Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Sarah Prime on championing future champions

Episode Date: August 15, 2020

If you’re looking to make a difference in the world by finding a mentor or becoming a mentor and enjoying all of the individual and community benefits that flow from investing in this space, then you are going to love today’s chat with Sarah Prime. Sarah is an award winning social entrepreneur, speaker and change agent.  Sarah left the high flying corporate world as a CEO and overcame her own challenges before she founded her own social enterprise, where she returned to her roots in Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, to find many communities had reached a tipping point of no return.  She established the flagship Champions Academy program in 2015 to champion change in rural communities at the grassroots level.  The program has scaled from sporting clubs into schools, government and a range of business and community groups. As a former National Winner of the Agri-futures Rural Woman’s Award, Sarah’s considered an authority on rural contraction, decline and exodus, and is widely regarded for her experience in community resilience, revitalisation and next gen foresight.  As a Westpac Social Change Scholar and a thought leader in the field of change, Sarah’s a highly sought after mentor to other trailblazers, movers and shakers and ruckus makers.  In 2020 she was formally appointed a Westpac W100 Mentor in Residence. Sarah has won a number of awards for her efforts, including the Telstra Business Women’s Award for Purpose & Social Enterprise, and was an SA finalist for the Australian of the Year ‘Local Hero’. At a time when the world is in chaos and experiencing radical uncertainty and rapid change, her approach to individual and collective growth is a timely gamechanger. So In our engaging discussion today, we dig deep on her beneficial change champion framework that covers: The foundational importance of a sense of place How human-centred design can help you make breakthroughs The unique concept of Problem Hunting – what it is and how it will help you So if you’re looking for a way to break autopilot and smash through the limits of self imposed conformity, get on board with The Champions Academy by jumping on Sarah’s website at https://sarahprime.com/ca. In the meantime, you’re really going to enjoy this engaging and thought provoking chat with Sarah Prime. Sarah's book recommendation: A Fortunate Life By Albert Facey Get Invested is the podcast dedicated to time poor professionals who want to work less and live more. Join Bushy Martin, one of Australia’s top 10 property specialists, as he and his influential guests share know-how on the ways investing in property can unlock the life you always dreamed about and secure your financial future. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I would love to see a world in which we empower other people to champion a cause greater than themselves. And to me, a champion isn't a person who, you know, is winning trophies and getting accolades. To me, a champion is a person whose actions motivate and inspire others and leave a legacy. So I would love to be able to see a world full of people who are championing a change that's important to them

that is bigger than them and that they've recognised the importance of the legacy that they're leaving, whether they're doing it as a role model or mentor, whether they're doing it as an agent of social or economic change, whether they're just doing it for an altruistic purpose. I would love to see a world where people have the courage to create the change that they want to see. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills and their money and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests every minute of every day. We're investing our time, our skills, our energy and

our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you to start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested.

Hi Freedom Fighters. What world do you want to see? What change are you championing that's important to you? And what legacy are you living and leaving? For many of us, the answers to all of these questions is nothing. We use the excuse that we're too busy or we don't have the time or the resources. But deep down, we really know that it's just an excuse. Or we think our world issues are too big and one person is just not going to make any difference. So we let it go. We leave it to others. And then quite often we criticise them for not doing it right. Or maybe it's because you're stressed and worried about your more immediate and pressing needs and you don't feel you've got the headspace for anything else. Like secretly worrying

about the future because you don't know whether your work, your job, your business or community will survive our troubled times. The reality is that the answers to all of this is actually all part of the same thing. To see the change, we need to be the change, as one of my champions Mahatma Gandhi once famously said. And as the old adages say, old habits die hard but we need to make a start. Because if we're always doing what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got. That old definition of insanity where we just keep on doing the same thing over and over but expecting to get a different result. Yet surprisingly the answers to all of these questions on change and our legacy lies in the quality of our

mentorship, what today's guest calls our real champions. Those rare people who've done what we're looking to do, and challenge and inspire us to make a difference. And making a difference doesn't have to be earth-shattering, so don't be daunted by this. World changes like Gandhi, Mandela and Mother Teresa come along about once in a generation. So keep in mind this poem by Edward Oswood Grover that Helen Keller often quoted. I am the only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Making a real rewarding difference in the world starts at the grassroots level. One person helping another person with one thing, one day at a time. so where do you start to make a difference in the world what's the one thing that can make a difference to rediscover the gift of giving of generosity without a price tag this is the secret to true fulfillment to give freely and anonymously without judgment without expecting anything in return so start by just doing one little new and unexpected thing every day make a coffee for your partner or work colleague. Smile and say hello to strangers as you walk down the street. Compliment someone randomly. Buy a homeless person a coffee or a meal. Just try it and

see how good you make people feel. And the unexpected gift is how good you will feel. I can tell you there's no better feeling than giving freely to others. It is the true answer to fulfilment in life and it's free and right under our noses but we're too busy to see it and do it. So I challenge you to try it. Do a random act of kindness and pay it forward. A drop in the ocean creates ripples that can become huge waves and if you don't think that what you can do can make a difference in others lives let me share with you one of my favourite stories from Elizabeth Ballard about Teddy Stallard and his teacher, Mrs Thompson. You may have heard it, but it moves me every time I hear it. It goes like this. As the teacher, Mrs Thompson, stood

in front of her fifth grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children a small untruth. As she gazed around the room of the students, she said that she loved all of them the same. However, this wasn't quite true, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stallard. Mrs Thompson had watched Teddy the year before, and she'd noticed that he didn't play well with the other kids, that his clothes were messy and that he constantly needed a bath, and Teddy was also quite unpleasant at times. And it got to the point where Mrs Thompson would actually take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen, making bold crosses and then putting a big F for fail

at the top of his papers. As part of getting to know the history of the students, Mrs Thompson was required to review each child's past year records. And, as you'd expect, she put Teddy's off until last. However, when she reviewed his file, she was shocked and horrified. Teddy's first grade teacher had written Teddy's a bright child with a ready laugh He does his work neatly and has good manners

