Backing Myself & Finding My Way Back Home

I’m a Brisbane girl, born and bred. I grew up on the northside, around Stafford Heights and Wavell Heights, went to school here and then studied business at QUT.

After uni, I joined a big Australian bank through its graduate program. Little did I know I would stay there for 15 years.

Early on, I attended a training session run by a facilitator who was incredibly engaging. They introduced us to new ideas, challenged the way we thought and made learning feel exciting. I remember sitting there thinking, I want to do that one day.

I had no idea how, so I tucked the thought away and carried on with my career.

A few years later, my then-husband and I decided to do the London thing. The bank gave me a career break and we moved to the UK for around 20 months.

Starting again in a new country was humbling. My first job was literally packing and archiving boxes in an office. Nothing glamorous! But the boxes belonged to the accounting team and, once they discovered my accounting and banking background, they started giving me other work. Not long afterwards, I moved into project management.

When we returned to Australia, I went back to the bank and eventually moved into one of my favourite roles, supporting a general manager responsible for Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Not long afterwards, though, my marriage ended.

I had met my former husband when I was 18, so suddenly finding myself single in my early thirties felt like entering a completely new stage of life. I loved Brisbane, but at that point it didn’t feel like the right place for me. Many of my friends were married and starting families, while I was figuring out who I was on my own for the first time.

So in 2016, I transferred to Melbourne.

I didn’t know many people there and suddenly had a lot of time to think about what I wanted my life to look like. It became one of the most transformative periods of my life.

Somewhere along the way, I remembered that facilitator from all those years earlier. That feeling of “I wanted to be that one day” came back and I couldn’t just put it off. 

Maybe that “one day” was now. 

I enrolled in a coaching accreditation program and also completed my yoga teacher training. Both experiences changed the way I thought about work, people and what I wanted to do with my life.

Melbourne was good to me. I built a new social circle, started dating for the first time as an adult and eventually met the man who is now my husband.

Then COVID arrived.

I had annual leave but nowhere to go, so I used it to go deeper into my coaching studies. I started coaching people for free at night and on weekends to build my skills. Slowly, something that had once been just an idea started becoming real.

I fell pregnant with our first son and kept coaching during maternity leave. Eventually I got one paying client, then another.

Resigning from my corporate job was nerve-racking, but I knew I had to back myself. I resigned in 2022, my husband and I married that December, and a few months later I discovered I was pregnant with our second son.

Building a business with a toddler and a baby was tough. There were plenty of sleep-deprived days spent networking, meeting potential clients and trying anything I could think of to get things moving. But the business was gaining momentum and I didn’t want to let that go.

By then, Brisbane was calling us back too. Years earlier it hadn’t felt right for me, but with two little boys I saw it differently. I wanted to be closer to family and had always thought Brisbane was a wonderful place to raise children.

In October 2024, an opportunity came up for my husband to take a Brisbane-based role, our lease was ending and everything seemed to line up. We moved home.

In 2025, with both boys finally in daycare, I felt like I could really put my foot on the accelerator. More clients came in, bigger opportunities appeared and I began working on projects I genuinely care about, including women’s leadership.

Coming back to Brisbane has felt like a full-circle moment. I now live not far from where I grew up, with much of my family close by.

After all those years, all those moves and a career I never expected to leave, I’ve somehow ended up back where it all started — only this time, building something of my own.