Category: Challenging yourself

A friendship worth tattooing

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Words by me (Fiona)

A couple of years ago I had a bright idea – myself and 4 women who had been best friends for over 30 years should get matching friendship symbol tattoos to celebrate that fact. 

Then I changed my mind. 

Then I changed it back. 

There is a back story…

In my 20s I was in Africa and got henna drawings on my hand and foot. I really, really loved them, but they were of course temporary. I mourned their fading. 

I strongly considered getting a foot tattoo as a result, but the practical (sometimes slightly boring and conservative) side of me kept rearing its head.  

You see, I had worked as a radiation therapist at a cancer hospital and that meant I interacted with many older people, some of whom had tattoos. There were not many tattoos on 80 year olds that still looked great.  

And what if I regretted it?  Unlike most things I was willing to try, a tattoo was permanent (laser tattoo removal was not a thing I was aware of).  

Then there was the tattoo artist who told me that the foot was the most painful place to get tattooed.  

So I didn’t do it. 

As time went on, more and more friends and family got tattoos. Some I loved, some not so much. I felt a mix of envy and regret, but didn’t join their ranks. 

Then I had a conversation with someone about tattoos that had special meaning. An example was a friend who had her scar from breast cancer tattooed into a beautiful image. 

Which got me thinking… 

What if my friends and I got a tattoo to celebrate our amazing friendship, still strong almost 30 years after we left high school? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful celebration?  

So in a moment of madness I asked on Facebook messenger what they thought of the idea. 

I immediately changed my mind, and deleted the message. Within seconds. But it turns out that only deletes it from your screen, not theirs!  

4 really enthusiastic agreements came back to me. Oh oh. 

I explained that I was unsure and they gave me time to think about it. 

I researched, as is my tendency, and I found a gorgeous symbol, and my inside right ankle seemed to call out for some artwork.  

Justifications came to mind – my skin was not pristine. It has scars, many moles and freckles, blemishes and wrinkles. A tattoo was not marring a perfect canvas. I was in my mid (maybe even late!) 40’s, old enough to do what I wanted without worrying about my sister realising I was not 100% a goody-two-shoes. 

So I said yes. And we booked in to get it done a week later. 

Each day of that week I woke up with a different feeling about the coming tattoo. Excitement one day. Horror the next. I actually had a nightmare about it (needles, blood, and regrets were all involved). Then I would be really excited again.  

My friends laughed each morning wondering if I was going ahead that day or not! 

Along came the Friday evening. A quick drink in the pub first (only one!). Then off to the tattooist, a lovely man who was very reassuring.  

My friends made me go first – in case I backed out!  

The tattoo artist and I spent time selecting the right place and size for the image. Higher than I had pictured, but perfectly positioned. 

I sat in the chair, at this stage more excited than scared, though worried slightly about the pain. 

And it began! 

It turns out a tattoo hurts less than I thought it would! And my ankle really did need a friendship symbol on it. It just looks perfect to me. 

My friends went next, 3 on top of their feet and one on her chest. 

I don’t think they regret it either.  

It has been a few years now, and I have no regrets. And, don’t tell my mum, but I have started thinking my left foot might need a bit of artwork… 

Coaching Journey Vlog #5

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Coaching Vlog #5 – 1 week of coaching and part way through a coaching course

Good morning, it’s Friday again. And you may have noticed that I’m in a different location today. I am about to start day two of my coaching training at Telstra. So yesterday was lots of learning and a bit of practice, today will be lots of practice. So we’ve learned about Johari windows, about the grow model, about various other coaching techniques such as open ended questions. That’s one of the things I struggle with the most, I think. So it’s been a really good day yesterday, I’m looking forward to today, as a follow up. The last week, I have started coaching the team, and I think I’ve added some value. I will see in the long term I guess, if I actually have, and
it’s been a very fun week.
I think in my I’ve, yeah, I’ve had to really process where I’m at, the nerves of taking on my team. The confidence, you know, am I actually adding value. It was good to get into it, I do feel like, you know, maybe in a small way, I’ve added some value this week. And hopefully over the coming weeks, I’ll be able to add more. We’ve done a team charter, which has been interesting, because not all the team was able to attend the meetings. So we’ve done the team charter in two sessions so far. The first one being the brainstorming session for the various sections of the team charter, the second one, and then we kept that open for a week. The second one was the voting for which of those ideas they wanted to put through to the actual team charter. And again, because of people not able to attend the meeting, we’ve left that open for a week. And the idea being that next Wednesday, we will actually finalize the team charter and get everyone to agree to it. So I’ve actually now moved the time of that meeting so that hopefully more people will be able to attend it. That it’s been interesting. I’ve not done a team charter in three sessions before, but it seems to be working and the people who didn’t attend, were quite happy to have the opportunity and also to do that offline. So that worked out well for us, I think.

