How it began
Eight years of being a receiver first.
Twelve years ago I started teaching Body Balance, and it mattered enough that I took a career break to do it. Then I went back to corporate. That was the first sign that the thing I needed was not in my head. It was in a body that had been braced for years and had forgotten how to stand down.
Eight years ago I started again, properly, and this time I trained: IIN, yoga teacher training, reiki, Aromatic Kinesiology®. Receiving first and studying second. I went and learnt each of them because they had already worked on me, and I wanted to be able to hand them to somebody else.
I did not do it to leave my career. I did it to like being in it again.
What changed
A regulated person makes different choices.
They ask one more question before they escalate. They can sit in a hard conversation without needing to win it. They do not send the email at nine at night that costs three days of goodwill.
None of that is soft. It is the difference between taxing and liberating, in a meeting: a team that tells you the problem early, or one that tells you once it is a crisis.
Which is why the rooms come. Not because I am the only person in Melbourne who can lead a breathing exercise, but because I have sat on the other side of the table and know what a room under commercial pressure actually needs.
And I lead with heart, and humans first. That is not a style. It is the reason things work.
The thing I notice most, in a boardroom and in a workshop equally, is people measuring themselves against where somebody else is now. It is the fastest way to feel behind while doing well, and almost nobody says it out loud.
How I work
I have sat in the CFO chair and handed over the sales strategy.
That was at Holden. Walking into that room and asking to take it on was never the hard part, because I believed I could carry it. That belief is what I now spend most of my time teaching. It is worth more than any framework, and it is already in you.
It is also why a national portfolio has come easily. Before that I ran two IT portfolios at once and people asked how.
An engineer thinks end to end. And project management does not finish at delivery, it finishes at cohesive execution and an honest review.
That is the same shape whether the thing being built is a supply chain, an app, or a leader.
