A company’s values can be written on a wall. Its brand can be carefully designed. But eventually, somebody has to make another human being experience them.

Daniel Silvestri is an ICF Accredited Coach, facilitator and IAPCP Certified Hypnotherapist (NLP), he's trauma-informed and founder of Farside, working across life, relationships, families, business and people development.

My Approach

Reflective and practical.

I don’t believe there is one method, perspective or answer that fits everyone.

My role isn’t to tell somebody how to live their life. It’s to create enough space, attention and honest inquiry for us to understand what’s happening — and then help them develop the awareness, skills and confidence to decide what they want to do with what they discover.

That can mean slowing down and listening. Thinking and feeling. Asking better questions. Looking at something from another perspective. Exploring a relationship or repeating pattern. Learning a practical skill. Practising a difficult conversation. Taking responsibility. Making a decision. Or turning an insight into action.

My approach draws on coaching, therapeutic and relational perspectives, mindfulness, facilitation, hypnotherapy and NLP, alongside lived experience of business, leadership, relationships and personal change.

I value deep listening, presence and compassion, but also accountability, skill-building and action. I can offer structure and guidance without taking away someone’s agency. I want people to feel supported without becoming dependent on me.

Because insight on its own changes very little. The deeper work is learning how to take what we become aware of and gradually integrate it into how we actually live, work and relate.

That’s what I mean by The Deeper Way: not a formula or a finished state to reach, but an ongoing practice of meeting life with greater awareness, understanding and choice.

Get to know Daniel

His route into coaching has been anything but conventional.

Dan’s entrepreneurial streak started young. As a boy, he enjoyed making things to sell — at one point going door-to-door with homemade doorstops — and during his school years was rarely without a job, from paper rounds and fish and chip shops to pubs and a high-end Italian restaurant.

Music and performance were another early influence. He remembers accompanying his father to hospital radio and later being involved in discos, parties, karaoke and light shows. By his teens he was playing guitar in metal bands, eventually becoming a frontman — writing lyrics and songs, designing artwork, finding venues and meeting the people who came to their shows.

At 18 or 19, business became more serious when Dan opened a ShakeAway milkshake bar and café franchise with his family. It was an early education in entrepreneurship, but ended painfully. Fraud within the family contributed to the collapse of the business and, by 22 or 23, Dan found himself bankrupt, insolvent and homeless.

At 24, he turned to barbering and began rebuilding his life.

Behind the chair, Dan spent thousands of hours listening to people talk about theirs. Long before he had professional language for deep listening, presence or holding space, he was discovering what can happen when somebody is given enough attention to talk, think, feel and hear themselves more clearly.

Barbering eventually took him back into entrepreneurship. He built Jack Rabbits Barbers to two shops and later co-founded another barbering business that grew to four locations, alongside an in-house operation within one of John Lewis’s flagship stores. He also delivered barber training alongside colleges.

The John Lewis partnership took Dan from negotiating the deal and contract through to building the operation with his business partner, introducing and marketing the brand in-store, developing the team and managing the experience for staff, stakeholders and customers.

It strengthened a longstanding passion for customer experience and the relationship between happy, engaged staff, genuinely cared-for customers and healthy commercial performance. For Dan, great customer care isn’t about scripts or forced smiles. It’s about people understanding what their organisation stands for and having the confidence and skills to bring those values to life.

Dan was also recognised for his work with vulnerable and disabled customers and those who cared for them, receiving [CUSTOMER CARE AWARD / RECOGNITION — NAME, ORGANISATION & YEAR TO ADD].

At around 25, another part of Dan’s life began to change. While struggling with a relationship and emotions he didn’t yet understand, a fellow barber introduced him to mindfulness and gave him a copy of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

He was hooked.

That introduction grew into a deeper exploration of meditation, psychology, relationships and human behaviour. The same friend later introduced Dan to life and business coach Rasheed Ogunlaru, beginning more than six years of transformational coaching training and mentorship. Dan also volunteered with Mind as a befriender.

Over time, personal exploration became professional training. Dan studied coaching, NLP, hypnotherapy, mindfulness, counselling skills and trauma-informed practice, eventually becoming an ICF Accredited Coach and IAPCP Certified Hypnotherapist (NLP).

His relationship with Rasheed continued through training, mentorship and collaboration. Alongside their work on the Soul Inspired Business Support Club, Dan also assists Rasheed in delivering Soul Trader sessions for the British Library’s Business & IP Centre, supporting aspiring and established entrepreneurs as they explore both the human and practical sides of building a business.

Today, Dan brings those different experiences together through Farside.

Away from work, Dan’s early love of music, performance and the arts remains, alongside a strong connection with the outdoors. He enjoys trail running, hiking, wild swimming, skating and camping — sometimes for adventure, sometimes for stillness, and often simply because life feels better outside.

Looking back, the different parts of his life share a common thread: people and how we experience life.

Mission

Space to understand, explore, learn & grow.

To create spaces where people can pause, think, feel and understand themselves more deeply; explore what matters; and develop the awareness, skills and capacity to live, work and relate well.

Through coaching, learning, facilitation and people development, Dan’s work helps turn greater awareness and understanding into meaningful action — personally, relationally and professionally.

At its heart is a simple intention: to help people become more able to meet themselves, each other and life with presence, compassion, responsibility and choice.

Vision

A more aware, human way to live and work.

A world in which we understand ourselves and each other more deeply — and where greater awareness leads to healthier relationships, happier lives, better work and more human organisations.

Where personal fulfilment and professional success don’t have to compete. Where businesses can care for their people and customers while performing well and making money.

Where people can take responsibility without shame, be compassionate without avoiding difficult truths, and continue learning and growing without treating themselves as something that needs to be fixed.

To be, live, work and relate well — with ourselves, each other and the world we’re part of.