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Mark Smith - The Powerful Man team member

Mark Smith

Meet your Activation Method coach – Mark

I am a global adventurer who has made it his mission to learn to be a better man.

It all started when I was relocated to a strange yet vibrant city called Johannesburg by my employer in 1995.  I was a sales area manager and had my priorities screwed up.  It left me running on empty.  My girlfriend had broken up with me.  Instead of dealing with my emotions, I was looking for the next exciting thing to escape pain, shame for cheating on her, and other behaviors I was not proud of.

It was a friend who gave me the book The Celestine Prophecy.  My eyes were opened to a new way of being.  

I undertook a life skills course (where I met King Arthur, now head coach @ The Powerful Man).

This propelled me along the path of a seeker.  I was in search of my soul.  

Not satisfied with the world I inhabited, which had brought me success and yet emptiness, I forged ahead devouring course after course looking for my center, for meaning, for fulfillment.  

In this time I also got married and had two children.  The marriage was a disaster and I fought for 6 years in the courts to gain access to my children, going so far as a custody hearing.

I moved out of the house and closed my promotional products agency.  

I needed to change my path.  I chose to work with people, not products. This epiphany became a journey and what a magnificent adventure it has been.

This shift saw me run team-building processes, grow my experience, and start Wildcat Adventure Training.  I learned outcomes-based facilitation, led sales training, leadership development, and many other personal development courses.  I began creating and running my own courses and truly stepped up as a people development specialist.

Excited by the opportunities, I invested in courses and read books around performance, leadership, human limits, and learning theory.

Finally, in 2005 I discovered coaching.  The driving force was people asking me to work with their husbands, daughters, PAs, managers, or sons.  I relented and devised some processes and tried them out.  Feeling as if I needed to be certified and not make up my own way of helping people, I signed up for a coaching course and loved it.  

I went on to study executive coaching and that was it for me.  The tools, the insights, the sustained performance, and brain science exhilarated me.  At the same time, I was superbly supported by my now wife and daughter to follow my dreams.

I grew as a coach, finding it took a while to gain momentum and a brand.  Once that happened and I had a few strategic partnerships, business began to boom.

I set up and ran my Leader As Coach courses internationally, in India and Europe. 

There were opportunities to mentor leaders in India and Africa, become an assessor of coaches, and certified with the ICF as an ACC coach in 2011.

My coaching studies and work grows and develops organically.  I have transcended transactional and moved much more deeply into transformational and process-type coaching.

I work with leaders who need to find their core, their magnificence, and their power.  This stretches into executive teams and male business owners.

Having worked with men for 10 years on their shadow aspects, assisting them through bio-energetic processes to move beyond pain, trauma, and self-limiting behaviors, Arthur realized The Powerful Man might be a good fit.

He was right.  The move to focus a large portion of my time and energy on the good work we do in The Activation Method hit the sweet spot for me as a servant leader.

Combining a love for working with transformation, assisting men to get real and leadership coaching creates an opportunity for me to explore my zone of genius.