The path less travelled?
What do a pilot, financial controller, kinesiologist and wellness and lifestyle educator all have in common? They each represent the roles I’ve held in my diverse career path. It’s this winding road, the path less travelled that guides and informs my hybrid approach to my leadership and life coaching consultancy.
I love my work- I really do. Every day, I work with leaders, teams and individuals across Australia to help them align their values and their purpose to their profession, to find the meaning in their (incredible!) work and to break free from the behaviours and limiting beliefs that hold them back. My focus is providing a safely provocative space where we challenge stories and make the shift to high performance. It’s personal development, fast tracked, and is based on sustainable, long term behaviour change.
Behaviour change and aligning values to career objectives are concepts of which I am intimately acquainted. After completing VCE I launched myself straight into aviation and like many uni students, I worked behind the bar through university. Anyone who has worked in hospitality knows that it gives access to people and to humanity in all of its glorious and not-so-glorious forms!
After graduating, I immersed myself in the world of aviation, working as a pilot and as a flight instructor before doing a complete 360 when I joined one of Melbourne’s leading commercial plumbing firms’ accounting team. I worked and studied my way to Financial Controller. I was not even midway through my Bachelor of Accounting when my family experienced some significant health issues. You can read about our experience here, but bottom line, over the course of nine years, my husband and two children went under the knife more than five times between them with open heart surgeries, pacemaker insertions, extreme pain and immobility and in one case, twelve months of complications that had us staring down the barrel of a heart transplant. It was this experience, of watching the three people I love most in the world literally with broken hearts, that shaped my understanding of emotions and the impact they can have on our lives when we don’t deal with them. You see, while I knew on a pragmatic level that I was running on fumes and that something had to give, I was too busy in the day-to-day of doing *all the things* to take the time to address what was going on in my life. I experienced first-hand the power of kinesiology in helping me process my emotions, and boom I left my role in finance and transformed my life and my career, with a vision to help other people live their best lives, moving past the roadblocks and constraints that hold them back from thriving, professionally and personally.
Learning and curiosity are a key part of who I am. I live by the philosophy that self-knowledge leads to self-empowerment and have completed further education, qualifications and professional learning in Kinesiology, NLP, Hypnotherapy, Time Line Therapy®, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and Coaching. I’m a NLP practitioner, coach and trainer, a hypnotherapy practitioner and trainer, a Time Line Therapy® practitioner and an Acceptance & Commitment Therapy coach as well as a certified professional coach. My coaching training and experience has enabled me to blend all of my favourite modalities into a powerful, effective suite of services that help people in life in general, as well as in the corporate and small business space to be impactful and influential leaders. I’ve been told, multiple times in fact, that I’m not your typical leadership or life coach, and it’s a badge I wear with pride. You see, while I have a mix of methodologies and tools in my toolkit to help people be the best version of themselves, I’m no cookie-cutter coach. My focus is on the individual and I change my approach based entirely on their requirements. And did I mention that I love my work?
Looking back, one of the most powerful things about my career diversity is the way I’ve had my values at the core of my professional life. Self-awareness has always been a pursuit of mine, way before I even knew how to put a name to the concept, and now I get to spend my working life helping others develop theirs. If I were an influencer, this is where I’d insert a hashtag, but instead, let me leave you with this: if you’d like some support clarifying your values or working with a trusted, supportive coach to live your best life, please reach out.
