Ways to Become a Better Man (Through Coaching) – Darren J. Brookes | Podcast Ep. 57

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Listen to the Podcast on Spotify: CreateGrowProfit: Coaching Stories

Get In Touch With Darren J. Brookes

• Darren’s Website
• Darren’s Facebook Group
• Darren’s Instagram
• Darren’s Books
  • 23 Rules of Life…: that most people don’t want to hear
  • DREAMS TO GOALS

Interview Transcription

Morris: Welcome to CreateGrowProfit: Coaching Stories. I am Morris from creategrowprofit.com, and today I’m speaking to Darren J. Brooks, the author and founder of Seat at the Table, which is a network for men to help them connect, contribute, and conquer. Darren, thank you so much for being here today. Where are you calling in from?

Darren: Calling in from Stoke-on-Trent today, mate. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invite.

Morris: Yeah, thanks for being here. As we spoke just before hitting record, it’s nice to talk to someone for once who’s almost in the same time zone as I am.

Darren: When you jump on those interviews or those meetings and somebody’s in Australia or America, getting that time zone right can be a bit crazy, can’t it?

Morris: Yeah, I feel bad for the Australians and people in New Zealand. They have it the hardest to connect.

Darren: Definitely. I spoke to somebody the other night, and it was 7 o’clock in the morning for him; it was 11 o’clock at night for me.

Morris: Yeah, difficult times for both. Darren, what kind of people do you work with today?

Darren: The people I’m working with now, Morris, aren’t the people who I started with. It’s men—I work with men, and usually, those men have had quite a colorful past. Usually, something happened. Some of the guys, you know, have been involved with the criminal justice system; some of the guys have had substance misuse issues; some of the guys have just had a crazy upbringing, but they’re really working towards being a better man.

A lot of them are in business, so they’ve used those lessons that they’ve learned throughout their life, and they’ve applied them to businesses. Some of them are really successful entrepreneurs, so I love a guy that’s kind of burnt it to the ground and is really building things back up. That’s who Seat at the Table has kind of attracted—the kind of guys who have been attracted to it, really. I think.

Morris: How does your network work when somebody joins?

Darren: So I run a free Facebook group. They can jump on the Facebook group for free. I run a private mastermind, which runs on a Tuesday night. I’m just starting the next one, actually, in July. I’ve got one full at the minute; I’m starting another one.

And I host regular events. I do one called Cigars and Stories, where all the guys get around the fire; they tell stories, and they can share a cigar. I put other ones on where men are speaking, so it will be a man who’s gone through some challenges in life, whether it be health issues, substance issues, or a relationship breakdown, and share that story with another group of men who might be going through that at the time themselves, or they’ll just take some golden nuggets from that that they can apply to their own life.

Morris: That’s really awesome. And you just said sitting around the fire—does it mean that the network is only in person, or is it also virtual?

Darren: No. The mastermind is virtual, Morris, so we catch up by Zoom. And then I hold regular events in and around my area, really so that is the Cigars and Stories, where it is held around here, but the idea is to grow that nationwide so it’s all over the country, and then eventually, you know, grow it internationally.

My partner, she’s from Kansas, and I’ve got a guy over there who’s willing to host one over there, so probably in 2025, we’re going to put one on in Kansas, which will be amazing.

Morris: Oh wow, you’re going international, Darren, that’s so cool!

Darren: Yeah, that’s the plan, mate, that’s the plan.

Morris: I read on your profiles and websites, you wear many different hats: you’re a father, and author of two books, right? You’re a speaker, and you’re a coach. Is there anything else on that list?

Darren: I think, no, I think that might be about it. You know, I enjoy getting in the outdoors and stuff like that. This is why I think the connect part of what I do. I encapsulates that as connection to yourself as a man, but also connection to what’s around you—connection to nature, connection to the people around you. And I think we’ve come so far away, Morris, from who we are, which we, you know, we briefly spoke about before we jumped on, that when we’re out, sat around the fire and things like that, that’s kind of what we’re supposed to be doing.

