Blog

Reflections of an Insecure Overachiever…

In his book, Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman reasons that our hustle culture is created by the misunderstanding that our existence is insufficient reason to be happy and fulfilled. Some of us run on an often-unconscious belief that we “must prove that we are worthy to exist”. Burkeman describes it as starting each day in deficit of some productivity debt we believe we need to pay off, before we can relax. The trouble is that we never seem to be able to settle this productivity debt, because every time we achieve the impossible, reach the deadline, or finally manage to get slightly ahead, we realize that we now must keep maintaining this new standard of performance and achievement. Consequently, there is no end in sight, and we keep at it day after day, in the hopes that one day we will arrive at this elusive future where we finally feel “good enough” or like we have done enough. Unfortunately, that day is never coming, because we have set it up in a way that we can never get there…

May 16, 2026 Read more →

Certainty vs. Clarity

Do you believe you need certainty before you can take action? Today, I want to distinguish between certainty and clarity. The one is impossible to obtain, and the other is essential if you are truly going to thrive and stay committed to your most important goals.

April 27, 2026 Read more →

You don’t need to deserve to thrive to choose to thrive…

In a recent article I posed the question: What do you believe you deserve? Today I want to explore this question: What if there is a reason why you don’t question whether other people deserve to thrive? You see, our innate being is one of wellbeing and of thriving. We are meant to grow, learn, expand, flourish, thrive… It’s built into our DNA. If you consider how much a baby grows and learns in their first year of life, and how much can change in the first five years of life, you have witnessed the wonder of our innate ability to grow and thrive. What’s even more amazing, is how adaptable we are, and how our nervous systems will adapt to the environment we find ourselves in. We will cultivate behaviours that will help us survive in any environment, and over time, those behaviours become our habits and our patterns. Anything that is learnt, can be unlearnt...

April 14, 2026 Read more →

What is driving your desire for more?

In my most recent article I talked about the drive to do more, and I questioned the desire for abundance. This may have left the impression with you that I’m saying that wanting more is bad. And that is not what I’m saying at all. Over the past three years, I have discovered that there are two kinds of desire for more…

March 25, 2026 Read more →

What to do when you feel overwhelmed – Take 10…

I’m not someone who tends to write about the steps you need to take to overcome something, or fix something, and today I want to talk about something Alison Armstrong shared that landed and resonated deeply. And it’s directly connected to our willingness to let ourselves grow, stretch, and ultimately thrive… So, I hope you will indulge me in sharing with you what you could do if you are currently feeling overwhelmed.

March 23, 2026 Read more →

Will you leave a legacy of surviving or thriving?

When I was completing my master’s degree, our professor would always talk about living your dash – which was perhaps a not so elegant way to talk about how we choose to spend the time between our date of birth and our date of death. Today marks the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing, and it has me thinking about how he lived his dash, and how all of us live our dashes.

March 15, 2026 Read more →

What does it mean to thrive?

Over the last two years I have sat with this question: What does it mean to thrive? I used to believe that if I could achieve enough outside success, then I would thrive. When I started my coaching business, I read The Prosperous Coach, in the hopes that I could figure out how to prosper – which is another word for thrive. I was longing to find the secret to thriving / prospering / flourishing / expanding. And I will be honest, initially I thought that I would feel like I was thriving if I were making more money and if I was really successful in my business...

March 4, 2026 Read more →

What season of Life are you in right now?

The other day at my son’s Hip Hop class some of the other moms were discussing camps they were booking for their children for Summer. Summer?! It’s January. We are still in Winter. I laughed a little at their urgency around needing to get their Summer camps booked now. This event left me with two thoughts…

January 14, 2026 Read more →

A year in the rear-view mirror

At the end of each year, I complete a Year-End Review. I spend time looking back at the year in granular form. I go and look at one month and one week at a time. What am I looking for? I look at what was happening both personally and professionally. I look at my calendar and my business tracking to see who I was serving, where I was travelling to, and what felt important during each moment in time. I reflect on how I felt, and how I was relating to all that was occurring. Why do I do this? I complete this detailed Year-End Review every year, because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on my life from a zoomed-out perspective with new knowledge that I didn’t have at the time that the events were occurring. It often has me change my perspective on the story I tell myself about the year I just had. And it ensures that I tell myself the truth instead of just holding on to a story...