He's a joy to be around His second grade teacher wrote Teddy's an excellent student, well liked by his classmates But he's troubled because his mother has a terminal illness And life at home must be a struggle His third grade teacher wrote His mother's death has been hard on him He tries to do his best but his father doesn't show much interest

and his home life will soon affect him if some steps aren't taken. And Teddy's fourth grade teacher wrote, Teddy's withdrawn and doesn't show much interest in school. He doesn't have many friends and he sometimes sleeps in class. By now Mrs Thompson realised the problem and she was ashamed of herself. She felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents wrapped in beautiful ribbons and bright paper except for Teddy's. His present was clumsily wrapped in the heavy brown paper

that he got from a grocery bag. And Mrs Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presents. Some of the kids started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the stones missing and an old half-full bottle of perfume. But she stifled the children's laughter when she exclaimed how pretty the bracelet was and while putting it on, she dabbed some of the perfume on her wrist. Teddy Stollard stayed back after school that day and he went up to her quietly and he said,

Mrs Thompson, today you smell just like my mum used to. After Teddy left, she burst into tears and cried all night. on that day she quit teaching reading writing and with arithmetic instead she began to teach children from then on mrs thompson paid particular attention to teddy as she worked with him his mind seemed to just come alive the more she encouraged him the faster he responded by the end of the year teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class and despite her claim that she would love all the children the same, Teddy actually became her teacher's pet. A year later, she found a note under her door from Teddy telling her that she was still the best teacher he

had ever had in his whole life. Six years then went by before she got another note from Teddy. He wrote that he'd finished high school, third in his class, and she was still the best teacher he'd ever had in life. Four years after that, she got another letter saying that while things had been tough at times, he'd stayed at school, he'd stuck with it and he'd soon graduate from college with the highest of honours. He again assured Mrs Thompson that she was still the best and favourite teacher he'd ever had in his whole life. Then four years more passed and yet another letter came. This time he explained that after he got his bachelor's degree he decided to go a little further. The letter explained that she was still the best and favourite teacher he'd

ever had, but now his name was a little longer. The letter was signed, Theodore F. Stellard, MD. He'd become a doctor. And the story doesn't end there. You see, there was yet another letter that came that spring. Teddy said that he'd met the girl of his dreams and they were going to get married. He explained that his father had died a couple of years ago, and he was wondering if Mrs. Thompson might agree to sit at the wedding in the place that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom, and of course, Mrs Thompson did. And on Teddy's wedding day, she wore the bracelets with the several rhinestones missing that Teddy had given her all those years ago, and she also made sure that she was wearing the perfume

that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together. They hugged each other. Dr. Stallard whispered in Mrs. Thompson's ear, thank you Mrs. Thompson for believing in me. Thank you so much for making me feel important and showing me that I could make a difference. Mrs. Thompson, with tears in her eyes, whispered back. She said, Teddy, you have it all wrong. You were the one who taught me that I could make a difference. I didn't know how to teach until I met you now I don't know about you but this story moves me every time I hear it because we all have the ability to make a difference in people's lives even if we don't realize it now the best teacher I ever had was Bronte Price and I'll never forget

how he turned my life around you see when I was a youngster at Bordertown High School in country South Australia I was a bad asthmatic with a hair lip that was a year younger than everyone else in the class. So I was always the flat-faced, punk-chested runt who struggled to play sport. Because of my small size and my breathing difficulties, I could never keep up with the other lads when I tried to play footy. So I took up field hockey instead in year 8, or first year as it was known then. And the sports teacher at the time, who I'll refer to as Mr H, always picked on me and criticised me for not being as fast or as good as the other players. I always felt really self-conscious and really struggled but I persisted because I

was determined not to give up. Thankfully Mr H moved schools in year 11 and the new teacher Mr Bronte Price took over hockey coaching. Overnight my hockey improved from his positive supportive and encouraging approach. As my self-belief and confidence grew I quickly went from the worst player to the captain of the regional team at the state country carnival where I won best on ground every game and saw us through to the grand final for the first time ever. And this improved self-belief and confidence flowed into every other area of my life and was the turning point and the start of my achievements from that time on. I'll never forget how formative Bronte Price's support and guidance were in my life's journey.

He was and is a true champion. what about you who was your best teacher or your biggest influence the person that's had the most impact on your life i'm talking here about your champions those rare caring few who in the words of today's guest whose actions have motivated and inspired you it could be your mum your dad a teacher a sports coach a good friend an uncle an auntie or someone at work the person who really cared or cares about you and took time to encourage, inspire and motivate you with their actions and words of guidance and support. So now, I challenge you to call them today or drop in on them unexpectedly or handwrite them a letter and thank them for being such

a champion and making such a difference in your life. Then ask your champion, who is their champion, the person that has made a big difference in their life, and encourage them to pass it forward and do the same for their life champion. Let them know that we're all part of the Champion Cascade Challenge, where we're all giving thanks and gratitude to those who've made a difference in our life and up until today may not know it. And then jump on Sarah Prime's Champion Academy Facebook page, that's Champion's Academy Facebook page, like it, then post and tag your champion's name and post something like this. Thanks for being my champion as if you've made a big difference in my life.

