Dave Sewell

Researcher, Facilitator and Executive Coach

“Every child deserves a home where they feel safe and loved.”

This is what drives Dave Sewell’s research and approach to executive education and facilitation.

Sewell’s own life story has led him to question everything he understood about leadership, from the beatings and shame from his own father to the near-complete psychological breakdown at the hands of a ruthless Area Manager in his early twenties. The question burning inside him, “Why do people behave this way?” and “How do we change this?”.

Sewell’s research built a deep understanding of human behavior and our need to feel physically and psychologically safe. None of us are at our best when we are under continued levels of stress beyond what we can comfortably cope with. It is when we are in this space that we are often not helpful to others, indeed we can be quite uncivil, causing us to be more aloof, more confrontational, and less tolerant of others.

No one wants to be this person in the workplace or this type of parent when we get home, but it is all too common.

Having published the learning of his research in his book Safe Leadership – beating stress to drive performance, Sewell is on a mission to make more workplaces psychologically safer so that every worker can go home with enough emotional and mental capacity to spend quality time with their family, creating that psychologically safe space in the home. He does this through a series of leadership workshops, a longitudinal program, and one on one executive coaching.