Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and founder of Suada
I’m absolutely delighted to be an Entrepreneur in Residence – empowering the next generation with the most important life skill, how to be persuasive and influential using the power of words.
David Thomson is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and founder of Suada, a learning retention platform that makes learning visible, provable and far harder to fake. David is a practised and passionate speaker, coach, consultant and advisor, and his work draws on the science of how people learn and how they decide.
A veteran of several start-ups (David successfully ran two other businesses before Suada), David is a Napoleon Hill certified instructor and a qualified life coach. He was formerly one of six people in the world certified as a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer to teach both the Principles of Persuasion workshop and the Pre-Suasion workshop, and he gave that certification up by choice, because influence in isolation does not cause transformational results.
David is dyslexic and struggled at school. He joined the army and came out of the forces with enough money to pay off his loans and buy a green Ford Capri his friends called Kermit. At the age of 21 he got a job packing Doc Marten boots, but it was a chance encounter with a book which changed his life: William Clement Stone's 'The Success System That Never Fails'. The book spoke to him and he took a new path. After six interviews and a lot of persuasion he secured a sales role at a mortgage company. Every moment he was in his car travelling to this job, he listened to business and personal development audio cassettes, learning from the greats and growing the belief that if the likes of Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill could go from rags to riches, why couldn't he?
David's philosophy is that if you're prepared to be outrageously brave, and you're prepared to follow it with determined action and hard work, then you can achieve your wildest dreams. You can read more of his story at his website davidthomson.com
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