We’re not supposed to be sitting behind a laptop for 9–10 hours a day, so I like to get a balance between the two. You know, you can’t escape working on the laptop, and it’s good that I can run those masterminds with men from all over the world, but it’s also good to just get out into nature and connect with nature and sit around the fire and things like that. I don’t think they are important—I think they are essential.

Morris: So you’re telling me I can’t turn on a YouTube video with the fire and watch that on my screen and get a similar experience?

Darren: No, you can; it’s going to relax you, but you’re not going to get the full benefit unless you can smell it, hear it, and yeah, I think you’re going to get the full benefit. I think we’ve, yeah, a lot of things we’ve kind of replicated and technology has tried to take over some of these things where, how I see it, we need both working in unison. One of the amazing things that came from sort of the COVID pandemic really was this connection with different people through Zoom and through these different avenues that might not have happened otherwise. I met some amazing people through that time really through technology, but it’s not a substitute for catching up in person. I love in-person events, that’s why I love getting around the fire. I think they are essential to a man’s well-being, to his development, and to everything really.

Morris: Yeah, I agree. I was on a podcast yesterday where the topic was connecting with nature, and it’s really incredible when I thought about it how I didn’t consider myself a nature guy at all, but then being a guest there yesterday and participating in the conversation, I realized how me just running outside—that is my way of connecting with nature, and it has massive benefits in my life and ultimately also in my work because I sleep better, I focus better, fewer mood swings, all that stuff. So yeah, it’s really important what you’re saying—the balance between technology and the outdoors are, as you said, what we’re supposed to be doing.

Darren: Yeah, it’s just getting outside, and it’s like you say, that’s your connection to nature. It’s just getting out there rather than being inside all the time. Sometimes it’s so much easier to think, “Well, I’ll just go to the gym,” which is inside, rather than getting out, or, “You know, the weather’s bad,” where if you’ve got the right clothing or equipment on, it doesn’t matter what the weather’s like.

One of the beautiful things about being in England is if we were put off by the weather, we would never do anything. So we’ve got a wild camping trip on Friday where we’re taking a couple of clients, and it’s giving out rain, but you know, it doesn’t matter. We’re going anyway regardless of what the weather’s like.

Morris: Yeah, I think that is so powerful—knowing how to have a great time and how to feel good no matter the external circumstances, like the weather, right? Not being put off by that.

Darren: Yeah, because it does put people off, doesn’t it? If it’s pouring it down with rain or it’s snowing, it does put people off going out, but once you’re out and you’ve got the right gear on, it doesn’t really matter. I think you can have just as much fun.

We walk some, you know, we’ve got some good mountains around England, and we walk a few of them. We’re doing one on the 22nd, which is Crib Goch, which is Snowdon. It’s quite a dangerous ridge, but we didn’t do it in winter because it might have been slippery, but the weather still might be bad when we’re up there, but we’ve got all the right clothing and stuff, so I think, yeah, it doesn’t matter what the weather’s like if you’ve got the right equipment. If you haven’t got the right equipment, then you can maybe run into a few problems.

Morris: Darren, let’s talk about your story as a coach. When did you start calling yourself a coach?

Darren: So, I was the manager, Morris, of a residential rehabilitation unit for people struggling with addiction. I started there in about 2012, and sadly, in 2016, the government withdrew the funding to drugs and alcohol services by 50%, so that meant one rehabilitation center closed, and one stayed open.

The one we worked at unfortunately closed down. From there, one of the guys—he was the therapy manager, I was the residential manager, and there was another guy who was the lead support worker—he came to us with this idea of a well-being organization. He’d had this idea for years, and he wanted a couple of people who he could trust to go in on this business with him.

None of us had run a business; we’d run a service between us, that’s kind of what we did, but in the business area, we were completely green. We made a lot of mistakes. We were doing 80 to 90 hours a week each which was ironic considering it was a well-being organization. We were helping other people with their well-being but you know, our well-being was kind of shot and while we were there, we, you know, we did yoga classes, we did group counseling, one-to-one counseling well-being walks.

