I am at heart, a maverick, which means that I am an unorthodox or independent-minded person. Someone who is curious and inquisitive, and finds change and challenging the status quo exciting, fascinating and stimulating. I am also, considered, by some, as a misfit, which is a person whose behaviours and attitudes sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way, that often rocks the boat of the status quo.

This might be because, through necessity, as a consequence of an adverse and abusive childhood, I became self-sufficient, and resilient, at a very young age. Which provided the foundations for becoming bold, brave and courageous in exploring, navigating and playing in unchartered waters and often doing the unexpected. It also taught me to be compassionate and collaborative in inspiring, motivating, encouraging, teaching, coaching and mentoring others who are different and keen to change and innovate.

Which, it seems, are integral attributes required to survive, flourish and dance at the cusp of disruption, in today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguous) world, where exponential change is a way of life.

Exiting my Qantas career in pursuit of a more challenging career, I started working in the Australian fashion industry, where I shifted my focus and developed “on the ground” expertise across sales and design, and across product and marketing development, in both the wholesale and retail sectors.

This engaged me fully for the next 10 years, whilst exposing and gifting me my first real taste of true creativity and innovation and in how they act in unison to deliver global changes. This chapter ended once I achieved the top role, at the time, for a female executive for Grace Bros in the Coles Myer Group of department stores.  Where I was exposed to many of the rigors, challenges, and opportunities corporate executives’ experience as they climb the ladders to success.

In my final awesome role, I operated as a global fashion and lifestyle executive, where I attended all of the major textiles, men’s, women’s & accessories apparel trade shows, and the European, English, and USA based retail centres. In this groundbreaking role, I was responsible for researching, analyzing and conceptualizing fashion and lifestyle trends. To then inform and educate all of the merchandising, marketing and buying functions in adapting them to the needs and wants of the Australian consumer and retail marketplace.  This enabled the whole organisation to present a co-ordinated brand image to customers.

It was a very powerful, rewarding and extraordinary experience in learning and applying change management, critical and creative thinking skills. I also studied part-time, as an adult learner, which enabled me to structure my thinking and application of strong business management and strategic marketing skills.

Seeking strategies to reduce my levels of stress, and fulfil my life long ambition to increase my level of consciousness, I initiated a personal development journey that included a daily meditation practice, which I have continued to practice for more than 30 years as a serial entrepreneur.

Shifting my attention towards becoming accomplished in corporate learning I completed Stephanie Burns’ Training to Train program as well as Marvin Oka’s, at Inform, Professional Presenters, Trainers and Facilitators’ learning programs.

I also realized that true leadership and entrepreneurship also required people to be deeply attentional and intentional in their ways of being, thinking and doing.

This ultimately propelled me to reinvent my entrepreneurial game and work with Carolyn Taylor, as a senior consultant, at Corporate Vision, Australia’s first culture change and leadership consultancy. Where I ultimately invested 12 years specializing in custom designing, developing and delivering culture development, transformational leadership and experiential team effectiveness programs.

To some of Australasia’s top 100 companies across the financial services, telecommunications, and manufacturing sectors.

During this time, I met another misfit and global adventurer, Barry Aarons, who became my husband.  In the early years, of our relationship, we became accredited foster carers, for the Department of Community Services, in NSW. Over 10 years, we cared for and mentored a wide range of children and teenagers in need of a safe harbor, gentle guidance, wholesome meals and a stable roof over their heads.

As a result of essentially “trying too hard”, I collapsed emotionally and physically into what is now described now as “burn out.”  Diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it took me three months to move from being a victim to my illness, to take responsibility for not only causing what was my current state, and for also managing my recovery. I learned a lot about the impact of toxic thoughts, or negative internal dialogue, on my physiological state, and auto-immune system and eventually sourced a range of different healing modalities to assist and facilitate my recovery, and have thankfully never relapsed.

At the end of 2006, I found myself, at MIT, in Boston, attending the “Presencing: Collective Leadership for Profound Innovation and Change” five-day workshop. It was hosted by SOL (Society for Organizational Learning) and presented by Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge and other key people involved in the development and evolution of  Theory U and Presence.

