High-performance mind coach for the leaders of sporting and business organisations. Forty years in elite sport, twenty-five running Smart Mind.
Based in Sydney. Speaks across Australia, Asia, USA, UK and Europe.
Please use the wording as written. Dave’s title is high-performance mind coach, and Smart Mind is two words.
Businesses don't stall because the CEO ran out of ideas or motivation. They hit a wall because the team structure hasn't kept pace with the growth.
Dave Diggle is a high-performance mind coach with 40 years in elite sport, coaching Commonwealth, World and Olympic medallists and their coaches. For the past 25 years, he has led Smart Mind, a high-performance consultancy supporting elite performers and leaders across sport and business. He built the sports psychology module inside the University of Sydney's postgraduate coaching degree and is its academic lecturer, a program that only admits coaches of national teams, or athletes who have represented their country. He was Mental Performance Coach to the Wallabies.
He brings those same frameworks to the boards and leadership teams of sporting organisations and businesses. The growing pains are similar. The path through them is too.
Dave Diggle is a high-performance mind coach who brings 40 years in elite sport, including time as Mental Performance Coach to the Wallabies, to the boards and leadership teams of privately held businesses.
Growing pains in a business tend to share a common shape. The business has worked. The structure has worked. And somewhere along the way, the people stopped keeping pace with both.
Dave Diggle has spent 40 years working across every layer of elite sport, working through exactly this kind of challenge with Commonwealth, World and Olympic medallists, with the coaches and leadership teams behind those athletes, and with the organisations that make high-performance programs run.
Dave built the sports psychology module inside the University of Sydney's postgraduate coaching degree and is its academic lecturer. The program only admits coaches of national teams, or athletes who have represented their country. Through it, he has helped some of the world's best coaches develop a different way of working with their teams.
As Mental Performance Coach to the Wallabies, he worked inside a high-performance environment where the gap between who should be doing what and who actually is shows up quickly: on the scoreboard, in team culture, in how people function under pressure.
What Dave brings to his keynotes is a framework tested across elite sport, high-level coaching, leadership teams and boardrooms. It is practical and direct, and it meets people where they are.
His starting point is always the same: the businesses he works with are not hitting walls because people aren't working hard. They're hitting walls because of structure: who actually holds influence, who is in a seat that doesn't suit them, where friction has built up, and whether the culture is pointed in the same direction as the ambition.
Over 25 years through Smart Mind, Dave has brought these tools from elite sport into the rooms of privately held businesses. He doesn't approach it with a generic program. He arrives with the right questions, a sharp eye for what's actually going on, and a track record across both codes.
For CEOs, boards and leadership teams of privately held businesses, and the advisers who work with them. Each keynote runs 45 to 90 minutes and is shaped to the event and the audience.
What high performance looks like inside business: from the mindset that separates performing teams from busy ones, to the friction points that can build up, to the conversation about your people structure that's been sitting in the back of your mind.
Leadership when the clock is running and the stakes are visible. What elite sport knows about staying clear-headed, keeping a team functioning and making good calls when there is no time to make perfect ones.
When the market shifts, the opportunities are usually visible to someone on your payroll. Why many teams miss them, how to build a new objective around what your people are good at, and how to reshape the team to deliver it.
The journey from a founder with a product and a big idea to the person who pitches to global giants. Building the team around the founder along the way: the engineer who develops but can’t communicate, the banker who sees investment but not process, and the founder who has to become business-minded without losing what made the idea work.
Every company has one person who stands between what the business can do and what the client expects. How to build that person, whether it’s the founder or the successor, so they can carry both without dropping either.
How to make the calls that cost something, ethically and productively: what to weigh, who to involve, how to decide quickly, and how to hold the line once it’s made.
Half-day or full-day working sessions, facilitated by Dave, for leadership teams who want an expert in the room, working alongside them to tackle real challenges and build practical solutions.
A board-level working session focused on getting the right people in the right roles for the next stage of the business. Together, we examine strengths, capability, development opportunities and role clarity, including how the owner’s role may need to evolve.
Start with what the business needs to deliver, then look objectively at the capability of the team around it. Who is best suited to each role? Where can capability be developed? Which roles need to change? A working session on deliberately building the right team for the job, rather than shaping the business around the people already in place.
Tough conversations with owners and positional players about productivity, and how to have them so something changes rather than someone leaves. They are straight, respectful and built for the long relationship.
Every audience is different, so every talk starts with a conversation. Pick a time that suits you and Dave will hear about the room, what you’re working towards and where the session needs to land.
Book a conversation with Dave
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