One of the services that we were going to add was coaching so with my, mate being a therapist he was already trained in that area so I trained to be a coach. I completed my training while I was there with the idea of adding this service to all these services that, to be honest, we couldn’t all already maintain. We took on too much too quickly instead of focusing on one thing and making that work we added all these different things.

So one guy left and you know there were two of us then, we replaced them with somebody else. My life outside of the organization was kind of deteriorating. I was getting less time with my daughter, Morris, I remember crashing my car not you know it wasn’t a bad crash but I knocked the wing mirror off my car and I was quite stressed and had something out to give, I was doing this for a better life for me and my family and I ultimately I felt like I’d got a worse life than I had before.

So I pulled away and I started coaching on a one-to-one basis myself. So I started off coaching the initial two people I coached for free and then started you know charging a minimal fee and then slowly but surely increasing it and what I found was my life was getting better. My life was getting more rewarding.

I was my own boss. I was working on my own and I could decide what hours I worked. I didn’t feel like I was letting anybody else down or feel like I had to pull anybody else up. It was just me and yeah things, you know, things started growing. Initially, Morris, I was coaching people through burnout because that was what I felt like had happened to me in the well-being organization. So that was a simple step really, in coaching somebody that was going through something that I’d already been through.

Morris: And was it always easy for you to you know find people who wanted your coaching?

Darren: No and I don’t think it’s easy. I think the more clear on who you are and who you want to work with, the more those clients will slowly start coming into your environment you know. I quite believe in the law of attraction that if you put out there what you want then you will attract that stuff and I’ve kind of started attracting those guys who I work with.

They’ve just started coming. They’ve started coming into my network so I think to be very clear for your viewers that are watching, that want to coach, be very clear on who you want to coach and what you want to help them people with because if you not, I think you’ll struggle to find clients. I think it’ll be quite difficult.

Morris: Yeah and I’m I’m glad you brought that up, Darren because you know looking at the way how you present yourself in the marketplace, you’re very clear on who you want to work with right? Like you offer a network for men you’ve 4really niched down on this and what was it that, you know, made you say, “I’m only going to be working with men, and I’m creating these networks and events for men.”

Darren: So to start off with, Morris, I wrote a book, Dreams to Goals, and I was really passionate about coaching people who were chasing after their dreams because that’s what I felt like I was doing. At 12 years old, I wanted to be an author, and a teacher at school said, “You need to do something a little bit more realistic.” You know, I hate that phrase. And that came from a very kind, caring, and lovely woman.

One of the things that I try to encourage people to do is to not listen to others—listen to what’s within. A lot of the time, these people who talk you out of going after what you want aren’t haters or people who don’t like you; it’s your mom, your dad, your teacher, the people who love and care about you and want what’s best for you. But they don’t know what’s best for you. They want you to go through life with no struggle, no challenge, where all the beautiful things that happen come from struggle, challenge, and going through those things that you don’t want to do.

So I started, from coaching people on burnout, really coaching people who wanted to chase after their dreams, and that was men and women. But I was also running a single dads’ group throughout COVID, Morris. It was dads that had ended up with their children, maybe through social services, substance misuse, or death—usually something traumatic had happened for the guys to have their children.

This network for those guys, and doing a little bit of coaching alongside that, was a real lifeline for them. And what I thought while I was running that is, “This isn’t just something that single dads need. This is something that men need. Men need a network. Men need guys to push them, to encourage them.”

Your partner, a lot of the time, isn’t going to be that person who’s going to push you. My partner is amazing—she’s a rock—but if I want somebody to push me, it’s not going to be her. She helps me in many different ways, but I think guys around you will push you through that competitive edge, where your partner is more concerned about your well-being and making sure you’re okay. And as you know, in business, sometimes your well-being isn’t always good. Sometimes you’re doing too many hours.