Bye, and then put whatever it is that they've done. And then finish this with now it's your turn to thank your champion. Not only will they feel good and you'll probably make their day and probably their year, but I guarantee it would also make you feel really good in a way that only flows from helping others, that deep sense of satisfaction, the inner glow. And if you don't believe me, just give it a go once and see how you feel.

I mean, what have you got to lose? Now, while we're calling them champions, we're talking here about our life's mentors. Those often unsung heroes who have moved us and changed our lives, often without them even knowing it or expecting it. And if you want to start making a difference in the world by improving other people's lives and making you feel really good on a regular basis through the sense of fulfilment that only flows from giving to others, why don't you consider becoming a mentor

or a true champion, as today's guest Sarah Prime describes it. Sarah and her unique Champion Academy help you to start making a difference in your life and your community by becoming a mentor to help others or by finding a mentor to help you. Either way you win and the community wins. Sarah uniquely defines a mentor as anyone who can challenge you and ask you questions about things that you can't see.

This might be because you don't have the same life experience, or it might just be that they are objective third parties who can see things differently. And a mentor can be anyone. They don't have to be older than you, and in fact, they're often younger than you. They're people who aren't afraid to hold a mirror up to you. They're people who aren't afraid to call it as it is and just say it bluntly. A mentor is someone who can help you arrive at your own learning

without giving you the answer. They can ask you the questions, or more importantly, they can just hold the tension until you have that aha moment, that penny drop moment. Sometimes it's tough love, and yet a good mentor can do this with generosity, they can do it with patience and respect and kindness. So if you're looking to make a difference in the world by finding a mentor or becoming a mentor and enjoying all the individual and community benefits that flow from investing in this, in other words, to find or become a true champion, then you're going to love today's chat with Sarah Prime.

Sarah Prime is an award-winning social entrepreneur, a speaker and a change agent. Sarah left the high-flying corporate world as a CEO and overcame her own challenges before she founded her own social enterprise when she returned to her roots in Eyre Peninsula to find many communities had reached a tipping point of no return. She established the flagship Champions Academy program in 2015 to champion change in rural communities at the grassroots level. The program has scaled from sporting clubs into schools, government and a range of business and community groups. As a former national winner of the AgriFutures Rural Women's Award

Sarah is considered an authority on rural contraction, decline and exodus and is widely regarded by her experience in community resilience, revitalisation and next-gen foresight As a Westpac social change scholar and a thought leader in the field of change Sarah is a highly sought-after mentor to other trailblazers, movers and shakers and ruckus makers In 2020, she's formally been appointed a Westpac W100 mentor-in-residence. Sarah has won a number of awards for her efforts, including the Telstra Businesswoman's Award for Purpose and Social Enterprise, and was a SA finalist for the Australian of the Year Local Hero. At a time when the world is in chaos and experiencing radical uncertainty and rapid change,

her approach to individual and collective growth is an absolute timely game changer so in our engaging discussion today we dig deep on her beneficial change champion framework that covers the foundational importance of a sense of place how human-centered design can help you make massive breakthroughs and the unique concept of problem hunting what it is and how it's going to help you. So if you're looking for a way to break autopilot and smash through the limits of self-imposed conformity to discover the very real and tangible benefits

of starting to live with intent to make a difference to your life and others, then get on board with the Champions Academy by jumping on Sarah's website at www.sarahprime.com forward slash CA And that's Sarah with a H-S-A-R-A-H-P-R-I-M-E. In the meantime, you're really going to enjoy this engaging and thought-provoking chat with Sarah Prime. Welcome back, Freedom Fighters.

Now, as most of you know, I'm a proud boy from the bush who's been to the big smoke and back. And it's rare that I get to talk with other kids from the country who share my passion for living with intent. to live by design, not by default, so that we're making it happen, not let it happen. So I'm really excited to be talking to a fellow champion of change who's a bit of a champion herself. So welcome and let's get invested, Sarah. Thanks for having me this morning, Bushy. Yeah, really looking forward to our chat. I think there's very different pathways, but very, very similar beliefs in the opportunity that our great country has. Now, I guess just to kick it off, rather than Lisa can guess it,

for those that don't know you, can you give us a rundown on who you are and what you do? I can indeed. I'm a person who grew up in South Australia's Eyre Peninsula on a family farm. I went away to a university degree pursuing behavioural sciences. I was going to grow up to be a criminologist. But I took a turn and ended up in a corporate career which went from the Kimberleys across to Queensland and then I ended up in this business advisory sort of capacity and worked myself into the ground a little bit there and decided to take a bit of a break from life, head down to South Australia, return to my roots and found a whole new purpose in life here.

And I'm now a social entrepreneur who's working with individuals and communities, specifically in rural areas, empowering people to help their communities to be more adaptable to change. So I have a social entrepreneurship business, working with different communities and individuals, basically creating other change agents. Okay, change agents. I love that word. And we're going to come back to some of that. So why do you do what you do then, Sarah? Well, you know, it's an interesting way that it came about. It's not the everyday sort of decisions and actions that led me

to this place in time. In fact, when I left Queensland, it wasn't really a planned decision. As I said, I'd ended up in a corporate career and it was quite a high-powered job and I worked as if my life depended on it basically. and I worked myself to a point where I could no longer sustain this this lifestyle this behavior and my doctor recommended that I take a leave of absence which as I didn't recover turned into a resignation and in order to basically survive what I'd put my body through working the way that I had I made the decision to go back to where I came from return to my roots in South Australia