Other than that, I am ready for the weekend. But I’m also looking forward to a day of lots of practice of coaching. Where I get to be a coach, a coachee and an observer in apparently three rounds of three, so nine, nine coaching sessions, where I’ll be playing one of those roles. So that should be a fun day. And I should learn a lot and get lots of practice.

I’m also considering doing a formal coaching certification. So I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but I’m going to talk to a couple of people in the team who have done that to find out what my options are. So coaching is really resonating with me. So that’s a good thing. Talk to you next week. Thanks

Gaining Something New

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Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
Words by me (Fiona) based on an interview with Elisa

Elisa shared a different perspective with me – she carefully considered and attempted something specifically to get herself out of her comfort zone! 

“I actually regularly get out of my comfort zone when I’m at my work. If there’s something new and shiny to try – count me in! Nobody else would like to tackle a complex problem – I’m there! You want an early adopter or an exemplar to be used as guinea pig – Yes please.   

At the beginning of this year I realised that trying out new things at work is no longer “getting out of my comfort zone”. I needed something else to challenge me. I came up with these choices:  

1. Publish a book (this will take time and still scares me so much. Brene Brown didn’t manage to dare me for this yet)   

2. Jump from a plane over 10k feet and sky dive (I’m very scared of heights and I heard that sky diving will fix that. The only thing stopping me from doing this is well my anxiety attack. I tend to feel faint if I go higher than 4th floor of a building)   

3. Learn something physical, which I haven’t done before – either dance, music, martial arts   

Luckily both my daughters are karate students and since I’m already spending half our Saturdays at the dojo I might as well learn like them! So, I’m now into my fourth month of karate. So far, so good I haven’t received any real combos, but I do get bruised sheens from all the kicking.” 

Elisa had other good reasons for choosing karate “I chose karate out of all the challenging things I can do because right now it’s the most realistic challenge that I can sustain for more than 2 tries. I also wanted to see how I learn using my body, coordination, fitness (or lack thereof) and focus. I noticed that I love learning, but most of my learning have only been applied using my head and my mouth for talking a lot about it. This time I would like to learn differently.” 

I asked Elisa about her emotional journey, and she described it well “Before my first class, I was a ball of nerves. My oldest daughter is a brown belt and I’ve watched enough of her classes for the last 3 years to know how physically intimidating and exhausting learning karate can be. I worried about the fact that I don’t know how to do push-ups properly, I am not the sportiest person and don’t have stamina, and if [I would] able to follow the karate combos they will teach my class.   

The Saturday class is a “mixed belt” class which means I’m learning with the higher belts too! My first class was brutal! I had to be slammed (dropped) a few times during my class. I think I did more push ups and sit ups in a span of 20 minutes than all the push ups/sits ups I’ve done in the 42 years I’ve been on this planet. I struggled, felt like my heart would be ripped off my chest at some point. I was wiping sweat off my face every second wondering where the waterfall down my forehead was coming from. The higher belts kept telling me I was going well for a first-timer, which I guessed encouraged me to not leave the mats in the middle of the class and throw up.   

After my first ever class finished, I sorely walked to the change room. I felt totally wasted. But by the time I reached the car I wanted to go back in and do it again! I didn’t realise how fun and exhilarating it would be to get slammed.  

I’m now coming into my 4th month of learning. I have my eye on that yellow belt. I’ll take this one belt at a time. I’ve also noticed a confidence I’ve only seen in bad-ass heroines before. Wow, do I have my shoulders more upright and my head higher. And damn can I push up!  

Regarding stepping out of her comfort zone again, Elisa was clear “Yes. I’ll be working towards going up that list of challenges. I do somehow someday would like to deal with my fear of heights. And also publish a book. The interesting thing is seeing which will come first?’’ 

Elisa’s last words are: “Leaving a comfort zone for me means learning something new. It may be about something, about ourselves. If we frame it this way I feel more people would be bolder and take more risk. Because it’s not about losing our comfort, it’s about gaining something to improve ourselves, to feel fuller and well, new-er?   

