Ash Manuel

About Ash

Ash Manuel is the founder of Growing With Gratitude, a wellbeing and positive education organisation giving young people practical habits for resilience, happiness and mental wellbeing. As a teenager he was certain sport was his future, but his path did not run straight. He took three years to finish Year 12, missed out on his AFL dream, and left a marketing degree after a few weeks.

He taught physical education for 12 years in Adelaide, started Growing With Gratitude in 2014 and left teaching in 2016 to run it full-time. It has since reached more than one million students across 1,200-plus schools in 80 countries. He is also an author, host of The Positive Education Podcast, and founder of the World's Biggest Gratitude Lesson.

The path was not a straight line

Before he became a teacher, speaker, author and program founder, Ash was a teenager obsessed with sport. He dreamed of becoming a professional athlete and spent much of his teenage life chasing that goal. He played high-level cricket and Australian rules football, represented South Australia in junior cricket, and was part of elite football pathways. At the time, sport felt like everything.

But Ash's path did not unfold in a straight line. He took three years to complete Year 12, struggled with the disappointment of not reaching his AFL dream, started a marketing degree and left after only a few weeks. What felt like failure at the time eventually became part of the journey that shaped his work with young people today.

Ash went on to become a physical education teacher and spent 12 years teaching at Immanuel Primary School in Adelaide. During that time, he began learning about positive psychology, gratitude and resilience. The ideas immediately connected with him.

"Why didn't I learn this when I was younger?"

In 2014, while still teaching full-time, Ash started Growing With Gratitude as a passion project. For two years, he worked on it before and after school, on weekends, and whenever he could find time. At the start of 2016, he left teaching to focus on Growing With Gratitude full-time.

Since then, Growing With Gratitude has reached more than one million students across 1,200-plus schools and 80 countries. Ash is also the author of Growing With Gratitude: Building Resilience, Happiness and Mental Wellbeing in Our Schools and Homes, and the host of The Positive Education Podcast, where he speaks with educators, leaders and wellbeing experts from around the world.

In 2020, Ash founded the World's Biggest Gratitude Lesson, an annual global wellbeing event that has now involved 375,000 students across 80 countries.

Why this book

Ash's work is grounded in a simple belief: young people do not need lectures, pressure or perfect answers. They need practical tools, real stories and the reminder that life does not have to follow one exact timeline.

He wrote Start Where You Are for the teenager who feels behind, unsure, anxious, different, under pressure, or quietly wondering if everyone else has life figured out. His message is clear: your path will not look like everyone else's, and it does not have to.