthood. Even the language reflects this value: the common phrase “Terima kasih” for thank you translates as “I receive your love,” to which the response, “Sama sama,” means “I receive your love too.” For Leng, these examples show how cultural frameworks can restrain ruthlessness and encourage more mindful connection.

He also reflected on the balance between good and bad. Drawing from conversations with historians and his own ministry, Leng noted that striving only to be “good” often leads to projecting “bad” onto others. Instead, he suggested, both kindness and unkindness live within us. The challenge is not to eliminate one but to acknowledge, integrate, and balance them. “When I say I try to be human,” he explained, “it is to acknowledge the presence of these in all of us, and work to balance them.”

Stories of kindness, he shared, endure. “During the HIV AIDS crisis, much of the world was absolutely cruel to people with HIV, cruel, contemptuous. It was lesbian women who took care of many dying gay men. And that's kindness. They didn't have to do it, but they did it.” He also remembered professors who gave him difficult but caring advice, calling that too a form of kindness. “Kindness need not be soft and fuzzy, but even if stern or harsh, the recipient must be able to feel and know they have inherent worth.”

“It’s wonderful when there’s kindness.”

Leng Lim is an executive coach, priest, and advisor who believes that kindness requires both choice and structure. His reflections show that cultures, corporations, and individuals must decide what to cultivate. Keep an eye out for more interviews.