and have some R&R time and my plan was that I was going to you know continue on this very Thelma and Louise style journey around the Great Ocean Road and up to Northern New South Wales but I when I got to South Australia I had a car accident I got stuck there and I wasn't able to continue on my journey it took about three months for me to fix my car now in this time I went back to the place that I had grown up in a little town called Dark Peak and I don't know if any of your listeners have ever been there but they might have fond memories of it being rather a a thriving little very small but very um very vibrant community only when I went back there and was expecting to still have some sense of of connection to that community that matched my

memory what I saw um really it punched me right in the feels I'll be honest there was you know the proverbial tumbleweed blowing down the main street there were um you know blinds pulled down over cracked windows there was graffiti there was um you know the bare patch of ground where my school once stood where I'd done my entire childhood education and as I drove around town the general store uh where we used to do our shopping was gone and the post office it was just an old derelict building and the community sporting club which is what I remembered as being the place where you didn't just go for social connection you went to learn how to be an active contributor to your community and to look up to other people so when I got to there

and I saw the torn astroturf of the net netball courts were flapping in the wind and the the um the oval was just there and sort of prickles you know there was no team left to represent this town I stood there just going, how can all of this have happened in the space of one generation, you know? How is there going to be anyone here to pass on the legacy of this town to the next generation and to explain to them what an important place this was and for all intents and purposes still is?

But as I drove back to where I was now living in Woominda, I not only went you know through Dark Peak the town where I'd grown up but then Rudale and Kyalpa and Verran and Wominda these four other places that in my lifetime were still towns or communities that still had general stores or you know schools they still had sporting clubs playing there but on this day as I drove through them I was seeing more bare patches of ground where benefits stood instead of schools rsl halls that had um been you know crumbled or converted um you know a place where my sister did a dead ball no longer even standing um i saw crumbling grain silos and faded road signs that people just sort of speed passed on their way to somewhere

else and it got pretty pretty depressing as i arrived at warminda and saw this same pattern of contraction and decline in each place and warminda school which still had this sign in front of it that reads it takes a community to educate a child right next to the sign that says this school is now closed and has you know those brown sides with the um establishment date and closing date on it and right next to that school is one of the um you know the old brick columns and wrought iron entrances to the sports ground that proudly still stands there warm into oval and there's just nothing beyond that all of the life that was once there is now gone and all of the the memories and all of the community spirit that those things used to represent are no longer

there and it just was a wake-up call for me that I cared about this I cared about this town's story these people's story I cared about the fact that there didn't seem to be a community around anymore to pass that on to someone else and so I I thought to myself it took a while percolating on how awkward and uncomfortable and ambiguous all of this change was to me I didn't understand what to do about it to begin with and then it occurred to me when my partner at the time and I were driving along one day on the way to Adelaide and I was talking about what I'd seen and we were talking about the sporting clubs that are left and in Air Peninsula and Eastern Air Association where these regions are that I'm talking about it's now a four club association

but it was formerly closer to 40 you know there's a there's a heritage lineage of all of these clubs and I said to him like this process of contraction and decline you know there's there's all of these different um clubs being absorbed or just fading into dusty oblivion and we can't allow that to keep happening and I had this penny drop moment where I said you know if another club amalgamates in this league or is absorbed in this league it's not just the closure of the club that we need to worry about it's the impact on the people and what that club represents because the the sporting clubs are really one of the only reliable lead indicators of health that we have about communities a leading indicator so the way a sporting club is performing will tell us a lot about the resilience

of that town and about the morale in that town and about the economics and the social impact in that town. And when a sporting club closes its doors, it's like the beating pulse of a community stopping and I just can't stand by and let that happen. I can't allow it to happen. And so I spent that entire car trip, it's about a seven-hour drive for us, um thinking about how i could use my background in um working with the next generation aspiring you know leaders and business owners uh and my understanding of economic development and social

impact and how i could bundle it all together in some kind of a framework that would help people learn through avenues like this sporting club how to lead positive change in their community how to advocate for their community um it's basically saying you know you're already turning up to your sporting club engaged ready to participate you know be an active community member at this level how about while you're here i just give you this extra information and teach you some stuff and that is very much how champions academy came about that's um my journey into becoming a social entrepreneur awesome you've given us a uh a really good outline there i want to circle back a little bit if we can and sort of unpack some of the stuff that's that's threaded

through that journey and in doing so sort of help the listeners to understand the you know the sort of thriving pulse of the areas that uh you're enjoying when you're growing up compared to the ghost towns that that you would then return to and and some of the stuff in between those two in terms of the skills that you've picked up that have now become you know you've sort of leveraged well into what you're helping those communities now do to rebuild themselves so where I'd love to start actually and I love the I've never been to Dark Peak but it's got that sort of almost Twin Peaks feel about it I don't know if you remember the old old program of Twins Peak so that's got this really quirky sort of – I mean, just the name itself

has all sorts of interesting connotations. But I know from a little bit of stalking from way back when, very early on even, you have some memories there of having to leave the farm. Can we start there and then just put a little bit more flesh on the bone? So tell us what happened there and how you were feeling and what that meant to you at the time. yeah i um i think if you had asked me when i was a kid whether or not i ever wanted to grow up and be a change agent i would have said to you mate why would i want to change anything have a look

around have a look at what's here because to me growing up on our family farm my mum and dad my brother and sister my um my mum's parents just sort of 50 meters away that we share farmed with i had everything i had an entire universe on that farm um it was my safe place as a child obviously my feeling of contentment and safety came from there but it was so much more than that it was the ability to roam and to learn um by doing it was the ability to go and explore and problem solved because you just you just didn't have access to the same things that you would if you were living in a town you really did have to make your own fun you had to have a bit of a vivid imagination and those are all things that I developed as a result of growing up on a family

farm um and I think have a lot to do with what what have made me a resilient person later in life um to me this is what it meant to be you know alive to feel alive to be vibrant to to grow up in the country um that was a time when i probably didn't realize until we had to leave our family farm that there was this massive um drought going on um economic collapse in the grain and sheep markets interest rates at historic highs you know all of things happening all of these things happening made it just simply not viable for two families to live off of this farm anymore and so my family moved into the town of dart peak at that time and um you know my dad got a job uh i believe he started out just sweeping the grids at the silos and then my mum was on the