This profoundly deep experience created “cracks” in my assumptions about change, leadership, and culture. It opened a doorway and created a threshold towards renewing and retooling myself for the coming decades.

Having always sought creative ways of fast-tracking a client’s consciousness, I evolved presencing and emergence concepts and mindfulness principles to create new pathways and a toolkit for connecting, exploring, discovering and designing new ways of being, thinking and doing.

This amazing learning journey took me to Mount Abu, in Rajasthan, India, where I reconnected with the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, through participating in a range of Emergence & Peace of Mind Retreats, at various stages, over the next ten years. Where I learned the true power of deep-diving into silence and stillness, and into retreat and reflection, to let go of the old and allow space for the new to emerge.

I ultimately moved on to become the CEO of my own Australian based learning and development company, Compass Learning Pty Ltd. Where we focussed on custom designing, developing and delivering experiential-based, blended, adult learning programs.

Our niche involved “bringing to life” the concepts, principles, and techniques of accountability, top team effectiveness and transformational leadership.

In 2010 I relocated to the Middle East, with my husband, two dogs and our pussycat, where I joined the Start-Up Revolution. When we arrived in Israel, I faced a series of harsh new realities which defied and challenged most of what I had been taught and experienced about high-performance organisational cultures, leaders, and teams. Aptly illustrated by Dov Frohman founder of Intel Israel, in his book “Leadership the Hard Way” that “leadership in today’s economy is a lot like flying a plane through a thunderstorm” which focussed may attention on the nature, role, and impact of disruption on leaders, teams and organisations.

This made me quickly realize that most of the approaches to organisational development that I had learned and applied in Australia were irrelevant to potential clients inside and outside of my new homeland.

In my first year, I deeply immersed myself in a wide variety of online learning programs to expose myself to the new language, concepts, and principles of innovation.  I simultaneously deep-dived into the Israeli culture, to research and identify the key cultural drivers, mindsets, and behaviours, responsible for impacting this tiny “huge” country, with its own unique set of adaptive challenges. I discovered that its success, as The Start-Up Nation and its incredible ascension in The Global Innovation Index, defied most of the consulting, culture, leadership and coaching models I had learned and had been attached to.

As I had studied cutting edge emergence principles, I knew that to allow the “new” to emerge, you have to let go of the “old”. This caused me to ultimately, not without difficulty, let go of almost everything I knew and had practiced, throughout my professional career.

It also reinforced my intuitive take on the emerging need for more conscious leaders and teams, who could evoke people towards being, thinking and doing things differently, individually, and together.

I set about completely re-inventing myself by massive amounts of thinking, reading, field researching, learning, networking and debating. Where I sought to understand, decipher, integrate and generate new approaches to dealing with disruption. By developing innovative organisational cultures, conscious leaders, co-creative teams and executive coaching within a holistic, systemic and innovative business ecosystem approach.

Once I managed to clear the fog of the disruptive change that had settled into every fibre of my being, I realized that I had landed in a completely new and radically different innovation and entrepreneurship space that totally embraced and fascinated me.

I sailed voraciously around in the volatile, uncharted waters that this amazing learning journey took me on. Where the innovation rollercoaster, with it’s high emotional, cognitive, and viscerally challenging peaks and deep troughs, involving horrible failures and the odd triumph.

Whilst not intending to, I became an Israeli start-up entrepreneur and founded an innovative global consulting and learning company called ImagineNation™ to retool to win in the next decade.

Where I sought to invent new non-prescriptive, adaptive and innovative ways of disrupting prevailing leadership, culture, coaching, and corporate learning paradigms.  To invent creative and innovative ways for organizations, managers, leaders to learn, adapt, take risks, lead and thrive in this bewildering VUCA environment.

I founded ImagineNation™ as a modern elder and start-up entrepreneur in Israel, ultimately specializing in the people side of innovation, managing the interface between people and technology. What drove me, was knowing, that a VUCA world, on the cusp of disruption, and full of wicked problems, globalization, digitization, and fractured global demographics needed new ways of being, thinking, talking and acting differently.

