Unleashing Brilliance

Karen Faehndrich’s ethos is:

“Dwell on possibilities. Creative foresight. Listen to connect. Courageous Adventures. Spirit of grace. Compassion and fortitude.”

Karen has gained a depth of specialist expertise as a member of Global Executive teams and Global Talent Development and D&I Advisory Boards where she represented the APAC region to set the agenda globally for thought leadership in, business growth, talent, executive performance, governance, future of work, culture, diversity & inclusion, agility and change initiatives.

 

With global experience working in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and overseeing business operations in the Arabian Gulf and South Africa Karen has applied a diversity lens to provide equity and access, flexed solution design and growth strategies and navigated the social and cultural nuances to inspire individuals and build communities of excellence. 

During this podcast Karen generously shares her leadership journey and lessons learnt along the way including:

✅ You can always find a way

✅ You don’t need to win to take joy from what you are involved in

✅ Trust and humility are key leadership skills.

Enjoy

Michelle Cox is a corporate turned creative with over 25 years of executive leadership experience in a variety of National and Global Executive roles across a range of industry sectors. In addition to being a CEO, COO & CMO for several well-known brands, an entrepreneur at heart, Michelle has acquired and started a number of companies throughout her career as well.

These days Michelle has a ‘portfolio career’ which means she gets to do lots of fun, interesting things every day that are incredibly varied. She’s held a Director role on the Board of Tourism Tasmania for the past six years; is a Non-Executive Director on the boards of two ASX listed companies Experience Co (ASX:EXP) and BSA Limited (ASX:BSA); and continues to be a shareholder in the marketing communications agency group Bastion Collective, she part-founded ten years ago.

Michelle is passionate about living an unconventional life and encouraging others to embrace imperfection more.

In 2019 Michelle founded The Wabi Sabi Series. This company includes a podcast and book series of short, impactful books centring around topics we don't often talk about. Taking her ‘corporate turned creative’ venture further, the past year has seen Michelle transform what started as a ceramics hobby into a successful new business making tableware for clients and she recently opened Sydney’s newest Makers Studio & Retail store, Atelier 9 - Avalon, with the purpose of connecting community through creative endeavours.

Listen in as we discuss the concept of taking ownership of this life you have now, embracing imperfection and loving the person that you are.

Find out more about Michelle at

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellejcox/

Insta: @michelle.j.cox|  @thewabisabiseries | @atelier9_avalon

Facebook: @wabisabiseries

Podcast: Wabi Sabi Series

Websites:  www.wabisabiseries.com | www.atelier9.com.au

A combination of fortune, luck and what makes you as a person is a very thing that sets you apart.Wise words from my latest guest Antoinette Colbran.

Antoinette led the idyllic life of a wealthy Sydney family. Life was wonderful - multiple homes, cars, boats and overseas holidays.  Kids in private school and no cares in the world as a result of her husband building a successful business.

But then her world was turned upside down due to a sudden change in the law in the industry their family business was involved in.  Overnight the life they had enjoyed fell away and suddenly they had to sell up, find cash and lost everything.

So what happens when you hit rock bottom?

How do you rebuild your life?

Somehow Antoinette found the resilience to rebuild -  it was about:

-Being brave enough to face the reality

-Being brave enough to work out the options with that she had

-Being brave enough to reach out and ask for help

-Being brave enough to take one step forward every day

-Being brave enough to realise it was up to me

She now runs her own business, Benchmark Experts providing expert witnesses in the medical, engineering and work health and safety space to law firms.  She has run this business for over 20 years.

Antoinette is a speaker and has also published the book, “Great Handbag – don’t forget your Briefcase” – a book she wrote as a cathartic measure to help with the shock and the pain endured when things changed so rapidly for her and her family.

To contact Antoinette:-    www.antoinettecolbran.com.au

Enjoy

Tina Tower is an award-winning, serial entrepreneur who has founded and sold several businesses and franchises. 

Tina started her first business at the age of 20, that went from being a small suburban tutoring centre and educational toy store, to a licence program and then a franchise. After 5 years of franchising Tina opened 35 Begin Bright centres with 120 staff.

After Begin Bright was acquired by an International education company in 2016, she started business coaching other people to scale their serviced based business. Tina found herself repeating a lot of the same fundamentals again and again to people who were paying top dollar for private coaching. So, she put the repetitive content into an online course. It went off!

To put location freedom to the test, Tina set off to travel the world for a year with her husband and two children, visited 28 countries - all while growing the online business in a couple of hours a day.

Tina has helped hundreds of people package their expertise into an online course and launch it to the world.