Weybridge and eventually you know he became a site manager and then an area manager and then a regional manager and ended up you know a lot further down the track but to me that seven-year-old girl leaving her family farm and moving into town is probably one of the most traumatic memories that I have it was it was a complete feeling of being um tilted on my axis and I think I it took a lot for me to learn how to trust um other ideas and other people after that time I really um felt like I had to carve out my own groove and perhaps that has a lot to do with why I'm um a little bit of a non-conformist and a little bit of a you know creative thinker because I really I didn't feel like I just gelled straight away but what did happen and what is so important

about dark peak and anyone who's ever lived there will probably tell you the same thing is it has this incredible sense of place this incredible feeling of belonging that um you're connected to something and a group um a bunch of people who have got your back no matter what happens to you and that was certainly proved to us because it wasn't an easy time. It's a sense of place that for us made us feel as though no matter what we were going through, we weren't going through it alone and that everything was going to be okay. So I went from having this real sense of trauma to this real sense

of belonging and being able to overcome adversity and that's that's really something that set me up um to become a change agent i'd say it just understanding how you can be empowered by your connection to your community and how that helps you to develop as an adult i mean there's some incredible research that's been done about sense of place and how um you know even today in metropolitan areas you know there's all this research around how important it is for kids to be able to have open space to play to to learn by doing and to learn by exploring and roaming and not be bound in by so much regulation and you know routine and protocol but to to test the boundaries in new ways and perhaps learn

by trial and error um so yeah that sense of place for dark peak was something that has helped me to understand later on in life the importance of community to an individual's sense of empowerment and ability to to do something with their lives and to make a difference in a way that's important to them it doesn't have to be changing the world it could just be you know that growth mindset that comes around if i do this and it doesn't work out then I know that I can do it another way and it might turn out differently it's not just well that didn't work so I'm giving up you know a strong sense of place goes a lot towards a person's outlook on life later on as an adult yeah I mean you're touching on a really important subject

there I think in the context of it's something that that sense of place and that sense of community that flows from that uh certainly having been a country boy and then moved into the city certainly first-hand experience the you know the quite dramatic difference between the two and for those that have been brought up in the city and listeners that are in that situation you know that there's a very different you know that community tends to relate to who you went to school with and the family rather than the broader broader community that you sort of get ensconced in in in the in the regional towns uh that sense of community both in the regional areas and and and the suburbs has to some some point been diminished uh over time but why do you think

that is sarah yeah i mean there's probably a lot of contributing factors to it and different cultures will have different factors um i think that certainly we've become quite a regulated society there are so many things that have been imposed on um the way we do life uh which are quote unquote for our own safety you know some of these things are um you know we we worry about our kids playing in parks on their own now because of you know the potential risks of of you know um different criminals doing different terrible things we don't want to expose our kids to danger and, you know, those are the sorts of things that change our sense of community.

But also the connectedness at a personal and social level is so different now. You know, where Australia, you know, as an example, used to be a place where it was a whole bunch of smaller communities, little hamlets, little villages that were not very far apart, we're now further and further and further apart geographically with greater populations of people in these, you know, a big regional centre or in our urban regions.

And we don't have that same connectedness. We don't have that same one common ground that brings us all back together. We all have our own little bubbles of self-interest. And I really feel like the traction has been lost in trying to get people to re-engage as a community. You know, there might be some great strategies around how towns and cities are doing that, but they're not really going to ever return it back to what it previously was

when people lived physically as smaller communities. So I believe that that's probably a large part of it is just, you know, that mass exodus of people out of rural areas and into big cities or into large regional centres and just the sheer population and the inability to gather people together as one community. Yeah, that's certainly something that's been challenging for a while. I mean, I think there's some opportunity out of the times we're living in that I'll explore with you in a minute around that. But I guess just to sort of complete the

picture, because you've really experienced and sampled firsthand life in the country and then life in the fast lane as far as the corporate career and whatnot's concerned that you sort of touched on. And you sort of talked about how you initially wanted to be a criminologist, which is certainly, again, a fair distance between there and where you're at. What attracted you into that early on? And then how did that sort of bridge into the more corporate career that you then followed after that? I'd love to understand your thinking around that. Oh, gosh, I wish I hadn't asked for why I was interested in it. It was, I remember a clear thought process that I wanted

to understand what is that switch in someone's head that flicks where they suddenly decide that they're going to commit a crime, like some terrible, horrible crime, and, you know, is that a switch that's existing in everyone or is it something that is you know this is the way that person's born and that really intrigued me and I remember even in my high school years doing a lot of reading around people like you know Charles Manson and these these people who had committed these terrible crimes and just wondering what would make someone do that sort of thing and how are they influencing other people to do that it

just defies belief like I can't wrap my head around it and I just wanted to have a better that understanding of what makes people do what they do and so I did a couple of years of behavioral science at Flinders and before I realized Sarah if you're going to do this as a career you're probably going to need to join the federal police and if you're going to do that you're probably going to need to join the police force and then I realized I didn't want to join the police for so i became a bartender for a little while yeah as all uni students do i i worked at the elephant castle in adelaide for a few years and uh then i met and fell madly in love with a ringer from the top end and i moved up to the kimberley's with him and we lived um for a couple