“Thanks for letting me share my karate story! Happy to share how my grading will go in 4 months’ time.” 

Thank you Elisa! 

Coaching Vlog #4 – a bit exhausted!

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Coaching Vlog #4
A bit weary – but had an amazing week.
There are pauses, I think you will cope though 🙂

Transcript to follow

Good morning. It’s been a big week for me.
A lot has happened, lots of good things. It’s been a really awesome week. So as far as coaching goes, I ran my team charter on Wednesday. And that went really well. We actually did it in two parts. So we did the part where people have brainstormed, and on next week will actually go through and vote and come up with the actual final team charter. So that was a great exercise.

And, well, as of today, I’m officially coaching the team, with the support of the person handing over from me, which is really exciting as well, and a little bit scary, but not too scary, because I, I do know what I’m doing.

And on top of that, I have decided to do a mini retro about how the team is feeling about agile, not an agile maturity assessment as the team is only at the end of their second sprint, after all, but making sure that the team is feeling comfortable with all the different ceremonies and things like that. And that also helps me with my coaching backlog, because I’ll know what areas that the team feel least secure about. And I can focus on those as my priority. So I think that should work. Well. I haven’t told the team yet. If they watch this, they’ll find out my thing.

And other than that, I’ve got some things going on. Non coaching related. I’m not sure if I should be sharing these on my video blog? But I am going to be interviewing Moira Were from South Australia. She founded Chooks and is a member of the Order of Australia, she’s pretty amazing woman. I will be putting an invite out for that. Because what I will be doing it as a webinar, which is a first for me. So hopefully that goes really well.
I also spent time at a session yesterday that focused on Human Centered Design for employee … satisfaction, I guess, a lot about their tools. So it’s really great to see Human Centered Design implemented in a different context. So I enjoyed that and met some people that I am going to speak to again because one of the things about attending these sessions is you meet people who have the same passions that you do. And it’s easy to strike up a … connection, which you can then follow up afterwards. So I’m really glad I went to that as well.

I’m not sure what else I have to tell you this week. It has been a huge week. I’m actually a little bit brain… overwhelmed. Does that make sense? So I’m sure I’ve missed stuff but I will be talking to you again next week and so will pick up anything I missed then. Thanks.

Being true to you

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Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
Words by me (Fiona) based on Maddie’s generously shared story

This week I spoke to Maddie, and I have the great honour of sharing another very personal story about stepping out of a comfort zone. 

Maddie explained that stepping out of her comfort zone was necessity, not choice. She believes that ‘’when we have that mindset of ‘we have to do this’ you’re more likely to do so’’. 

In 2017 Maddie came out as transgender, and she started with the huge step of telling her partner. To be able to get through this major step she called her partner and then sent an SMS while on the phone as she could not bring herself to say the words. Maddie’s partner at the time was “quite supportive” in her words. 

I asked Maddie about what she went through before she told anyone, and she said for a while she had specific thoughts and feelings about “wanting to be pretty and being able to express that side of herself”. Initially Maddie didn’t know that how she felt was deeply embedded, and described as transgender, she just knew that she had to be true to how she was. 

Coming out to her mum and family was the hardest for her. Maddie had mentally and emotionally prepared to tell her mum on a shopping trip, and ironically her mum spent a lot of the day on the phone! Anxiously waiting until her mum got off the phone, they were on the way home and Maddie couldn’t help blurting it out! After taking a day to process everything, her mum started worrying about how this would impact Maddie. At one point hoping she could be a drag queen instead (Maddie tells me she is definitely not a performer!). Since then, “Mum has definitely been the star. She’s definitely been the best support that I’ve had. She helps me buy shoes and knows what dresses look good. I feel like I’m very lucky to have a good mum.” 

Getting pronouns correct seems to be the hardest part for most people, other than that Maddie has been really pleased with how everyone has adapted. She loved legally changing her name. She worked in a small team at the time and when the system updated someone called out “who is Maddie?” By this time Maddie was confident about telling her colleagues as she had done this a few times already – but the fear of someone reacting wrongly never completely goes away. 