Her advice:

-Own your spotlight – drop that façade and be who you are

-Own your expertise – identify what it is that you are known for

-Own every action and treat everything as a curious experiment

-Own the simplicity – design a simple, easy and frictionless business that is scalable.

Tina is the author of two books, One Life - How To Have The Life of Your Dreams and Million Dollar Micro Business and she is on a mission to help 100 women build a $1 million business by 2025.

Enjoy

James Cooper is a filmmaker and videographer. He got his first film camera when he was 5 years old. The son of an award-winning Television director, he always had a love for film and storytelling. As he shared on this podcast, “Information by itself doesn’t move people.  It’s the stories that people share that move people.”

James believes that there is a SIGNATURE STORY inside everyone, that can transform your business. This story is unique to you and it is one that needs to be told.  And yet for so many perfectionism gets in the way. As James shares,, “perfectionism is a thief of life” getting in the way of the very legacy that all of us should be leaving, our story.

During this conversation we get to hear all about James’s childhood on set with his dad.  How he learnt on the job watching the masters at play and the moment he stepped in to his own spotlight to do the work that he does now.

We discuss:

-       How trusting in yourself is key

-       The confidence to own your own voice, to stand out and be different

-       How your story is valid and your unique fingerprint

-       And James challenges us all to own and share our story as opposed to letting others create it for you.

Enjoy

Holly Ransom is a globally renowned content curator, powerful speaker and master questioner with the belief that if you walk past it, you tell the world it’s okay.

Named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by the Australian Financial Review, she has delivered a Peace Charter to the Dalai Lama, was Sir Richard Branson’s nominee for Wired Magazine’s ‘Smart List’ of Future Game Changers to watch and was awarded the US Embassy’s Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Leadership Excellence in 2019. Having interviewed the likes of Barack Obama, Richard Branson, Billie Jean-King and Condoleezza Rice, Holly fights complexity with curiosity, apathy with empowerment and fear with fact.

As a Fulbright scholar and Harvard Kennedy School Class of ’21 fellow, Holly is a recipient of the prestigious Anne Wexler Public Policy Scholarship, allowing her to action social and economic inclusion by connecting people with the decisions that affect their lives. Soon to release her book The Leading Edge, Holly helps people harness their own potential to lead by asking better questions, thinking beyond biased answers and building collective momentum for change. The Leading Edge, Holly brings the real- world leadership lessons of so many diverse thinkers and pioneers she’s met to the fore.

Holly was identified early as a dynamic thought leader, asked to Co- Chair the G20 Youth Summit in 2014, the United Nations Coalition of Young Women Entrepreneurs in 2016, and becoming the youngest Director ever to be appointed to an Australian Football Club. Holly’s podcast ‘Coffee Pods’ was named in the top ten business podcasts to listen to by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018, and Holly has been recognised as a LinkedIn Influencer and a credible content producer by the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Herself an accomplished company director, Holly has compressed a power- packed career into a decade, spanning corporate, non-profit and public sectors. As founder and CEO of consulting firm Emergent, Holly has led real- world results with clients such as P&G, Microsoft, Virgin, Cisco and KPMG. Holly has also been a regular on the likes of The Drum and QandA.

Melissa Browne is an ex-accountant, ex-financial advisor & ex-working till she drops. Nowadays she’s a best-selling author, financial educator, business strategist & mentor and entrepreneur who is passionate about helping women particularly also live a life by design not default.

In this episode we talk about:

✅ The risk that cultivating busyness has on achieving our potential

✅ How understanding and owning your story creates the freedom for growth

✅ The 4 x money types and how to create the right habit that works for you

✅ The result of Melissa asking herself – what would I do if fear wasn’t in the way?

Mel is the author of three books: the illustrated business book More Money for Shoes, the coffee table book of financial fairy tales, Fabulous but Broke and the global best- seller Unf*ck your finances. Her current book, Budgets Don’t Work (but this does) dives further into understanding your Money Story, Money Environment and Money Type and developing great financial habits that work for your unique Financial Phenotype.

Mel is CEO of the financial education business for

women who want to financially grow up, melissabrowne.courses, Director of

Business at the long-day Early Learning Communities, Thinkers,inq and up until

she sold the business for seven figures in 2019, she was CEO of the

award-winning accounting and advisory firm A&TA (Accounting & Taxation

Advantage). Three very different businesses that all are pushing the boundaries

in their fields, questioning what is possible and disrupting their industry in

order to create the best possible results for their communities.

Does fear stop you from doing the very thing you would love to do?

Is fear the loudest voice in your head?

Does fear control you?

What if you could turn fear into your friend vs your foe?