of years we worked with his dad where he had a a training and employment company and i basically ran the office and did the books and all that sort of stuff and by the time I'd finished there I thought well I better get a piece of paper to say I can do what I've been doing so I decided that I'd do an accounting degree which you know until this point Bushy has been a closely guarded secret you know I was going to say with some of the really big imagination and a very curious person is what I that you know that I'm threading through here you've always been someone who's question why why this why that what does that mean what was the attraction into accounting because that sort of it doesn't feel like a fingers in the glove fit explain that one to us what led

you into accounting at that time well spoiler alert an accounting degree is a major buzz kill for a person like me you don't know i'm mad um i felt like i needed validation for the work that I'd been doing probably a bit of imposter syndrome as well you know creeps in and you think well unless I'm qualified to be a bookkeeper and office manager how will people ever employ me elsewhere because what my partner and I had decided to do he was originally a Queensland boy so we were going to make a beeline across the top end and go and set ourselves up in Queensland and it happened that when we got to Cairns we liked it so much we bought a house there and stayed for 10 or 12 years but when I was in Cairns, I felt like I needed to be able

to have something behind me to, you know, go and knock on the doors and say, can I have a job, please? I'm studying for my accounting degree, you know, and that was largely what got me employed. I actually began as a corporate governance auditor first. I did that for about three years. That sounds exciting. Oh, I can tick and flick, mate, don't you worry.

It was, yeah, green cans at the ready. and with the same firm, I had a bit of a knack for systems and operations and that was my curiosity and my problem-solving coming out. I didn't really fit the mould of a compliance accountant. The idea of working on someone's tax return was abhorrent to me. I was physically repelled by the idea. I can well imagine. And how did that lead into the CE role?

I'm interested in the transition into that. How did that come about? Well, it was a matter of having been seconded to that business advisory role. And then all of a sudden, I'd been at the firm for seven years. And I thought, well, I can either shoot for partnership or I can start again. I'm 27 years old. I can go and begin at the beginning of another career. And I decided to apply for a role in economic development.

with the peak economic development agency up there, and I landed the job. So I thought, well, it's just like doing business advisory. But little did I know that my boss would get cancer. And within, yeah, very sad, within a short timeframe, I would be carrying out the role of acting CEO while he was away, having his cancer treatment. Now, fortunately, he did recover.

where he did come back to his work, and that was a big sigh of relief to me because I felt as though I was in a position that I wasn't ready for. I wasn't yet 30 years old. I didn't have the life experience that I felt would have been necessary to carry that role out for the Peak Economic Development Agency. But the feedback sort of said otherwise, and I was selected for a role as the set-up CEO for Regional Development Australia for Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait region.

Massive job. Massive job. Yeah, it was. I think it was. Because you're bridging areas, you're bridging cultures, and anything start-up means an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears. I would imagine that would have been a – well, you probably didn't know when you jumped into it,

but the further you got into it, the bigger the challenge would have become, I'm imagining. Oh, you've nailed it there, that's for sure. I mean, we're looking at the social, environmental and economic priorities for a region of some 260,000 people. Now, if I thought I had imposter syndrome before, then, you know, enter the imposter demon now in my brain. You know, I worked, as I said before,

I worked as if my life depended on it. I worked as if the world might stop turning if I dared to sleep. I had one staff member who was working with me and she was absolutely brilliant and I had a board of 12 people who had been ministerially appointed who I answered to. Now, our job was to set the strategic priorities for the region and I did the best that I could to bring people in to create more of a collaborative message in what we felt the priorities should be but it consumed an enormous

amount of energy and um i probably lived on adrenaline um at that time and yeah it really did drive me into the ground that it was my undoing yeah did you i mean it sounds to me like and i i'm saying this because i had a similar car crash in my early 30s when i just virtually burnt out emotionally and physically i just ground to a halt uh and my thinking at the time was the harder if i just work harder then that'll be the answer and uh clearly it's not talk us through you know the the pressure that you had then and and then what what was the straw that broke the camel's back because uh it's it's a situation that a lot of listeners will be going through that you know that in the heart of their career they're working really hard they're pushing

to the next trying to get to the next level or taking on enormous tasks with less resources but more expectation uh talk us talk us through that and and you know what what popped the bubble yeah i mean you're living with this inherent fear of being discovered for not knowing all the answers it's like being um on a i don't know a netball court or a basketball court and having every team member on both teams with a ball and you never know which one of them's about to throw and you're terrified that you're going to drop the ball you know this feeling of being on permanent high alert and what happens in your body is you um you use up all of your serotonin and then you use up all of your adrenaline and once all of that's gone you know you're living below the line

and that's when all of the terrible things um that are um i guess environmental factor driven diseases can kick in like your cancers and things like that and i i probably was masking for a long time and by that i mean i would get up in the morning and i'd put on my makeup as if i was putting on wall paint and i would get dressed in my clothes as i was getting dressed in a suit of armor and i would put on my power stilettos and i would go to work looking confident and on the inside i was saying oh god do i have to go run away run away you know my my every fiber of my being just um knew that i wasn't coping and if what happens is if you mask for long enough your body goes listen i'm going to um pull the rug from under you because clearly you're not

listening to me i'm going to make it obvious to everyone outside of your body how you feel So what happened was I started losing my hair in handfuls. I lost a lot of weight. My clothes were just falling off me because I was literally forgetting to eat for days at a time because, I mean, how inconvenient having to stop work to eat, let's face it. It's not as if your body needs it or anything. Oh, this was a good one.