November 17, 2025 Read more →

The value of facing our Demons…

I want to start this article a little differently to how I would usually start a post. I want to start by sharing this funny video that captures my evolution with KPop Demon Hunters in 15 seconds. And if you don’t know what KPop Demon Hunters are, welcome to the movement. May it inspire you as much as it has inspired me. If you are not a fan, that is totally fine too. I feel a little sad for you. And, you don’t need to a be fan, or even have watched the movie, to get value from this article. It’s just my starting point, and it doesn't need to be yours. So, just hang in here with me for a little bit as I provide some background to why this movie, why this article, and why now?

November 12, 2025 Read more →

What’s the difference between self-improvement and self-growth?

Usually in January we hear a lot of talk about goals, dreams, aspirations, ways that we are going to be better and do better. This time of year tends to be a time when there is a heavy focus on self-improvement. Although, I will say that this year, I feel like the energy is different. I don’t know if it’s only on my side of the world, or whether you have experienced something similar? And I’m attributing it to all that is occurring in the world at the moment – wars, elections, wildfires. One colleague said what I was thinking. He said, “It feels like it’s the pandemic all over again...” I will share that that is certainly where my fear-based mind went immediately, because I remember that there were these out-of-control wildfires in Australia at the beginning of 2020 just before the pandemic really hit. And if you are feeling less inspired and excited this January, I want to invite you to be gentle and compassionate with yourself. My sense is that in many ways, we are still recovering from the trauma of the pandemic, and that our nervous systems are constantly bombarded with more things to process. And it’s a lot. It really is. And this is why I want to discuss the difference between self-improvement and self-growth...

January 21, 2025 Read more →

Where and how are you adding value without seeing it?

Just before the completion of the Coaching Leadership Mastermind I did with my coach, she invited the group to consider where, in which dimensions of our lives, we added value either to ourselves or to others in the past 24 hours. We worked through The Wheel of Life and considered which dimensions of our lives were enriched in the past 24 hours? Then my coach invited us to reflect on the past week, and consider where in the past week we add value to either ourselves or others? Lastly, she invited us to review the whole month and consider in a deeper way where did we add value to ourselves or others over the past month?

November 4, 2024 Read more →

The Paradox of Self-Improvement

Something that we all share as human beings, is the desire for learning and growth. It’s built into our DNA to want to learn and grow. If you don’t believe me, simply spend some time with babies and you will see it. We learn more in the first year of life than in any other time in our lives. We are simply geared towards learning, because learning things helps us survive, and even once we have figured out how to survive, learning helps us go from merely surviving to thriving. If you consider the technological advancement of humanity, it becomes quite evident that we want to grow, learn, and expand. We almost can’t help ourselves. What I’m most baffled by though is how our natural instinct for learning and growth then starts morphing into a need for self-improvement and/or self-betterment, and then sometimes even morphing into an obsession with perfectionism. The idea of self-improvement has been with us for centuries. Even the great philosophers advocated for continuous self-improvement. And yet, I feel like there is a tipping point where self-improvement becomes toxic...

October 16, 2024 Read more →

Self-care in times of chaos

The energy in September tends to be similar to that of the start of the year. Once back from Summer break, people now need to recommit to work, and schedules, and often with the start of the new school year, and after having a break, we vow that we will start doing things differently...It’s interesting how I found myself in the first week of September, already wondering how I will get through the rest of September… Perhaps this feels familiar to you too? And yet, often, even when I feel less resourced, I find myself still pushing through. One of the stories running in the background was, “You can’t be tired now. You just came back from a vacation.”...

September 17, 2024 Read more →

How we overcome shame, is we own our story

In April, I shared with you about the launch of my private six-month coaching group called Living As If You Matter. This group is all about living as if you truly matter, or as Brené Brown would put it, wholehearted living. Today I want to talk about what gets in the way of living more wholeheartedly or living as if you matter, and the antidote to it. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown explains that the biggest thing that gets in the way of us living more fully as our true selves, or living as if we really matter, is something that we all experience – shame. Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough. It’s the feeling that makes us want to hide or run away. It’s what sometimes makes us overreact in certain situations. According to Brené Brown, “Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable… Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”

June 3, 2024 Read more →

The Gifts of Imperfection

A while ago I wrote an article about what your perfectionism is really trying to tell you. Perfectionism is a misunderstanding that we need to earn our self-worth or prove that we are enough or worthy. The truth is that you came into this world worthy and then got disconnected from that truth over time. So, embracing your imperfections is a way that you can choose to reclaim your inherent worthiness...

