Jump on the waves with us for raw, honest conversations with athletes and artists, medicos and military, scientists and advocates, survivors and everyday extraordinary humans.
Welcome to the tribe!
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Clinical neuroscientist and researcher, Dr. Izelle Labuschagne, has been studying the hormone oxytocin for a long time. Known as the love hack chemical, her research has shown that it’s so much more! Its administration via nasal spray can, for example, temporarily relieve extreme social anxiety in young people. It induces feelings of connectedness and promotes resilience, among other things.
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Grace Kim has always known the value of making music a part of children’s lives and the crucial role it plays in brain development. But when her oldest child was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and struggled in live music settings, she saw a need to bridge the gap between comfortable performance environments and audiences with special needs.
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Music educator, Dr. James Cuskelly, has taught music to people of all ages and levels, and does just that with his young students. He talks with great passion about the far-reaching benefits of a music education for everyone, from language acquisition and literacy to self-expression and the ability to think in a creative way and complete complex tasks. He speaks of the modern understanding of ‘talent’ and what it means to be able to connect with, and give meaning to, sound.
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Jo Farkas was 20, parasailing in Bali, and something went wrong. She found herself under the water with a rope wrapped around her neck. And then the most extraordinary thing happened; she experienced a sense of expansion and oneness, an unconditionally loving, neutral presence, and it seemed as though she was the only thing in the world. Jo remembers thinking, “Well, this isn’t such a bad way to go!” Then her physical survival mechanisms kicked in and she found herself gasping for breath, panicked.
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Charles Crawford has written and contributed to speeches for British Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, the British Royal Family and foreign dignitaries as well as composing and delivering his own speeches during his diplomatic career. He was described as “the Dale Carnegie of speechwriting” by John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher. You could say, he knows a thing or two about preparing and delivering speeches for leaders!
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Lesley Williams has an extraordinary knack of making you feel welcomed into her life, her presence, her story, into our shared history and making you feel like you belong – the opposite of her experience growing up under the control and monitoring of the QLD government under their ‘protection’ acts.
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Fabiola Campbell describes her loss of identity and sense of belonging, when she migrated from Venezuela to Australia, as the “death of her superwoman”. In a very different way to what she’d expected, she discovered her adult identity through the experience of being an immigrant. The process was rocky, at times humiliating, sometimes devastating, but ultimately became a journey of transformation where she was able to recreate herself and reawaken her "superwoman".
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August 2009 Katherine Varley’s car spun out of control, hitting a tree and leaving her with a serious brain injury. She was in her 30’s. She has little memory of that time and the first stages of her rehabilitation process, but she had to relearn how to eat, how to walk, talk… All those capabilities most of us take for granted every day.
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Holistic health and movement coach, Ross De Vincentiis and I, discuss the importance of creating mental space, why most of us struggle with it, and how to do it! We speak of our own experiences and those of our clients both when we’ve failed to give ourselves stillness as well as the surprising, wonderful things that have happened when we have.
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Matthew Boyd strives every day to use his career to create positive impact in this world. 5 years ago he decided to quit his marketing job and founded Vollie, an online marketplace that’s unlocking a new style of skills-based remote volunteering. In 4 years of operation, Vollie has seen 4,000+ social impact projects completed to date, through 200,000+ skilled volunteering hours, generating over $5 million of savings to the current 925+ non-profits using the service. It’s exciting stuff!
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Brent McKean has done a huge amount of walking all over the world, from the Inca Trail to the Blue Mountains, easy strolls in nature to incredibly demanding rugged walks of hundreds of km’s, and now he's editor of Australia's only dedicated bushwalking magazine, “Great Walks”.
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As soon as you hear him speak, his resonant, rich voice demands attention. Built like a Gridiron footballer and with charisma galore, Berlin-based Derrick Lawrence chose opera singing over football. He won the world’s most prestigious singing competition in New York when he was 23, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it all came easily.
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Getrude Matsche embodies Ubuntu – the African philosophy with which she grew up in a small town in Zimbabwe. She’s a warm-hearted whirlwind of passion, drive, energy and vision, and believes she has been given this life in order to make a difference to the world and to even out the inequality she sees.
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Unconscious bias – it’s part of our innate survival mechanism and, at its worst, it can threaten our survival. Justine Cooper has been delving into and training people, teams and organisations on unconscious bias for decades. With humility, humanity and wisdom she talks us through her personal realisations and experience around unconscious bias, how we can become aware of our own biases and how, even with small actions, we can have a huge positive ripple effect.
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Who hasn’t ever agonised over a difficult but necessary conversation OR avoided it altogether? (Yep, I hear silence here…) Cameron Shepherd is the master of ‘difficult conversations’. As an HR consultant he’s had to have them on behalf of different companies in vastly varying situations all over the world.
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Nikki Smith’s the person to have in your corner if you want to be fulfilled and energised by your work. She’s a psychologist and career / redundancy coach with nearly two decades’ experience, and a fount of the kind of wisdom we all need in order to feel great and perform at our best in our careers.
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Ross De Vincentiis is a guy who, to put it euphemistically, LOVES a challenge. He thrives on it! In this episode we talk about Ross’s career in the military, from infantry soldier to intelligence, the challenges, stories, injuries and what led him to become the holistic health, movement and nutrition coach he is now.
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Powerhouse Virtual CEO and CEO of Financial Executive Women, Alex Tullio, is raw, honest and oh so naturally insightful as we cover such diverse areas as moving from rule-follower to risk-taker, purpose and whether we need it, the painful, confronting, challenging road to change (on the inside first!) and deleting the j*** word from our vocabulary.
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Mark Kruger lived and breathed music for over 20 years. Being a concert pianist isn’t a job or even a vocation, it’s an all-absorbing way of life. In this conversation Mark talks about not only those experiences of elation, but the grind of the life of a concert pianist. He speaks candidly of his journey of self-discovery through music, and what ultimately led him to change his life direction.
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