Maddie still has tough times, gender dysphoria being one of the hardest things to deal with, but she wanted to focus on the positives for this interview (though she was happy to answer all my many questions!). I asked Maddie what was the best part, and her answer was quickly “Definitely wearing the dresses!”, but also getting joy from being accepted and allowed to be herself. “I still get a little bit giddy when a friend gets a pronoun right, or seeing ‘Maddie’ in my email signature. It took a lot to get all that stuff, and it took ages to decide the name!” 

Being true to herself has enabled her to become more confident and put herself out there more – aiding a youth group on her weekends, advocating for causes such as ‘Wear It Purple’ and organising events in the workplace. 

The good days are slowly outnumbering the dysphoric ones. The best days being when she almost forgets she is transgender! 

Maddie’s final notes were “Thankfully, my coming out, and leaving my own comfort zone, meant that I didn’t have to go through it alone – I’m spoilt with support from family, friends and co-workers that I don’t have to worry. I knew that I had to eventually, and I’m relieved I did it earlier rather than later.” 

“If anyone out there is hesitating to leave their comfort zone, as soon as you’re ready, try having the mindset of ‘I need to do this’ – depending on your situation, it might be easier to imagine the scenario if you don’t try.” 

“Lastly, for anyone going through something similar, I’m more than happy to pay it forward and help support you, even if it’s just a chat – email me at maddie.sumner@team.telstra.com” 

About Maddie: 

“Maddie Sumner has recently joined Telstra as part of the Graduate Program, leaving her last job to continue learning new technologies. She studied at Swinburne University, under the Bachelor of IT scholarship program. 

Beginning her career whilst changing her identity has encouraged her to reach out and participate in additional activities; such as running a youth group, becoming an executive member of ‘Wear It Purple’s Melbourne team, and leading the D&I team at her last workplace. 

Maddie is a proud member of Telstra’s ‘Spectrum’ network – a yammer group for all LGBT+ and allies within Telstra.” 

Coaching Vlog #3 – assigned to a team!

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My latest vlog about my coaching journey.
This week I was assigned to a team.
Also features my cat (sorry!)

Transcript of the video below:

Good morning, and welcome to my third video blog about coaching. It’s been a couple of weeks. And yes, it has been two weeks, not the one that I promised. So apologies for that. The first thing that happened was that I got my second coaching badge, which I’m really pleased about. But more importantly, I ran a SWOT session to get it.

Apologies for the cat bombs.

The SWOT session (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) that I ran for my fellow coaches went really well. And the best part for me was that I got feedback afterwards that a couple of the coaches, at least, really got something out of it and really enjoyed the session. So that felt brilliant, to be honest, that I actually ran a session that people got real value from.
After that, the…
I might leave that in there, I might do that. Let’s see what happens the cat just knocked the camera.
Anyway, what happened a couple of days ago, I had the expectation that I would begin my coaching in a real team around the first of August, and that’s been accelerated. Now, when something happens like that, my initial reaction is nearly always ‘well no, I’m not ready, I had another four weeks, I had another six weeks’. But as I thought about it more, I got more excited. My initial reaction was definitely panic. But as of yesterday, I started shadowing a coach who’s leaving the team at the end of June. And I’ll be taking over, she’s moving to a new team. So she’s not leaving the company, just the team. So after my initial terror, I became more excited about the opportunity, because the best way to learn is to do and also, I think I am mostly ready to do it. There’s still a lot I’m going to learn in the next few weeks before I take over the team. But I I feel like I understand the basics. And I’ve got so much support around me, as I mentioned in previous blogs, that I think that with that support, I’ll be able to really help this team to move through their agile journey. They’re very new. They just started this week, their second sprint. So they’re very new, they have got some people in the team who are familiar with agile, which will help me as well as them. And I’ll be given a really good hand over. So, I will talk to you again probably next week when I’ve got my through my handover, if not at the end of my handover before I start my new journey as the actual coach with this team. So very exciting times.
Again, apologies for the cat bombing. Thank you

My Coaching Journey #2

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My second video blog about my coaching journey

Transcript of video below:

Good morning and welcome to my second video blog. The overall arch of these blogs is going to be about my journey to aligning my passions with my career. But at the moment, the focus is going to be on me becoming an agile or ways of working coach at Telstra, which is, as mentioned my last blog, huge first step towards aligning my passion with my career.

So, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about today. The first being that, since our last, my last blog, I have realized what a privilege it is to be given this opportunity to learn about being a ways of working coach. I didn’t realize at the time how unique it was around the world. And I did know that I was very lucky. But I didn’t realize that I was uniquely lucky. And I’m really pleased that Telstra willing to invest in training 50 of us to become coaches, they selected us for our mindset, and they will teach us the technical items.