April 16, 2024 Read more →

What’s Your Relationship to Failure?

How do you relate to failure? Do you believe failure is an essential part of success? Or do you believe that failure is to be avoided at all costs? How we relate to failure hugely impacts our openness and willingness towards risk taking and trying new things. If we see failure as something that is “bad” and that needs to be avoided at all costs, we will be less open to taking risks or trying things that are new, different, unfamiliar, or out of our comfort zone. However, if we believe that failure is part of the process, and that success without failure isn’t possible, we would be more willing to fail.

March 31, 2024 Read more →

What’s Your Context to Life?

A question I love to ask my clients, is: What’s your context to life? This question reveals so much about how someone is relating to their experience of life. A context to life, is the story we tell ourselves about life, about ourselves, and about others. It’s the things we believe to be true about Life, about ourselves, and about other people. For example, someone might believe that Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Or they might believe that life is hard, and only the strong survive. Or they might believe that life is the relentless pursuit of more. Or that life is unfair. Or that life is a gift. Or that life is a journey. What we tell ourselves about life, determines how we might respond to different situations IN our life.

March 13, 2024 Read more →

What Your Perfectionism is Really Trying to Tell You…

I have shared about my experiences with perfectionism before in my writing about a Perfection Detox: Learning to trust yourself and I have shared how I battle with my P Twins – i.e., Perfectionism and Pleasing – whenever I am navigating important situations or events in my life. Perfectionism isn’t just about wanting everything to be clean and neat, or orderly. Perfectionism can take different forms, and often people who are perfectionists, see their perfectionism as a moral compass or guideline to measure their personal “goodness” as a person. In other words, somewhere they internalised the message that they are only a good person, or lovable when they are perfect. This of course sets you up for a lifetime of struggle, frustration, and failure, because there is no such thing as the perfect person who always does everything right. So, you end up living in constant fear that someone will discover that you are not perfect, and that you will be ostracised from the very groups of people you are trying to belong with.

February 27, 2024 Read more →

The most powerful force in the world

Recently Rich Litvin posed this question: What is the most powerful force in the world? People have so many different opinions about what the most powerful force in the world might be. What would your answer be?

February 12, 2024 Read more →

Appreciate and acknowledge the phase of life you are in

Often this time of year, there are lots of posts on social media about big goals and kicking the year off with a strong start. Many of those messages contain a subtle (or not so subtle) tone of “if you're not all in and ready to go, there's something wrong with you". And yet, you might find yourself in a place where you are not sure you are all ready to go. These messages are not accurate. Not everyone is excited at the start of a new year. And nor do you need to be, because let’s be honest, New Year’s Day, is just another day in the year, like any other, and nothing significantly changes between one minute before midnight on December 31st and one minute after midnight on January 1st...

January 29, 2024 Read more →

Why it serves you to slow down at the Beginning of a New Year

This past weekend, I led a workshop for 19 people called “Creating 2024 with Intention”. These 19 individuals made the conscious and brave choice to slow down, take stock of what had transpired in their lives in 2023, and really become intentional about who they want to become in 2024 and what experiences they would like to be having this year. The New Year often evokes within most of us the need to set new year’s resolutions. It’s an invitation to start anew with a clean slate. And it’s been my experience that so often people are so eager to move forward, that they don’t take the time to slow down, turn around, and look back to where they had come from...

January 17, 2024 Read more →

Is your Permacrisis a state of being?

Recently, Carolyn Freyer-Jones wrote about Permacrisis. She explained that Permacrisis “refers to a state of ongoing instability and insecurity, where unexpected challenges seem to arise constantly”. We all know people who live in a constant state of Permacrisis, regardless of anything happening in the world. Their lens (based on upbringing and other circumstances) is Permacrisis. They look out into the world, and they see Permacrisis everywhere. They find things to worry about and they experience life as one emergency after another. Even when things are going well in their lives, they live in constant anticipation that something will go wrong. We get to choose who we want to be and how we want to show up in the world. I create my life in every moment by how I show up to each moment...

