David Bentley was born in New Orleans and raised in the Deep South. After
graduating from Louisiana Tech with a B.S. in Business Administration and Finance, he worked for a hospital holding company as a budget analyst, an internal auditor, and then as a hospital comptroller.

Deciding that he really wanted to be a teacher, David left the hospital business and went back to school at LSU at Shreveport where he completed a B.A. in Elementary Education and a M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction. He taught public school for 13 years in grades 1-4 in both traditional and multi-age classrooms at rural, neighborhood, and inner-city schools.

While attending school between his hospital and education careers, David managed a college cafeteria, a bookstore, and a burger shop. He has also been a summer camp director, a hospice volunteer, a telephone crisis intervention counselor, and the facilitator of numerous workshops.

David realized that what he enjoyed most in all of his other careers, transitions, and service work was helping people learn and make better choices. He found that he had actually been coaching employees, students, parents, hospice patients and others for years but only began calling it "coaching" when he discovered that it was a legitimate career field and became associated with Coach University. He now works with clients from four states, and two foreign countries doing personal coaching.

A member of the International Coach Federation, David coaches clients on relationship skills, life transitions, career changes, education and child rearing, short-term project completion, and personal transformation. His mission is to empower individuals to make effective choices toward creating a balanced and satisfying life without losing clarity of purpose and direction.

David has lived on San Juan Island for ten years. In addition to his coaching work, he volunteers in the local hospice program, sings in a number of choral groups, facilitates workshops on the use of labyrinths as transformational tools, writes a weekly column called "Outside the Box" for a local online newspaper, and recently organized a local networking group for single adults which is called Single-Minded Fridays.