Meet Darren
Darren is usually happiest when he is either by the sea, at a live music concert or helping leaders and their organisations become the very best that they can be.
He is a Performance Psychologist who works mostly with leadership teams around the world in the areas of safety, health and wellbeing and has held a variety of operational leadership roles in some of the most challenging and competitive environments in the world.
Hobbies include travel, ocean swimming and live music.
He's an in-demand Keynote Speaker, a creator of innovative and highly acclaimed online learning programs and still delivers groundbreaking live courses that totally change the way leaders, managers and their organisations think, feel and act with regard to safety, health and wellbeing.
He is also the only safety professional in the world who holds an MSc in performance psychology and has extensive operational leadership experience across many different cultures.
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Here's Darren delivering a Keynote to a global corporation
But how did it all begin?
My interest in performance started when my dad took me to my first live football game at the age of 7. I was fascinated with the players and the dynamics between them and their coach.
It was the same watching athletes at the Olympic Games and then performers at theatres and music venues. Why did some people become really good – and just get better and better?
It’s the same with music. When you think about Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran how is it they have this ability to engage the audience and get everyone dancing – and some performers don’t.
When I started to play sport, I became focused on coaches. Why could some engage us to listen, and inspire us to learn and come back for more? Throughout the first 25-years of my chosen first career, I noticed that it didn’t really matter too much about where you were in the world or even what you were being asked to do, what really mattered was who you were with.
You could find yourself in the most austere of places and most challenging environments but if you had good people around you, if you had a good leader that cares for you, then whatever you’re doing can be really enjoyable and feel meaningful.
So, why safety?
In my previous career, safety wasn’t necessarily at the forefront of our minds that often. Like many organisations the emphasis was usually on “getting the job done” usually as ‘best as you can and as quick as you can”.
Occasionally we’d take too many risks and make poor decisions that could have led to tragic incidents. Then came my “safety epiphany moment”. We had a new leader, in an especially competitive and challenging situation who changed the way myself and many others thought and felt about safety and our performance in general.
When our new leader took over, he made it absolutely clear that he expected things to be done differently – he demanded that we take better care of ourselves and our team.
At first, we just carried on doing stuff the same way we had for the previous 15-years and as other leaders expected. The problem was we didn’t believe him that he wanted us to change, so we carried on taking risks.
A couple of days later whilst carrying out an important and hazardous task with my team that really needed to be done quickly, he came up to me and said, ‘what do you think you’re doing’. I got a real dressing down for not taking care of myself or my people.
Then he asked me a question that changed everything:
'What would I do if I lost any one of you, how could I possibly replace any single one of you?’.
People say to me that it takes years to change culture, but this guy came in and changed it pretty much overnight. Culture can change quickly but it depends on two things. Who the leaders are and how badly they want it to change.
The leader that changed me was also an international rugby player, he understood the core principles of performance psychology to motivate people intrinsically. When you combine psychology with leadership in safety, change happens.
You change - Your team changes - And then the culture of your organisation changes to enable sustainable improvements in performance.
I now enjoy helping others create this kind of change I their workplaces.
Thinking about working with us?
There are a many different reasons why organisations and delegates come to us.
Here are just a few....
- Organisations that work with us want something different. Compliance is a given, they’re usually already really good at safety – but they want to become even better.
- What tends to have happened is they’ve already put their people through IOSH Managing or Leading Safely courses or possibly even NEBOSH certifications and realised that compliance isn’t enough. They want to go beyond that and become even better – We really enjoy working with organisations like this.
- Even organisations that see good results in safety usually have 2-3 issues or behaviours that they'd really like to improve. Our courses help them do exactly that by applying their learning to real life, everyday issues.
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