It’s been a fabulous journey for the past three or so weeks is our last blog. One of the things is I’ve had to do is unlearn. My role in the past is one of the things I’ve had to unlearn. I’ve had to stop being focused on delivery of actual, you know, projects, I’ve had to stop expecting to be busy for 10 hours a day and not going to my work done. And being under a lot of pressure constantly, it’s a different kind of pressure; that pressure to learn. And it’s retraining my brain to learn so much, there’s been days where I felt a bit lost because I think my brain was full. And I needed to time to process and take the knowledge in before I moved on to learning something new. So that’s all been an adjustment and an unlearning which has been really good for me, I think.

The next thing I’ll talk about was how we are learning. So, to start with, we kicked off with a four day coaching camp, which was very intensive, but really well paced. We came out of the that with a lot of new knowledge and also a learning backlog. So, all the things that we knew, that we didn’t know, that four days is a bit of a roller coaster of ‘’there’s so much I don’t know’’, to, ‘’Oh, I think I’ve got this’’ to ‘’Oh my god, there’s so much I don’t know”, again. So that’s been a really, that was a really interesting four days and very enjoyable.

The way we are being assessed is through a series of badges. So to become coaches, there’s a minimum of five badges we need to earn. And we are on our pathway to do that. So I have my very first badge. And I’m a little bit addicted to badges already. The other badges I need to learn, earn sorry, through facilitating, through coaching and through other aspects of the skills that I need to gain. I love the idea of a way of saying “Yep, we’ve witnessed this person doing this, and we know that they’re okay to go out into the wild’’.

The other way that we’re learning is that we’ve been assigned to mentors, I have three actually, I got very lucky: three for the price of one. And they are fantastic. They have assigned us to agile teams. So, we are witnessing, observing their ceremonies. Over time, we will hopefully be able to take part in facilitating some of those ceremonies, and gain our experience and knowledge that way. Our mentors, they’re really supportive as you’d expect from a mentor. But our mentors, I feel particularly glad that we have who we have. They’ve been really good.

The next part of my journey is to keep learning of course, but also yesterday, we had to nominate the areas, the missions in Telstra that we would most like to work with. No guarantees, of course, but the fact that we got asked about our missions is really cool. So I got to select I had a great time yesterday going through some of the missions in the areas will be moving to and picking my favourites. Very excited to find out which one I get assigned to.

The learning through observing, through training courses, and through my own, you know, research and books, videos, articles, will continue obviously in parallel. And there are other areas are getting involved in as well, such as facilitating training courses, and things like that. So it’s a really exciting time for me, and I will be back in a week also to tell you about what the next steps have been. Thanks

Your Whole Self

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Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
Words by me (Fiona) based on an interview with Sarah

Sarah and I connected via SheEO, she responded to my #ask for people to share their stories with me. We have, as a result a brave, story about Sarah bringing her whole self into everything she does. 

Sarah finds some things much easier to do outside of her comfort zone “In the realm of work & business I’ve pushed myself more than in the areas of creativity, physical challenges & romance. But I consistently found that the things I wanted to achieve or create were on the other side of my comfort zone. They were in the unknown.” 

Sarah’s big step was to bring her whole self into all her endeavours “One thing I really used to struggle with putting my spiritual, material, creative and project manager parts of self together. Showing up fully & vulnerably instead of ‘being in the spiritual closet’ in some situations because I was afraid it wouldn’t be received or understood.” 

It took time and practice to consistently achieve this, but the benefits were real “Once I had consistently confusing communication with a supplier. It had gone on for months [with me not bringing my whole self to the meetings]. At a [particular] meeting she asked me a practical question and I answered with an intuitive answer. She paused. I thought she was shutting down. Nope, she was opening up. We talked for the next three hours, we’ve since book swapped, she customises things for us, and she just made me a laptop case and other custom unexpected gifts. This was what happened when I brought ALL of me. Getting out the of comfort zones of relating beyond surface level stuff can be challenging and exposing but also magic.” 

