AYU Partner Spotlight: Life Coach Dave Knight

Stress test your mental health with Life Coach

Dave Knight

Hi Dave, tell us about your podcast?

The main arm of our business is our Sunday Settler Life Coaching products – to transform people’s lives through conversations, which are steered towards overcoming many of our life’s challenges.

We help people manage themselves against mental health related challenges such as stress, anxiety and depression; addictive behaviours; goal setting strategies; dealing with imposters or difficulties in our relationships – amongst many other challenges that we experience in life.

We do this through our podcasts – the weekly 9pm Sunday Settler, collaborations with highly esteemed guests, our 1-2-1 and group/team coaching programmes, as well as our coach-in-your-pocket wellbeing packages. We work with individuals and alongside businesses, with our corporate packages too.

How has your entrepreneurial journey brought you to this point in your career?

My background and education is in the mental health and addictions field and I worked across many settings across the UK, New Zealand and Australia. In my role I supervised, mentored and trained many staff.

I’ve always had a strong entrepreneurial streak in me and I left my job to start my first business a decade ago, which was a training agency. Despite the competitive market that we operated in, we grew the business year-on-year. I sold the business after six years and it continues to be a success today.

Since then I have merged my professional background in mental health, addictions, business and also my sporting background – as a semi-professional footballer, to dedicate my time in serving individuals and businesses to overcome their respective challenges. This is my real passion.

I’ve always had a huge personal interest in our human psychology and there are lots of misunderstandings about how we experience our life challenges and, with my professional and sporting background to back it all up, Life Coaching is how I have chosen to have my impact in the world.

How can a life coach help cope with the demands of working in a high pressure industry?

A trusted and reliable Life Coach will help in many ways to cope with high pressures. There are many demands that might include – and are not exclusive, to setting goals, our self esteem, self-doubt, being more effective, being accountable to ourselves and others, juggling work demands and relationships or dealing with stress and anxiety.

A life coach will help you to find a balance in your life and to better manage yourself in relation to the pressure that you may be feeling. There may be times when we feel at full capacity due to the pressure and a life coach helps you to identify where we can find capacity and then, how we can use it.

Your work with a life coach is centred on you – you are important. It will very much be focused on what you can do now to help you get to where you want to be – it may involve actions of course, however, much of this is about understanding our emotional states – how we think and feel, and how that can impact on our productivity.

A life coach is also your personalised sounding board; someone to lean on for both the short and the long term until you feel able to manage your wellbeing in many key areas of your life.

How important is looking after mental health and wellbeing for success?

Our wellbeing is number one. It is the foundation for everything and it can’t be overstated as to its importance.

Our mental health and wellbeing determines the way we interact, how we engage with everything around us, our level of productivity, our desires, what we accept and will not stand for, how we aspire and then what we’re prepared to do to get to where we want to be.

If we have good mental health, it will also help us to see that our happiness does not depend on whether we achieve what we’ve set out to achieve. This means we can work with intent – but with less pressure, towards those success markers that we have either set, or have been set for us.
If we look after our mental health and wellbeing, we are better placed to make sound; rational and logical decisions based on the considerations that we have given.

With good mental health and wellbeing as our priority, it helps us to feel more resourceful; we’re more able to think about and serve others; to be present when we need to be and have the capacity to go that extra mile whenever we need to.

All of these areas are key factors to success and maintaining our mental health and wellbeing will promote the opportunity of having a longevity of success over a sustained period of time.

What are you most passionate about?

I am most passionate about helping people to self manage their wellbeing; to find the direction that they want to move in and then to help them move towards that direction.

There are many examples of what this can look like, such as wanting to manage stress better; to be less fearful of the future; to be present when we are with our partners, children or other loved ones; to realise why we want to achieve something; to be rid of unnecessary burdens and insecurities; to uncover those blindspots or self limiting beliefs that could be holding us back.

We have more control over managing our mental health and wellbeing than we give ourselves credit for and my time is dedicated to helping people do this, so they can keep moving forward without unnecessary pressure, overwhelm and innocent misunderstandings.

The Sunday Settler is currently offering 20% off one-to-one sessions and 50% off their Bulletproof Your Mental Health and Wellbeing Package exclusively to AYU Members.