When David Broadhead asks us to introduce ourselves and say WHO we are I suspect this is a trick question.

So does another member of the lunchtime group, all of whom have gathered at Huddersfield’s Media Centre to hear about the courses run by the business expert and academic entrepreneur.

It turns out our companion is a life coach and knows that the correct answer to David’s question is not “I’m a life coach.” Or, in my case, “I’m from The Examiner”. This is a question about our fundamental state of being.

As David says: “We tend to define ourselves by what we are rather than who we are. If someone asks me who I am I say that I am happy, because I am.”

In a way it’s fortunate for David that happy people in these frantic, stress-ridden, under-employed and austerity times are something of a rarity.

It’s why he can find takers for his trademarked RIDFEAR courses: “to help people work out for themselves who they really are, what they realistically want from life and how to achieve it.”

David, who lives in Lepton and is a divorced father of a 21-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, used to call his system ‘Wantology’ but after his work was featured in the national press he discovered that an American company had beaten him to the name.

The former mechanical engineer and University of Huddersfield academic, who now runs Partners in Management at the Media Centre, developed RIDFEAR (an acronym for the main pointers of the programme), after becoming interested in coaching programmes for managers.

He was concerned that individuals were becoming dependent on their coaches. “I thought, ‘why can’t people learn to coach themselves’,” he explained. “There is a culture of people expecting someone to come and fix it for them instead of taking personal responsibility.”

The first RIDFEAR course in 2005 was launched, quite literally, on a budget cruise liner, with attendees learning how to tap into their inner needs and desires while travelling around the Mediterranean.

Today David, who has an MA in action learning, takes his course on road trips around the UK and runs sessions from the Media Centre. There is a self-help book in the pipeline and a novel that will explore the concepts he uses in his work. “It’s been a long personal journey for me,” he says.

His lunchtime taster, to which I have invited myself, has attracted interest from a wide group of people from all walks of life. But, generally, he has found that RIDFEAR is more readily embraced by women.

“Between two-thirds to three-quarters of people on our programmes are female,” he says. “There is something about the male psyche that says we don’t need to change or develop maybe.”

David says that the collapse of the bubble economy of the Nineties and early 2000s left many people challenging their lives: “Everything was driven by success and it was about material success – having a new car, holidays, a bigger house. And I could see that people weren’t all that satisfied with that. Too many people were on a treadmill as opposed to enjoying life.”

One of the techniques David uses is to get participants to find their personality type from a list of nine main traits. (If you’d like to do it yourself then check out www.similarminds.com/advtest).

He says that revealing a person’s true nature can explain why they are so discontented in their current job and what they should aim for.

“I worked in big organisations and became frustrated with the bureaucracy. It didn’t suit me,” he explained.

Which is why back in 1999 he decided to go it alone with his own business delivering management development programmes.

RIDFEAR, he says, has helped more than 200 individuals, including one of his colleagues at the Media Centre, Sue Ramsey, who left a corporate job to become a novelist and part-time associate advocate for the programme.

Sue, 48, originally from Dewsbury but now living near Wakefield, climbed the corporate ladder throughout her career, working in customs and excise, training and development and financial services. “I was a square peg in a round hole,” she says.

As a trained life coach she enrolled on the RIDFEAR programme because she thought she could pass on the techniques to one of her clients. Instead she had what she calls “an epiphany”.

“I stayed in touch with David afterwards and came on a couple more programmes and then gave up quite a good, well-paid job and came to work here (at the Media Centre) a year ago.”

Sue, a divorced mother of two sons, aged 15 and 20, found that what she really wanted to do with her life was become a writer.

It was an ambition that had been on hold since childhood.

She negotiated her own redundancy and has published her first novel, RV On Me, which she describes as a parody of the many military history books she has read over the past few years.

Today Sue says she has stripped her life back to the essentials of what she needs and is happier for it.

“The top reason why people come on the programme is life dissatisfaction; they are people caught in the rat race. It gives them the opportunity to switch their phones off and think about themselves in a safe environment,” she explained.

RIDFEAR one-day courses cost £125.