As with many of the stories I share, Sarah had an ‘aha moment’: “I was on a panel at a large festival speaking about women’s health, I had a few speaking engagements which was very new for me. I’d been to this festival as a punter, volunteer cleaning toilets, managing stages and now I was part of it. This was a goal I’d had for years. I was nervous and all the self-talk about who are you to speak about this etc etc came up. Before the session one of the other panellists, an indigenous midwife, pulled me aside and said “I see you, I can see you are speaking from a deep space connected with spirit”. In that moment I decided it didn’t matter if people thought I was woo woo or airy fairy, I witnessed how seamlessly she brought all of her to the way she spoke and everyone in the audience received her with such depth. I had to bring all of me and by doing that maybe I give other people the chance to bring all of them. People will see the world from however they are going to see the world. At one of the other presentations I cried on stage because I was so moved about what we were speaking about, it tested me to bring ALL of me to what I’m doing & that some salty water coming out of my eyes is ok!’’  

For those that know me, the public tears are something I can relate to! 

And the outcoming of brining Sarah’s whole self to a public speaking event? “People gave amazing feedback & all received great insights from what we shared.” 

Sarah had advice about any one considering stepping out of their comfort zone. She would do it again because “it’s where new possibility’s live!!”. And for you “Find mindset practices, communities, habits and systems that set you up to win in whatever area you want to shift. Having things in place to support you/propel you embeds a new way of being into you.” 

And Sarah’s last words are a challenge for herself (and a promise to come back to us!): “I’m going to do something physical that gets me out of my comfort zone & report back! :)” 

Thank you Sarah! 

A bit about Sarah:  

Sarah has worked within the arts, community, entertainment, well-being and business sectors in Australia and internationally. Sarah is the Co-Director of Myoni making reusable, recyclable, ethically Australian made Menstrual Cups. She’s a trained primary school teacher & works now as a key collaborator for Flexi Flow, a learning innovation and wellbeing social enterprise working in creative events & innovative program delivery. 

Using capital to create the world we want to live in

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Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash
Words by Fiona (me) based on a story shared by Lisa

The title of this blog is something that really resonated with me when I chatted with Lisa. She talked about the fact that what we invest in is what grows, and we need a diversity of people making those decisions. 

Lisa “had a pretty traditional comfort zone to start with, I mean, I went live on the Gold Coast, went to school on the Gold Coast, went to university, studied Business and Commerce, and started my career at Deloitte as an accountant. And, you know, had a fairly exciting career in my 20s, I went around the world, and I got to meet lots of interesting people and do lots of interesting work”. 

Then things changed when she had her first child “things kind of shifted for me in a way that I probably didn’t necessarily expect. I quickly realized that working around the world for six to eight weeks at a time wasn’t going to work anymore. And that jobs that are extremely intense, like [a] 60 or 80 hour week [became] very, very difficult to maintain.  

“So I got really passionate about what does this mean for women, and the gender investment gap, and the gender gap in general?” 

“Whilst I was building my career, I’ve also been really interested in investment from a young age. So I brought shares at 15 or 16, I bought my first investment property in 19. And then I brought five more investment properties through my 20s.  

“When I first had my children, and I started to realize work is not going to be defined the same for me. First, I tried to make it exactly the same. And that didn’t work. And then I realized, I need leverage for my time, because that’s what I’m short of. So I started to get really passionate about investment, and looking at alternatives and investment, and in particular, looking at investing in businesses. 

“And I started to realize that there was a real language gap. They talk about gender, pay gap, gender, investment gap, those sorts of things, but I felt that there was a really big gender language gap as well. I’d gone into rooms with men that were talking about investing in businesses. And I feel like I’ve had a fairly good background. I’ve studied, I’ve worked in those environments, I should be able to understand.  

“But that wasn’t always the case. So I felt that it was really important to kind of turn up in those environments and participate.” 

Lisa felt that stepping into these environments was out of her comfort zone, but also realised that women being involved in business investment should be very normal! 

Lisa not only stepped out of her comfort zone to participate and learn, she then encouraged other women to join her. There is a “cultural kind of norm around numbers and money not being a woman’s forte.” 

This bothered Lisa, as confusing language aside, investing in business is relatively simple “Do you have something that people want to buy, do more people want to buy it?” is her wonderful summary of the basics. 

And are women great investors?  “You start to realize that actually, when it comes to sharing, networking, connecting, they’re all very, very, strong skills that most women have, regardless of their educational background.” 

Lisa was initially daunted by the challenge of being a business investor in a very masculine world, but continued regardless. She found it hard at times to admit to strangers that she didn’t know things. But she loves learning and research so 18 months later is feeling much more comfortable… so she commenced her next challenge of involving more women! 

