Change The Narrative

Long read, hang in there, I need to get a few things off my chest.

On Saturday morning, after 12 years, I returned to a job that I love. A job that I left as a result of needing to find a better balance for myself and for my children, whilst they needed me most. I left because someone else took actions that deeply impacted mine and my children's capacity to go forward as we were. I left because my request to job share my role - as a Mother with a new baby, as well as a 9 year old, coming out of a marriage that was not secure - was denied, not by a person but by outdated norms.

So I got on with it. I built a new life. I gave up drinking. Focused on becoming optimal - physically and mentally. I built a yoga school and ran it successfully for 11 years, in a life that enabled me to pick my children up, to be there when they were sick or needed stabilising and to fight for my daughter's life when she fell victim to horrific levels of domestic violence.

I witnessed one of my career babies - Like A Version - grow to enormous proportions.

I got on with it. I worked for festivals, wrote hundreds of articles for dozens of publications. I fought the justice system to advocate for victims rather than perpetrators. I became a therapist, built a clinic, wrote the first Yoga Therapy based program for addiction recovery, called Dissolving Patterns, which continues to support hundreds of people.

I started to yearn for radio - my career true love. I got on with it. I founded a 35 acre regen initiative The Prana Project on the banks of the most wounded river in NSW and created a 'greenprint' that looks at the correlation between proactive engagement in caring for landscapes and mental health.

I heard woman after woman, in mid-life, in my clinic and in my social life, talk about the societal narrative that they are now 'less skilled, less worthy' after taking time to diversify their careers to find balance, executively run households, families and everything that brings. Narratives that resulted in coming back to the careers they loved - if the doors were opened to them at all - to be granted more junior positions, less pay and certainly, less respect.

On Saturday, I got on with it. For the first time in 12 years, I hosted my first live show back with the ABC - a small but significant step.

I am not coming back as a broadcaster who is less than but as a more brilliant broadcaster than ever before. Why? Because life has a funny way of upskilling you - in ways you never saw coming.

I finished this shift on Saturday morning and I cried. I cried for how much I had had to adapt to circumstances that were created by others, by systems that were not made for me and were certainly not made for our children. And I know I am far from alone. I cried that we are still in this thinking that an 80 year old man is power but a 50 year old woman is past her used by date but I was one of the lucky ones, returning.

I have worn many beautiful skins and I cried returning to my most comfortable.

Let's be very clear - the value of women only rises. We navigate, we negotiate, we nuance, we sophisticate, we wrangle, we adapt, we placate, we initiate, we facilitate, we motivate. All before the school bell rings.

If you're overlooking women in their fifties for executive or highly skilled positions, you're naivety is costing your company.

Very happy to be making my way back behind the mic. On the radio, podcasts and onstage.

Thanks to all the amazing women, making it happen.

Featured in: Saxton Keynote Speaker - Innovation / Lifestyle & Wellbeing

#changethenarrative