Arjun Davé is the founder and lead coach at MindMaps Education, but his path into teaching was anything but traditional. Before entering education, he spent years working in sales and marketing — gaining first-hand experience of communication, motivation and human behaviour in high-pressure environments. Those early years gave him a sharp eye for how people respond to challenge, stress, leadership and change.

But it was what happened outside the workplace that shaped who he would become as an educator.

After leaving the corporate world, Arjun spent several years travelling across the world — experiencing street schools in developing countries, visiting monasteries across multiple religions, and learning from communities where wellbeing, discipline and meaning are woven into daily life. Those encounters opened a door to a deeper understanding of human development, mindfulness and the universal search for purpose. They also planted the early seed of a belief that would eventually become MindMaps: that education is not just about knowledge, but about the inner life of the learner — and the adults who guide them.

Arjun began formal self-development training at 20, long before he ever set foot in a classroom as a teacher. Over the past 18 years he has studied coaching, NLP, emotional intelligence, self-development frameworks, meditative traditions and modern wellbeing science — all alongside his own lived experience as a dyslexic learner. When he finally entered teaching, he realised just how much those tools mattered.

He spent seven years in education, beginning with a year as a supply teacher travelling between schools. In every staff room, every corridor and every classroom, he noticed the same pattern: teachers were deeply committed, deeply stretched and often deeply unsupported. Regardless of postcode, context or leadership style, the pressures were the same.

That year was a turning point. It showed him that the problem wasn’t individual schools — it was the system, and the invisible burden staff were carrying.

And it clarified something he had suspected for years:

There is a better way — one built on the integration of modern coaching, evidence-based wellbeing, ancient meditative traditions, and the opportunities created by emerging AI tools.

MindMaps Education is Arjun’s attempt to bring all those worlds together:
– the coaching skills and internal resourcefulness of self-development
– the reflective depth and calm of ancient contemplative practices
– the practical, scalable tools of modern AI
– and the heart-driven purpose of a teacher who has lived the reality of the classroom.

He believes that schools — increasingly asked to do more with less — can reclaim a sense of clarity, strength and humanity by investing in the wellbeing and capability of their people. When teachers feel resourced, grounded and supported, they not only change their own lives, but lift everyone around them.

This is the core philosophy of MindMaps Education:
Wellbeing is an ecosystem. When one part of the system becomes stronger, wiser or more grounded, the whole system benefits. Supporting teachers, parents, leaders and children together creates the kind of environment where everyone can flourish — because growth doesn’t happen in isolation.

MindMaps exists to make that investment real — through wellbeing programmes, CPD training, coaching frameworks and tools that help teachers rediscover the energy, clarity and sense of purpose that brought them into the profession in the first place.