I've spent much of my life building.

My first business was Shows 4 Kids, a national touring educational entertainment business working with primary and secondary schools on issues including bullying. I was in my twenties, and it taught me early that business, communication and education were never really separate for me.

After that I worked in brand partnerships at the National Breast Cancer Foundation, which shaped something in me about what organisations can actually do when they take contribution seriously, rather than treating it as a box to tick.

Later, I became a General Manager at Pacific Brands. It was where I saw retail and ecommerce at scale, and learned how decisions move through a large business.

Then I founded Shhh Silk.

My career has never followed a particularly straight line.

Each one taught me something the others couldn't.

I founded Shhh Silk and spent eleven years building it.

There were also the parts nobody sees from outside: the decisions, the risk, the mistakes, the years of not quite knowing if a call was right until long after you'd made it.

For around eight of those years, alongside raising my children and running the business, I was also caring for my father as dementia slowly changed our family. He lives in residential care now. Most of what women carry never shows up in a job title.

During the pandemic, my team and I found ways to get what we made into the hands of nurses and frontline workers who needed it. Contribution has rarely felt separate from commerce to me. My time in brand partnerships at the National Breast Cancer Foundation shaped that early.

After eleven years, I reached a point where I no longer wanted to organise my future around a version of work and life that no longer felt true to me.

Long before I knew I would build companies, there was another life I imagined for myself.

That stayed quietly in the background through the years of raising children, building businesses, leading teams and making a life. Then I signed my first book deal with Wiley for Self-Made.

The book mattered to me for reasons that went beyond seeing my name on a cover. It brought me back to something I had wanted since I was young: the chance to make sense of experience through words, and to put something into the world that might stay with someone after they had finished reading it.

Writing has become more important to me, not less. It sits underneath The Midlife Truth, the conversations I am having with women, and the body of work I am now beginning to build.

I started having more conversations with women about what they were actually experiencing in midlife.

Women spoke about work.

And the strange experience of knowing something has changed before you can explain exactly what it is.

Those conversations became The Midlife Truth, an ongoing body of witness conversations, listening and writing about what women are actually living through in the middle of their lives.

As this work has grown, I've continued training in facilitation, somatic practice and Authentic Relating, deepening how I listen and how I hold these conversations.

Organisations bring me in when they want to understand what's actually happening for the women in their workplace, and why it matters for leadership and retention. Founders and brand leaders bring me in for judgement shaped by having carried a business myself. Sometimes the work happens on a stage, taking these ideas into a room rather than onto a page, through speaking.

And some of it happens directly with women, through The Table, Pause, private sessions and private work, alongside the ongoing listening and writing of The Midlife Truth.

For me, these aren't separate bodies of work. The commercial experience matters. So does the life experience, the leadership, the writing and what I'm learning from women now.

I'm based in Melbourne. I'm a mother of two adults now.

I don't think I've become less ambitious. I've become much more particular about what deserves my ambition.

These days I care less about doing things simply because they're expected. I'm interested in contribution, equality for women, and using what I've learned in ways that can actually change something.

I want the next decade to matter, particularly for women. I think some of the most consequential work of my life may still be ahead of me.