September 26, 2023 Read more →

How much are you “shoulding” on yourself?

I recently shared what I had learnt from watching the Barbie movie. And the key insight I shared was how we put labels on ourselves or how we identify with certain labels without considering that perhaps they are just that – labels. And the label we assign ourselves or get assigned by others, could never really fully capture who we are, because we are so much more than the labels. In that article I pointed out that each of us have a responsibility to know who we are outside the system of rules we have created for ourselves. And today I want to talk more about the rules we create for ourselves. A lot of these rules operate unconsciously, and yet, they dictate how we live our lives, so they are worth investigating...

September 19, 2023 Read more →

On the other side of fear…

The other day on my morning walk, I came across three deer. They wanted to get past me to the other side of a set of stairs. Their fear prevented them from doing so. And this got me thinking. Isn’t this just how we are as humans? We reach a fork in the road of life. We are faced with a transition or a challenge in our lives. We tell ourselves we want to change, and yet we stay frozen right there in the middle of the road, too afraid to take the next step. We consider what might be on the other side. We take a few small steps forward; only to take three big steps back again, when things start shifting...

August 14, 2023 Read more →

Life lessons I learnt from watching the Barbie movie

This past weekend we went to the cinema and watched the new Barbie movie. I was initially very resistant to watching it. I had my own story about Barbie and that it would be a complete waste of my time to watch the movie. I was not a big fan of Barbie growing up. I had some Barbie dolls at one point. And I loved dressing the dolls. And at the same time, I felt a lot of resentment towards the stereotypes that the doll’s existence perpetuates. Barbie perpetuates an unrealistic and unattainable ideal that is very hard for most women to be confronted with. My husband was very keen though. He thought it would be funny. So, we went to see it. Here is what I learnt about life from watching the Barbie movie...

July 25, 2023 Read more →

What’s your Gremlin?

We all have Gremlins – also know as Saboteurs or Inner Critics. Our Gremlins are what we consider the worst parts of ourselves – the monsters that come out when we overfeed them. They come out when we feel most insecure, most inadequate, most incompetent, and when we feel most like we lack confidence in ourselves and our abilities. It’s the judgements we have of ourselves. It’s what we most dislike and want to hide about ourselves, because we believe that they get in the way of us showing up fully as our best or highest selves...

July 11, 2023 Read more →

Striving, yet not thriving

Recently, I posed the question, can you handle the effort shock? And there was quite a reaction to that article. So, today, I want to speak to those of us (myself included) who tend to overdo it and who tend to not know where the line is between effort and burnout.

May 2, 2023 Read more →

Can you handle the Effort Shock?

Recently I wrote about what it means to be a hero. Something I did not touch on is just how hard it is to create a life that is different and resonant; just how much effort goes into creating a meaningful and fulfilling life. My sense is that my last article could have perhaps left you confused. I shared that heroes are not special in some way. They are not extraordinary. They don’t have special powers. They are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things. If this is true, then why do so few of us take up the challenge? Why are we not all the heroes of our own story? The answer is Effort Shock. Let me explain…

April 11, 2023 Read more →

What does it mean to be a Hero?

What is a hero? Marvel and DC have taught us that heroes are special. They have incredible strength and supernatural powers, and they perform outrageous acts of courage. So, we tend to think that an average person can’t possibly be a hero. Heroes are special somehow, so they can’t be average people... We forget to be our own heroes in life. We forget that we get to create who we want to be in the world...

March 28, 2023 Read more →

Your Future Self wants you to love yourself NOW

We have always lived in a world that is characterised by change and uncertainty. We have never lived in a world that wasn’t changing... No-one has it all figured out, because what would be the fun in being alive if there is nothing to learn? Until the day you release your last breath, you will continue to evolve. You will continue to change. When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different to who we are now. In some instances, your past self might seem like a completely different person to you, and it may even be hard to relate to who you used to be. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. However, for some reason, when we look ahead to the future, somehow, we expect that we will stay the same as we are NOW. We assume that we will not change as much in the future as we have changed to get to this present moment...

March 13, 2023 Read more →