This is the lifelong passion and work of my latest guest and friend Dr Amy Silver.  Dr Amy believes that when we learn to quieten our fear voice we can all become more powerful versions of ourselves.

Dr Silver has a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, Masters in Forensic Psychiatry, Masters in Performance, Bachelor with Honours in Psychology and further therapeutic training in cognitive therapies such as Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Compassion Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. She has published widely in academic journals and more accessible magazines and now publishes fortnightly in a popular business-focused blog/vlog called Silverlinings She is a contributing author in many books including the acclaimed Oxford Handbook of Behavioural Experiments (for Oxford University), forthcoming collaborations Unite (ed. Julia Steel) and What’s Next? (Hagen, Butler and Hodgson). She is the author of the books Conversations Create Growth for managers and Brace for Impact (both available on her website). Her new book The Loudest Guest: How to control your fear is available through all good bookshops, Amazon and Booktopia.

Enjoy

Ep 113 - Finding Purpose Through Heartbreak w/ Nikki Shah, founder & CEO MyMuse

Nikki’s backstory is an incredible example of reinvention and evolution. But it was in the heartbreak she experienced in her 30s that she found her purpose. A purpose that will ultimately become a game changer for so many.

She is unstoppable, some people would see her life being full of tragedy, but she has turned every chapter of her life so far into something that has become a truly amazing story. She has an energy and presence that stops anyone in their tracks.

Nikki grew up in the North of England, with her Kenyan parents and younger brother Vee. Nikki was bullied at school, for the colour of her skin, for her cultural background, and even bullied by a school teacher at the age of 9.

At the age of 15 she moved (without her parents) to Florida to join an international tennis academy but then a major injury ended her dreams of a career on the tennis court.

Nikki retrained as a physio and joined the Huddersfield Giants rugby league team. This was challenging in itself, even walking into a male rugby locker room for the first time was a shock after the days of all whites in a tennis club. After several years, Nikki moved to London where she set up her own practise concentrating on sports injuries.

Following a trip to Australia to visit her best friend, she fell in love with the place and lifestyle and decided to make the bold move to complete her masters at the University of Sydney, another pond crossed. This then led to feeling that a career in physiotherapy was unsustainable forever, and she decided to move into the corporate space as a recruiter.

During working in Sydney, her partner was diagnosed with cancer, Osteosarcoma, he was aged 30. What was to follow was years of working full-time while being his carer, his best friend, his side-kick. When Mike was diagnosed as terminal, Nikki found that the company she was working for found it hard to navigate, as did she. Searching for support and education for all involved, she found nothing, so she did what many passionate, driven person does, she decided that she would be the one to set up the help others needed.

Nikki established MyMuse in Nov 2019 - a social impact business that bridges the gap for employers and employees going through cancer, a life altering illness or a carer journey. She delivers proactive solutions for when this happens in their workforce and how to support the individual as well as the rest of the team or even company. MyMuse has been the finalist to the Blackmores Women + Wellness awards and winner of The Hub Flexi Impact Program.

LISTEN IN

Not to be discouraged by some challenges during the early part of his life, Sandro Forte has built one of the UK’s most successful and highly respected businesses, with individual and corporate recognition and awards too lengthy to list.

Yet, by his own admission, Sandro is an ‘ordinary guy’ who simply believes – and demonstrates day to day – that determination and a will to win are prerequisites for success.

During this conversation we talked about – amongst so many things…

-Choosing not to join the Discouragement Club

-How every choice is a positive one

-How we can train our subconscious to be successful

-We can choose between discipline or regret but without discipline it always ends in regret

Sandro has excelled at just about everything he has done; captaining and playing golf, hockey and soccer at national level. His book, ‘Dare To Be Different’ has sold over 400,000 copies, across more than 80 countries – and it is now published in 8 languages.

Sandro has been voted ‘Top Conference Speaker’ in all five continents and is described by many as ‘warm,’ ‘engaging,’ ‘dynamic, ‘funny,’ ‘captivating,’ ‘hugely motivating,’ and

‘a brilliant communicator.’

His success strategies have made him one of the most sought after speakers in the world today. His keynote presentations have captivated hundreds of thousands of people and transformed businesses such as Virgin Atlantic, Lloyds Bank, The BBC, Apple, BMW, Prudential, Mercedes, AIA, MetLife, AXA, HSBC, AVIVA, Hilton Hotels, Yahoo and Microsoft.

His Success Masterclass programmes have been voted the best sales and marketing workshops in 18 countries – with a guarantee to improve personal performance by a minimum of 30% in just 90 days.

Sandro Forte clearly knows the secrets to success and he shares them, using simple, practical and transferable ideas, to help others achieve their objectives.

Enjoy