About Dave

Coach Dave Smart was an electronics engineer for over two decades, having taken his B.S. in EE at University of California, Berkeley. He is experienced in many areas of digital, analog electronics and power systems, computer programming and microprocessor applications. He worked at many places, including Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Physics International. He bridged many specialties, many disciplines, and got different kinds of systems "talking" to one another.

He got different kinds of people talking to one another too. He worked with people extricating their way out of cults like People's Temple and Subud. Later in working with ex-drug users trying to rebuild their lives, he found his knowledge and experience with cults useful in helping them stare down the drug world - also a cult.

His experience with mystery schools began with Builders of the Adytum early on, and later with Pathways Institute, where he completed many programs. There are three levels of initiation in Pathways, and Dave attained all three. "Some were very demanding" Dave says, "and though I had thought that I had long ago overcome all the victim-role parts of myself, I found that there was still work for me to do." In this and other programs he had coaches to help him get there, and so he was exposed to several forms of coaching. He knew then that coaching people was a true and ongoing passion. He trained at The Coaches Training Institute, finding and becoming expert at the many kinds of co-active coaching. There are many techniques from the mystery schools that he has brought to coaching, empowering his effectiveness as a coach.

"Life coaching and mystery schools go together in many ways", Dave says. His vision is to bring together Sierra Paths Temple, a mystery school in and for the Sierra Nevada. Some of his clients will be among the participants in the school's programs, and soon initiates in the school will be among his colleagues.