John Dawson, public speaking coach & trainer

Training and background

I trained in Relational Presence in 2000, and I think I'm the only person to have done the facilitator training twice — I loved it that much. My role in the network has deepened over the years. I now hold a senior position, having co-led it for over a decade. In 2025–2026 I worked with Caroline Peet to organise and implement supervision for the facilitator community, work I found genuinely valuable for everyone involved.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

I never stop exploring ACT, or rethinking how it applies to what I do in the room. It's an ongoing conversation with the work as much as a body of study.

• Two-day ACT training, 2019

• Six ACT courses completed online during the 2020 lockdown

• DNA-V course, Bath, 2023

• Online study in Values in ACT, and in social anxiety

• Continuing work on attention, mindfulness, and their relationship to anxiety and confidence

I've written more about what underpins all of this on my What I believe page.

Group facilitation

Two-year Diploma in Group Facilitation, IDHP, 1988–90. Probably the most practically useful training I've ever done. It taught me how to run powerful groups safely, and it underpins everything I do in the room. It went to a depth that really challenged me — and I'm still meeting monthly with some of the facilitators I started with, 35 years on.

Coaching and leadership

• Speaker coaching, Bath TEDx, 2021. A reminder of what's at stake when someone stands up to say something that really matters to them.

• Warriors for the Human Spirit, with Meg Wheatley, 2015

• Appreciative Inquiry Coaching Course, Lincoln, 2011, and Fundamentals of Appreciative Inquiry, 2010, with Jane Magruder Watkins. Appreciative Inquiry is about developing the strengths of an organisation or project rather than focusing on its problems. We need far more of that in the world.

• Spirituality and Leadership, Woodbrooke Quaker College, 2010. Leadership in Times of Chaos, with Margaret Wheatley, Schumacher College, 2010. Transformational Learning, with Michael Carroll, 2010.

• Common Purpose, 2008–9. A year-long enquiry into leadership in Bristol, alongside leaders from the statutory, voluntary and private sectors. Less a course, more a conversation about what it means to lead in a city.

Working with Meg Wheatley and Jane Magruder Watkins changed something in how I see my working life. I realised I could still be doing this work in my seventies and loving it. That was not a small thing to discover.

Before all that

The founding editor and publisher of The Spark Magazine in Bristol, 1993 to 2008. Over two million copies in print; the magazine ran for 25 years in total. I'm proud of what we built — an independent magazine run by a team who paid themselves the same hourly rate, worked crazy deadline hours, and laughed a lot. And I burnt out at the end of my time, which with hindsight was entirely predictable. It taught me that I can bite off more than I can handle.

Diploma in Health Education, Bristol Polytechnic, 1986. I helped devise training for an HEA drugs awareness course; my suggested name was Learning Skills with Drugs — LSD. Somehow they didn't go for it. It gave me my first real taste of group facilitation, and I never looked back. Before that, in 1984, I trained as a counsellor at BADAS.

Honours degree, Keele University. My mum died in my final year, but I had a lot of fun before then — I wrote a comedy show every week for a couple of years and performed sketches, and I wrote an ethical rag mag, which probably says everything about where I was headed.

I'm also a proud holder of a Bus Conductor's Certificate, my first job in Bristol in 1982, with absolutely no idea where those buses were going. I was fairly lost after my mum died: insurance clerk, unemployed, HGV1 driver for a while.

I did a careers test at 21. Number two career suggested was to be a Social Worker. Number one was Minister of Religion. I'm about 30% of the way towards that mix so far.