Award • 2021
Points of Light Award
Awarded by the Prime Minister for the Mental Health Family Hour during the pandemic: a year-long, volunteer-led online series that reached thousands.
Mental health is a massive problem. So much of what's offered to address it remains clinical, jargon-heavy and inaccessible to the people who need it most. Stigma keeps many from engaging at all. The result is silence: people suffering quietly, teams underperforming, young people carrying things they were never meant to carry alone.
What makes this harder is that most organisations still book tick-box wellbeing sessions. An hour of slides. A list of coping strategies nobody remembers on Monday morning. Content that informs without ever truly connecting, because you can't manufacture connection from a PowerPoint deck.
Lived experience
This is where lived experience changes everything.
Lived experience puts your people in a room with someone who just gets it, not because they studied it, but because they survived it. Someone whose story removes the shame from the conversation before the first slide has loaded.
That person is me.
Two decades of bipolar disorder, self-harm, an eating disorder and a crisis in 2009 that very nearly ended everything. First hidden, then shared, then shaped into work that has now reached thousands through schools, boardrooms, NHS programmes and an online series awarded a Points of Light Award by the Prime Minister.
More about Dave
Fifteen years combining clinical insight with raw human truth
- NLP Practitioner
- 15 Years Coaching
- 10 Years Speaking
- NHS Contractor
- School Interventions
Dave lives with bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and lived experience of an eating disorder and self-harm. In 2009 that struggle brought him to his lowest point. What followed was a slow, deliberate, profoundly worthwhile journey back.
That journey produced the Mental Health Family Hour, a volunteer-led online series awarded a Points of Light Award by the Prime Minister for its impact during the pandemic. It also led to five years as an NHS contractor, developing training programmes informed by lived experience, including self-harm interventions in schools with measurable, life-changing outcomes.
Today Dave brings that depth, honesty and hard-won expertise to corporate audiences. Clinical insight with raw human truth, and a warmth that makes even the most difficult topics feel approachable.
“The very things I was bullied for as a child are now my greatest professional asset. Every talk I give is driven by one purpose: to be the person I needed when I was younger.”
Previous clients
Trusted across corporate, sport, legal and public sector.
Speaking topics
Four talks. One goal: give people the words, frameworks and permission to change.
01 Flagship Keynote
From "Nothing Left to Give" to "I've Only Just Begun"
Dave's most powerful talk. A journey from rock bottom to purpose, tracing the behaviours that dismantled his mental health, the psychology of reaching a crisis point, and the unexpected moment that changed everything. Not a talk about surviving. A talk about what happens next.
02 Most Requested
Building Resilience in Yourself and Others
Resilience is a muscle. Too little challenge and it shrinks, too much and it snaps, just enough and it grows. Built for individuals, managers and parents alike, this session covers the inner critic, the inner coach, and closes with a framework for locking in new behaviours that is as funny as it is genuinely transformative.
03
Slingshots & Boomerangs: An Unusual Approach to Stress Management
We all have habits that quietly work against us. Dave introduces a simple but powerful framework that makes the invisible logic of our habits suddenly visible, and shows how to replace the ones that harm us with ones that build lasting resilience.
04
The Algorithm of Anxiety
Using the YouTube algorithm as a lens everyone instantly understands, Dave unpacks the reinforcing loop at the heart of anxiety and shows audiences exactly how to break it, and choose a different story. Closes with the truth that reframes everything, negativity comes naturally, but positivity takes practice.
Pay It Forward Protocol
From your boardroom to their classroom.
Every hour of corporate work funds four hours of mental health education in local schools. Your booking goes twice as far, and the people who need the conversation most are never the ones who can least afford it.
How it works
1 Hour of corporate work booked with Dave.
:
4 Hours of mental health education funded in a local school.
Awards & recognition
Recognised for work that lifts people who are often unheard.
Award • 2023
Time to Shine Award
Won as part of the NHS ChangeTalks team, recognising training work that reshaped the conversation around staff wellbeing across participating trusts.
Book Dave
Ready to bring Dave in?
Tell him about your team, your audience, or your brief. Dave replies to every enquiry personally, usually within two working days.