Lisa’s why was a real ‘aha’ moment for me: “I feel quite strongly that in the next 10 to 20 years, with the way that we’ve got technology changing, and the way the world’s changing, that we are going to have massive shifts and wealth. And the way that the world will be is going to be a product of who invests. So I do feel like it’s really, really important that it’s a diverse group of people that stand up to be investors, that it’s women, that it’s people of colour, that it’s people from all different backgrounds, and beliefs, so that we actually see capital kind of create the world that majority of people want to live in.” 

Lisa has a pattern of stepping out of her comfort zone, and then making it comfortable by inviting others to join her, and then stepping out again. I must admit after talking to Lisa I want to join her in whatever direction she heads next! 

Lisa did have a fabulous last piece of advice: “We don’t have wait until we are at the top of the mountain, we can have cocktails on the way.” Celebrating the little wins is an important part of making progress. 

Thank you Lisa 

About Lisa:  

Lisa Brincat is a senior Strategy and Change consultant with over 15 years of experience. Lisa has Big4 experience from Deloitte, is a qualified Chartered Accountant, a CAPM Project Manager and a Certified Exponential Organisations Coach.  
 
Her experience spans over Mining, Oil and Gas, Government and FMCG industries. Lisa has worked predominantly with top 500 multinational clients including South32, Rio Tinto, Anglogold Ashanti, BHP Billiton and Johnson and Johnson.  
 
Lisa works with and supports CXO’s and General Managers to design and implement business improvement initiatives. 

Facing your Fears

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Image supplied by Taniya
Words by me (Fiona) based on Taniya’s story

Taniya shared with me a story about facing a fear again and again! 

Taniya’s tale starts about 5 years ago “I went snorkelling with a few friends in Exmouth and I got caught in a rip. I didn’t know what to do. Another friend of mine was swimming with me but he was far ahead. I screamed out, tried to swim again it – no one heard me, I was absolutely exhausted and I thought that was it! My friend finally realised that I wasn’t there and he swam over to save me and help me back to shore.” 

You won’t be surprised to know that this caused Taniya to fear swimming anywhere her feet were not firmly on the ground. “I tried a year later to face the fear but I absolutely could not, I kept panicking and my body” 

This situation continued until 2018.  At this stage Taniya would only go out in water that was waist deep. And then: “My partner picked up a new hobby – kite boarding. I would sit out on the beach and watch him and the rest of our friends kite board out in the ocean, they would come back in at the end of their session and be loving life.” 

Taniya decided that enough was enough! It was time for her to give kite boarding a go. “It wasn’t easy, not for me and I definitely didn’t make it easy for my partner. Kite boarding was literally taking the kite and going into the deep water, if you lose your board you need to drag yourself in the water with your kite, if you lose the kite then somehow you need to remain calm and relaunch it as you get carried out into sea, sometimes things can go wrong and you need to self rescue yourself and use the kite as a sail as you physically hang onto it the water to get back to shore  and god forbid, if your kite blows up in the mid-air, you’ve got nothing there to save you!” 

I must admit that sounds pretty full on even without a fear of swimming in deep water!  Taniya persisted “I was a very slow learner, at first I would only go to beaches which had a long stretch of shallow water. This was an easier way for me to step out of my comfort zone but not jump into it all together. And now one year later, I can say that I’m a pretty confident kiter. I can go into deep water however I still can’t do a down winder yet (kite from one suburb to another in the ocean). That is my next chapter to conquer.” 

And it is easier after a year of kite boarding? 

“It’s not a happy ending story, every time I go out it’s an internal battle for me, do I go out into the deep? Do I just stay where it’s comfortable and glide along in the shallows? And sometimes I don’t get out of my comfort zone, I just stay in parts which are shallow, but I’m still proud of how far I’ve come and I’ve got a long way to go but I’m working on it! 

I’m proud of Taniya too! 

And Taniya’s last words: “I hope you enjoyed the story, not only did my experience teach me about resilience in my personal life but I’ve definitely learnt to implement that in work too.” 

About Taniya: 

I’m a HR consultant in the IT industry 

I’m passionate about the outdoors, traveling and animals 

If you don’t find me at work or the beach you’ll definitely find me at a restaurant

I also love hearing about inspiring stories from people so if you have one I’d love to hear about it