Within a safe and collective holding space that allows people to connect, explore, discover and design co-creative ideas individually, and collectively. To reorder higher levels of collective creative consciousness to result in creative insights and collective breakthroughs that unleash opportunities and solve problems in ways that transform them into innovative solutions that people value and cherish.

This made ImagineNation™ the first global learning company to research, decipher and replicate the “secret sauce” behind the hugely successful and enviable Israeli innovative culture and entrepreneurial start-up phenomena and lifestyle.

During this time, I joined the ICF (International Coach Federation), as a means of meeting and interacting with the local coaching community. As I sought to work globally, I completed all of the requirements to attain my initial ICF coaching ACC credential and recently achieved PCC accreditation.

Whilst letting go of my old knowledge, skills, and experience, I have created, iterated and pivoted, over five years, a completely new world-class innovation curriculum. Incorporating the ICF CCE (Continuing Coach Education) Coach for Innovators Certified Program, which is offered to coaches, trainers, leaders, managers, and teams globally.

ImagineNation™ has evolved, over the past six years, through constant experimentation, massive failures, iterations, and pivots as a global eco-system of expert people.

Who unleashes breakthrough mindsets to help companies, change, innovate and win through the use of our twentieth-century tools including the OGI® (Organizational Growth Indicator), and the Growth Leadership Indicator (GLI), which reveal both the strengths and the constraints occurring in organisations that impact their ability to affect value creation for customers and organisational growth.

“Learning quickly by failing fast” is my mantra, so what better way is there than by taking on the risks of another seemingly impossible challenge, from which to learn and then teach others?

I work hard at congruently walking my talk; I somehow manage to learn from my failures, even though they feel painful at the time, and I happily teach from my own embodied personal experiences. This has enabled me to develop confidence, emotional integrity and resilience, agility, authenticity, and evocative leadership and coaching presence which are at the core of my work.

Our intent at ImagineNation™ is to unlock human potential and develop human skills that enable people to adapt, innovate and grow through disruption in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, that are appreciated and cherished.

Finally, my husband and I took valuable timeout to recalibrate our vision for the future, making key quality-of-life and family decisions, which brought us back to Australia after six amazing and transformational years in Israel. Our range of challenging adventures in Israel became our “MBA of life” qualification, from which to draw deep learnings from our range of significant emotional events and life challenges.

This heralded yet another personal and professional renewal and re-invention process, integrating all of the various flavours of my maverickness and misfitness collected over the past forty-five years. Focussing my attention and intention toward building a conscious collective globally, in the form of The Coach for Innovators Amplifiers, whilst enjoying the benefits of beautiful Bayside Melbourne, acknowledged as one of the world’s most liveable cities.

Like most ex-pats, being the new and different kid in town, and the returning prodigal child has not been an easy pathway to take. It’s taken a considerable amount of time to blend into Melbourne’s business and social communities. Adding the Covid 19 global pandemic to the increasing amount of uncertainty has seen me, like many others, move to work mostly online, where I am enjoying making a difference to coaching clients via two of the amazing global coaching platforms.   

Not being a sports fan, being older, and being female, with boundless enthusiasm for change-led collaborative innovation, has further challenged my confidence and increased my capacity for resilience, courage, compassion, and creativity.

Making new friends and joining new communities have helped us settle in. Where we enjoy the amazing range of seaside walks with our now advanced four-legged family, as well as discover Melbourne’s amazing cultural leadership, awesome infrastructure, quality of life, and diversity.

In the end, it’s all been about making a series of fundamental choices that have constantly shifted and adapted my way of being (mindsets and moods), thinking, and acting. So that I can continue to focus on creating the groundswell that unleashes new possibilities for positive and sustainable change, and commit to constantly unlearning, learning and relearning and re-invent myself and those brave and bold others who I connect, coach and collaborate with to help make the world a better place and contribute to the common good.