I look at work-life balance now in a completely different sense. I look at work-life balance as a lifetime rather than a daily or weekly thing. Sometimes more time is needed to go into your family; sometimes more time into your partner. But sometimes more time is needed to go into your business. So, yeah, I kind of organically moved towards that, Morris. It wasn’t an overnight decision of, “Right, I’m going to work with men.” As slowly because of you know I probably look a bit, I’ve got tattoos on the neck and things like that so probably more men were coming towards that than women maybe.

I worked in the rehab where I was helping men. I also do some work in the criminal justice system and that was all men so everything was just kind of organically going that way really. I don’t think it was an overnight decision of right this is what I’m going to do. It was it was a load of small incremental decisions that kind of like led to it.

Morris: That makes total sense. And also, listening to you, it sounds like you were really good at listening to how the market responded to you, and then you doubled down on the types of people you worked best with, and that’s how you refined your niche over time.

Darren: Yeah, I’d say so, Morris. That’s a good way of putting it. You see who’s coming to you, who’s coming into your network, from events, from when I was doing coaching. I was just coaching men and women on burnout. I met people then who, funnily enough, have been quite important in this development of which way my business has gone. They’ve become quite close friends or close associates.

And I think the clearer you are on who you know—like, there are a couple of men’s networks about as well. Some guys I’ve got on LinkedIn are working with divorced men, some are working with men in the corporate world. For me, it’s men that have usually had quite a colorful past—something’s happened, but it’s taken them on an entrepreneurial journey. I like those guys who have messed everything up, burnt it all to the ground, and are slowly rebuilding, because I think those lessons can be very powerful in business as well and make you a lot more resilient.

So, yeah, I’m excited about the people I work with, and I think that’s important as well—being excited. Sometimes I was in coaching sessions, Morris, early on, and I felt like I was going through the motions. It felt like I was just, you know, “Oh, another person on burnout.” And that’s not to take value off what that person was going through, but for me personally, as that was going on, I wasn’t coming out of there invigorated and full of energy. I was coming out of there a little bit more drained, really, whereas now, I come out of sessions quite excited and fired up, which I think is important.

Morris: Yeah, I can sense that from just the content I’ve watched from you and saw on Instagram and Facebook.

Darren: Thank you, appreciate that.

Morris: I can really see your excitement to do the work that you’re doing. It really comes across. Also, you have a good awareness, I just realized, because you know partnerships. I’ve spoken with a few men, like myself, who are building their own businesses—they’re married—and some men, like me, have this dream to build it with their wife.

But you’ve just said something really important, and that is, maybe the wife or partner isn’t the right person to push you in business, and we as men have to respect that too. My wife wants to be in a role that she chooses to be in, and there’s a lot of validity to what you said about how men push each other differently through friendly competition. That really resonated with me. That was a good insight.

Darren: Yeah, I think, you know, I couldn’t ask for a better partner. Firstly, she’s amazing. She’s so supportive of everything I do. I feel like when you’re building something, you’ve got to be honest with your partner about what you’re doing. I sat down and had that honest conversation very early on, “Look, I’m nowhere near where I want to be. My vision is quite big. It’s going to involve sacrifice for me. If you’re not on that page, I completely understand, but I’m telling you so that you’re aware of where I’m going and what I want to accomplish.”

And she’s massively supportive. However, she’s supportive in a completely different way than some of the guys around me, and that’s through that healthy competition, through that push—the push to be better men, the push to be a better partner as well, and a better dad. What I’m finding is the conversations I can have with those guys are different than the conversations I have with my partner. She’s amazing and brings something absolutely amazing to my life, but these guys are also amazing in a different way, bringing something completely different to my life.

I think in the future, there will be something that my partner and I will probably collaborate on. She’s doing a PhD at the minute, so she’s got a real good work ethic, and she’s doing social-emotional learning, which I think can tie in quite well with coaching. So there will probably be something that we’ll collaborate on. But at the same time, the collaboration I’m doing with some of these guys is really important as well, but they’re just different.