I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling as though someone was strangling me you know having panic attacks I was just like out of breath like there was someone kneeling on my chest and all of this I could cope with this went on for months and months and months but then the the thing that burst the bubble and I'm getting real here the thing that burst the bubble was I slept naked but I would wake up in the morning fully clothed and not have any idea how that had happened wow does this continue to happen yeah this continued to happen i thought it was a bit it was quite disconcerting and then one night i woke up while i was dressing myself i was sleepwalking dressing myself and i realized that i was having a dream that someone

was knocking at the front door and no matter how tired i felt sarah you're so tired you've got to get up and you've got to go and see what they want it might be something important and that was a real metaphor for my life. I realized at that moment that I'm driven by this fear of letting other people down. And that's not a healthy way to live life. It's not about letting other people down at all. I wasn't looking after myself. I wasn't worrying about my own needs. I wasn't worrying about my partner's needs. I was just living in fear. And fear consumes you and drives due to pretty self-destructive behaviours that, you know, I wasn't even aware until that point how self-destructive they were.

So, yeah, I took myself off to the doctor at that point and it still took a little while from that point to actually come to the decision to leave. She sort of said to me, look, I'm going to do a suite of tests on you, she said, but I think what we'll find is that we'll probably find nothing specifically wrong but that everything's a bit elevated because your body's trying to give you clues that it's unhappy, she said,

but when we get the results, it's going to be the end of the week so I want you to just spend this entire week, switch your phone off, shut your computer down and put it in a cupboard. I want you to do nothing but rest, read a book, watch movies, whatever you want. When you come back at the end of this week, I'm going to give you a letter to give to your board to say that you're not capable of working and we're going to work through whatever is in those results.

And she said, at the end of that month that I've given you for that, you know, that letter, we're going to come back at the end of that month and I'm going to give you another letter. She said, and we're going to do this as long as we have to until you have arrived at a point that you're healthy and capable of humaning, basically. So I was at that point. That would have been pretty confronting to you.

I can imagine that the high achiever in you and the need to please that was driving you at that point, supported by that sort of insecurity about, well, gee, they might actually find out that I don't know what I'm supposed to know. That would have been a very confronting conversation because the prospect of saying, right, we're switching off the laptops, off the phones, off, you're doing nothing. How did you respond?

What happened from there? Well, I probably would have disobeyed the doctor's orders and sent emails and continued even just delegating things to people except that she showed me the results of a test which is called, I think, a K10 test and basically it's your mental wellbeing and a bit like, you know, the Black Dog Institute type thing and the K10 test had put me in the top 2% for suicide risk and had she not shown me that test result I possibly wouldn't be here today um yeah I

during that time that I had off I had to see a psychologist every second day I was sort of on watch uh I had to visit a psychiatrist to receive medications that you know were suited to the situation that i was in and i was very closely monitored so i take that um very very seriously now um and i monitor proactively my my mental health and well-being and my you know my body's stress levels and um yeah because where i had to make that phone call to that board you're spot on i really was just i was so afraid of what they were going to think that oh you know we invested in this young CEO and, yeah, she couldn't handle it after all. You were like, you know, Bill or Ben or whatever your name is.

It really, it was massive and I remember the conversation that I had. I don't remember much else about that time but I remember the conversation that I had at that time with the person that I rang and I just said to her, I just can't see anymore. I can't see past this giant fog that's all around me. I know that I can't do what you need me to do. Please tell me where from here I don't know what to do.

I don't even know the first plan to make or step to take. And thank God the person on the other end of that phone knew how to handle it and was very proactive. Wow. So it would have been a very challenging time, but clearly a crossroads. And you talked about the Thelma and Louise tour around the country. And I guess, you know, Providence again, car breaking down in pretty much where you lived, gave you the safety and security again to heal and to start looking forward and probably to shake off the shackles of thinking about what you should be doing with your life versus what you wanted to do with your life. I'm hearing that you were dancing to someone else's tune in terms of following the career exercise rather than listening to your heart in terms of what you're actually naturally good at, which is being inquisitive, solving problems, helping others to do the same.

Talk us through that transition then that you touched on when you got back there and you realised that, you know, this once thriving community is now dying on the vine. Yep. Just talk us through the thought process that led you into, right, I'm going to do something about this. Yeah, well, I think you're right. You know, if I just touch on something you said there, you don't recognise at the time from the outside looking in what you look like and what your decisions are or your problems are that need to be addressed.

And so it took for something like that to happen to create the discomfort I needed to feel in order to want to change. and I had been with that same partner for 13 years at that point in time. We owned two houses together, a company together. He worked out of town a lot of the time and I had to make the decision to leave everything and everyone behind there, including him, in order to prioritise my survival. and so survival became paramount you know in every essence of the word not just me but

it was a new lens that I saw everything through um if things don't survive by themselves they need to be sustained they need to have you know an investment made in them they need to be nurtured and so as I walked away from everything um up in Cairns and I got to um South Australia Yeah, you know, the last thing I could think of that I wanted to do was to set up something else, you know, was to enter into a new relationship, was to have some kind of massive project and I tried really hard just to take long walks on the beach and go squinting up the Port Neil jetty and, you know,

sit in at happy hour at the pub with the retirees that sort of sit around you in a semicircle like, you know, at the bar like barnacles on a boat. They're just there. They're part of my furniture. I tried really hard to live that lifestyle and I was doing that by choice. And yet somehow I met and fell in love with a farmer, something I swore I'd never do when I was growing up.

