#30YearsRolling – Day 18/30 – Reflections on the 30th Anniversary of my Injury

 

The trip to Solomon Islands not only had a profound impact on the direction of my life, it also brought some wonderful new friendships with the people I worked with on the project.

 

Sharing an experience like we did helped form unique bonds.

 

At the end of the project a few of us kept in regular contact and a common theme in our conversations was a feeling we’d let down the people we had worked with because we were in and out of there so quickly.

 

It almost felt like giving someone the most amazing Christmas presents and then taking them back away a few days later.

 

We felt that it would have been great to have had one or more of us stay there for a month or so longer to work closely with the participants when they went back home.

 

Unfortunately, we were restricted by the scope of the program we were delivering and the grant that funded it at that time.

 

Over time we started thinking up ways we could make that happen and not be at the mercy of needing grants to do so.

 

The idea we decided to run with was getting a group of experienced people with lived experience of disability together to form a “profit for purpose” company where we would deliver disability awareness and inclusion training and use the profits to do international development work.

 

Once the idea was formed, things took shape very quickly.

 

One of the co-founders had an incredible network from the previous development work he had done and had hit the phones to some key organisations in the space who were based in Melbourne.

 

He and his partner were based in Canberra, I was in Adelaide with the partner and another person we would work with was based in Perth.

 

He organised an ambitious schedule of meetings for a Monday with a plan for us to all meet the day before to discuss more about what our company would look like, how we could be of service and then how best to pitch ourselves in these meetings.

 

I was wrecked from my schedule that weekend: Friday night flight Adelaide – Gold Coast, speak Saturday afternoon, Saturday night flight Gold Coast – Melbourne and an extremely late check in to the apartment.

 

There was a great buzz from the collective sense of purpose, and we were prepared and excited about the meetings the following day.

 

We went from one meeting to the next with more and more momentum.

 

All of the organisations we met with were interested in what we shared and there were lots of ideas on projects or training we could deliver.

 

This round of meetings happened only 6 weeks before I was due to leave my job to pursue being a Keynote Speaker so I ended up with two businesses instead of two jobs!

 

My role was Training and Marketing Manager as well as being a Director.

 

I loved applying what I’d learned in my speaker and corporate trainer education to this new role and later in the year went on to do a Certificate III in Micro Business and then Certificate IV in Training and Assessment.

 

When I’d left the last job the highest qualification I had was a Certificate II in Information Technology, everything else was learned along the way!

 

With those qualifications I ended up redesigning our own company’s training as well as redesigning and delivering Certificate III in Micro Business for people with disability which I found super rewarding as I saw (and still see) self-employment as an excellent career option for people with disability.

 

We ended up running our own workshops in different states, ran workshops for corporate and government clients and did some big consulting projects for different levels of government.

 

I still remember being asked if I could consult on the Diversity and Inclusion strategy (including all the action plans) for a large federal government department.

 

Of course I said yes as I always did – after all they asked “could” I do it, not “have” I done it – and then I set out via my LinkedIn network to find someone experienced to collaborate with.

 

Only took me a couple of hours to find the right person, and with her help went on to do the Diversity and Inclusion strategies for an even larger federal government agency after the first one went so well.

 

Of all the projects and training I worked on, the one I’m most proud of was a research project I was asked to do in Cambodia for the Red Cross.

 

Again, this was something I had zero experience in doing.

 

Facilitation and conversations were my strength.

 

Doing anything constructive with what I found was way beyond my scope of experience!

 

The travel to Cambodia was brutal for me.

 

Flight from Adelaide to Singapore, overnight in Changi Airport but the transit hotels were all booked out so I had to stay awake all night, then next morning to Phnom Penh.

 

The people there were super friendly and so willing to help that I almost felt smothered at times.

 

The schedule was jammed pack and I found myself up until midnight each night or later trying to keep on top of everything and be prepared for the following days.

 

Being so focused on the work I didn’t get a chance to explore other than getting out into the city a couple of evenings for a quick dinner.

 

I had one of my colleagues and my partner at the time with me so I wasn’t completely alone in it.

 

I was really inspired by what I saw and the innovation of the organisations I met with (over 30 of them over the course of the week as well as facilitating a session on networking at their conference) and was reminded how much of a strength resourcefulness is over having the resources readily available.

 

The organisations we worked with for the research were facing a change of funding source which left them with great uncertainty for the future of the networks they had created.

 

The research helped to capture the impact of the work they had done together to that point and gave them tools to help them continue on their great networks regardless of where the funding came from.

 

I did enlist some extra help from my colleagues with the write up of the paper and looking back now, I’m still stunned that I managed to pull it off.

 

Over time though I really struggled with having two companies I was trying to grow and found that this one took way more of my time and energy, mainly because I was working with other people.

 

I started to feel burnt out and felt like the proverbial “man who chases two rabbits catches neither”.

 

It was after going to a workshop on values that Dr John Demartini ran in Adelaide and reading his book that I assessed my own values.

 

What I found was I was doing the disability work out of a sense of obligation – I was a person with a disability who had her shit together, was successful, and could communicate well and then felt obliged to “take up the cause”.

 

My real value and passion were in my resilience work – keynote speaking, training, and coaching.

 

I’d never been able to see it that way before and once I did, I knew I had to step away from the disability consulting which was very difficult.

 

Stepping aside from a company cofounded with friends was like a marriage break up and took its toll.

 

Once that happened though, I felt renewed energy and experienced exponential growth in my core business and personally.

 

Being so clear on where I could be of most service and having singularity of focus gave me a fresh start.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The song that represents this time for me is “Always On The Run” by Lenny Kravitz.

 

 

 

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