Tom Bilyeu, who’s got Impact Theory, has a really good relationship that he’s built with his partner. So I think it’s just different for different people. They look like they’ve got a fantastic relationship and a fantastic partnership as well. But business can put pressure on relationships as well, so it’s finding what works. It’s horses for courses, and I always say that.

What I can help some guys with, there will be other guys who come to me who will be better off working with somebody else. The way I work and what I work with, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, I don’t believe. And I think that’s the beauty of coaching. One coach can be great for you and could be not so great for another person. It’s finding those people that you really resonate with and who are on a similar path or maybe have similar values.

Morris: Yeah, 100%. I see the parallel in marketing too, where different, like you said, different things for different people. And that’s why even if you think you are life coach, business coach, fitness coach number 1,000,001, right? There’s still space for you in the market. You can still promote yourself authentically, and you don’t have to feel bad that there are so many other coaches on your Instagram reel or whatever because different things for different people.

Darren: I think that’s a really important point, Morris. Yeah, there is a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of coaches. There’s coaching groups. I’m in The Lion’s Den, which is, I’ve got my own coaching group for my own personal development, and then I’ve got my group as well. But if you look at how many billion people are on the planet, I can go down the road here now, and in 10 minutes, I can go past four different garages. They’ve all got people fixing cars. So, you know, it’s that abundance mindset. You will find your tribe, I think, as you go on and as you become clear on who you are, what I was doing early on. I was posting out generic videos and advice and it it wasn’t really it was you know it was it was dropping with people but it wasn’t really pulling people in because um I don’t think I was clear on who I was as a as a business and now I am, you know, it’s attracting it’s attracting the right people.

Morris: Talking about your post, I saw one you know, today before we started the interview and the post was so good because you know you work with men but you read messages from their partners, their spouses and it was such a powerful message because you showed right then and there, you showed the ripple effect.

It’s not it’s not an egoistic thing right like oh I’m just going to hang out with men and this is just for a close group of men or what not, it’s actually the whole family, the business, the whole environment, benefits from men who are developing themselves. Same thing for women women who work on themselves their environment benefits too but it was just so nice how you showed the ripple effect in that short video.

Darren: Yeah that’s, you know, that’s the mazing thing. The most messages I have been from women, you know not from the guys. It’s been from the partners who you know, he came back from your event, he had an energy, I haven’t seen him with for a while, he came out of that session, his eyes were brighter than I’d seen him and I love that because it just shows that and you know, funny when I set up seat at the table, I took a little bit of back for setting up a men’s group, it’s funny that one of the the things in the UK people don’t mind men’s mental health groups but when you talk about a personal development group, they’re a little bit suspicious of what that is and funnily enough the, you know, some of the most resistance that I got was from men. It wasn’t from women. Women were like, “This is exactly what guys need.” One guy said, “You’re taking people back to— We’ve spent years coming away from men’s groups, and you’re taking people back to that.” And it’s like, “Well, if you look at the state that the world’s in, then maybe we do need to go back to this a little bit.”

Morris: Yeah, I like that you’re taking a stance. It allows people to identify with you or not, which is good marketing.

Darren: Yeah. You know, sometimes you’re polarizing, but if you’re clear on who you are, some people are going to love what you do, and some people really aren’t going to like what you do.

Morris: Yeah, I think it’s the right thing to do when it truly is your values and represents your values, as opposed to, you know, doing it for the sake of polarizing for the sake of being polarizing. That’s just toxic politics, let’s just put it that way.

Darren: Yeah, you know, that’s usually to get—it’s like click-baiting. It’s usually to get the clicks and get the likes, which, you know, is what a lot of the news and the news outlets do. And it’s funny that some of these people who complain about news outlets, they do the same thing with their own marketing.

Yeah, it’s also like clickbait. Just being clear on your values and what you do, and being clear that you’re doing things with the right intention is important. If you genuinely want what’s best for other people and that comes across and upsets a few people, then so be it. But as long as the intention behind it is that you really want to help people, then in my eyes, that’s a good thing.

Certain people aren’t going to like what you do. I think Steven Bartlett said 70% of people will probably dislike what you do, and 30% will love what you do. And I think that’s probably a good statistic, really.

Morris: Yeah, that is really good. And also, I heard a similar analogy, and that is, even when a president gets elected, they get barely over 50% of the votes. And so imagine this: the country’s leader is only liked by like 55% or 56% of the people, and the other— Yeah, right, and they are allowed to lead the country, although almost half of the country disagrees.

Darren: Yeah, really good point. You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t be trying to please everybody. That’s another thing I think that’s important for any sort of up-and-coming coach—don’t try and please everybody. Don’t be a company or an organization that is appealing to everybody else. What you’ll end up doing is appealing to nobody.

Certain people wear Nike trainers; certain people hate Nike and wear Adidas trainers. Some people love Post Malone; other people love Dr. Dre. You can’t appeal to everybody. You’re going to appeal to the people you like, and you want that divide to a certain extent. You want some people to not like what you do because that makes the people who like what you do a stronger network, I think.

Morris: And then in paid advertising, it’s even a budget thing. You deliberately repel the people you don’t want to click because you pay for each of the ad clicks. So you only want the people to click who are perfect for what you’re doing.

So when you think back to you getting started as a coach, specifically building a coaching practice, what is some of the advice that you would give yourself to succeed faster or more effortlessly?

Darren: The first thing we’ve kind of spoken about in depth is definitely, number one, be clear on who you want to help. The clearer you are on that, I think the faster things will move.

Morris: Speaking to that, do you think it would have been possible for you back then to be as clear as you are today?

Darren: Yeah, maybe. I think I was already doing quite a bit of work with men, but I do believe that everything happens for a reason, Morris, as well. I believe that you’ve got to go through the struggle to see who you are. If everything landed on your plate straight away—just for an example, like with lottery winners, they win this big chunk of money straight away, and with most of them, within 12 to 18 months, it’s gone because they haven’t learned any lessons on the buildup to earning that money.

They haven’t got those powerful lessons that are needed. And I think the same in business. If everything happened straight away, you wouldn’t have the powerful lessons that you do need. But I do believe that I probably could have built what I’ve built now quicker if I was clearer at that time. That network would probably be a little bit bigger than it is, but I’m not concerned about that. But yeah, I do think it could have happened a little bit quicker than it did.

Morris: So finding ways to be really clear on who you want to work with—that would have been, if you coached your younger self, what you would have coached yourself on to get there faster?

Darren: Yeah, although my younger self probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

Morris: Yeah, I mean, that was my biggest stumbling block too. I just wanted to figure it all out by myself. I thought it was cool to figure it out by myself, but I went 180 on that one over the years.

Darren, thank you so much for being here today. Where can listeners get in touch with you? Where should I send them to?

Darren: Appreciate you having me, Morris. I really enjoyed that. They can find me as Darren J. Brooks on all platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Seat at the Table—if any men are interested in joining, there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of engagement in that Facebook group. It’s free.

It doesn’t matter what part of the world you’re in because people are posting regularly from different places, but there will be events worldwide at some point in the future, so just watch this space. It’s a network that will be international. There are already people in there from different places, but the events at the moment aren’t happening worldwide, but they will do. And the website, which is a little bit outdated, so it’s going to be under construction soon, is dreamstogoals.co.uk.

Morris: Okay, perfect. So I’m going to link to the Facebook group. By the way, there’s going to be a Swiss member at the end of this call, so I’m going to link to the Facebook group, your website, and your Instagram.

Darren: Oh, and just the other quick thing, Morris—both books are available on Amazon worldwide as well. Both of those books are— 23 Rules of Life…: that most people don’t want to hear, DREAMS TO GOALS.

Morris: Oh great, I’ll put those links as well.

Darren: Really enjoyed that.

Morris: Darren, Thank you so much.

Darren: Appreciate you. Thanks. You too, mate. Appreciate you.

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