All of my friends in high school, oh, I'm just going to marry a farmer so I can move back and be a nurse or a school teacher and raise my children here. You know, I was not looking for any kind of new commitment and yet somehow I ended up with this person in this community and the only way that I can make sense of it is to say it was meant to be. There were all these roadsides along the way that I just ignored and it took this giant slap in the face that went this way.

It's stupid, you know, and that's how I ended up here. um and but I think the only reason that I did arrive at this purpose in life this why of being a change maker has to do with that survival lens that I was looking at things through and recognizing that change sometimes only happens because we're given such a feeling of discomfort about where we currently are that we need to move away from it and i truly believe that that's probably the catalyst for how i came to be looking at rural communities and sporting clubs and the people within them and recognizing these as one of the last remaining incubators that we have for um community leadership and advocacy and thinking

right well i've already got all these these sort of skills in my kit bag how about i just sort of invest them into this pathway of empowering other people because they're you know a lot of them are people that don't yet identify as leaders and if I can see something in them and show them you know hold a mirror up to them and say let me give you the tools to to unleash this unlock your potential um in the only ways that I know and you know bring in other people to teach you other ways that I don't yet know um then to me that was a sense of fulfillment um it was something that I looked forward to getting out of bed every day instead of lying under my dirna with my, you know, pulled up over my head and just resenting the idea

that I had to shower and get dressed and eat food, you know. For the first time in a long time, I was springing out of bed and going, I can't wait to do some more work designing this framework. I can't wait to try this idea out. I can't wait to reach out to this, you know, person to ask them if they'd like to be a guest mentor to this group of people. um i just i think i have a huge debt of gratitude to the first club that i approached with my idea which was ports football and netball club in um in the eastern air league over here i remember

at the agm pitching this idea for this champions academy framework to them and they just said you know sarah we've got no bloody idea what you're talking about but if you can find a way to make it happen we'll be behind you 100 and they absolutely were you know and today we've got yeah we've gone from that pilot program back in 2015 to about 63 graduates i think we're at now from the sporting clubs champions academy program we've transitioned into schools and i've just finished designing champions academy for communities so an entire community can have the Champions Academy Framework talk to it. Love it.

Love it. I want to dive straight in there into just giving us a reader's digest version of what the Champions Academy Framework looks like because I think in terms of a framework to engender positive change in any environment, it probably has universal applicability and there will be a lot of listeners there that are going, yeah, okay, well, change is something that I've always found very confronting and generally run away from and hope goes away. Can you talk us through the key elements of the framework and how that might

be useful to people in terms of their own lives and their own communities? Yeah, I absolutely can. It's really about helping people to take off their core beliefs glasses. and that sounds really alien to a lot of people, the concept of core beliefs. So imagine you've got on a pair of glasses that are a lens that you see everything through and those lenses are made up of every single thing that you've ever learned in your life, in your formative years, in your development years.

They are the unwritten rules in your family growing up, things like boys don't cry or skinny is beautiful or you know that's woman's work or you know those sorts of things the formative things that we learned in our schooling years from our sporting club coaches from anyone else who's been a coach or mentor or leader of any kind to us what were the things that we learned by watching them what did we learn worked and didn't work what did we learn to believe in and not believe in what did we learn to try and strive for or not try and strive for that's what I'm referring to when I say core belief so those things that you learned everyone's a completely different picture the

world everyone wearing different colored glasses so we're all getting around with these completely unique core belief glasses on and what happens is um you know our brain our human brain this amazing machine is this giant receptor for information right it gets i think it's something like 11 million bits of information per second from all of our different senses from what we see hear touch smell taste 11 million bits of information but it can only handle 50 and the way that decides which 50 it lets in is what can go through those lenses anything that doesn't agree with what you know our core beliefs say it bounces off and we don't take it in so champions academy is about learning how to take off those core belief glasses.

First and most important thing, we're setting aside self-serving agendas because the reality is self-serving agendas won't really serve us, you know. They're only going to lead us in a position or direction that aligns with what we already believe and that's not necessarily where the answers are. It's about understanding that there are new and different ways of doing things when you take

those core belief glasses off. we might be able to solve problems differently we might be able to innovate differently we might be able to entrepreneurialize our ideas differently we might be able to empower the next generation earlier and better than we thought we could we might be able to get more people involved we might be able to create a greater sense of place and social cohesion and when you do that when you empower someone else with those skills and that knowledge and you give them a mentor who is going to support the transition of knowledge to the next generation and get behind them emotionally and sort of, you know,

give them the encouragement and motivation they need to keep learning a new thing every day, that's essentially what the Champions Academy framework exists to do, to empower other people to leave a positive imprint on their community, to have a positive effect on the people and community around it so it can be more adaptive to change, so it's got a better chance of not being that dying fruit on the vine. And so, yeah, that's probably not the Reader's Digest version,

but that's what we do. Yeah, I love that. And you sort of, in some of the readings, you've talked about human-centred design. Can you sort of flesh out what human-centred design means in that context? Yeah, it's something that I was exposed to through the social change fellowship that I did with Westpac.

I went away on a study tour to Harvard and I did a few programs over there. One was innovative solutions to complex challenges, a creative thinking, and another was a design thinking. And together what I learned was all about human-centred design, which basically means if you look at something from the perspective of the impact on the person, so say, for example, you're problem solving, if you can look at it from the perspective

that what is that person thinking or feeling? what is the pain point for them how can we reduce the amount of time it takes them or the amount of effort it takes them or the amount of money that it costs them and work backwards from there to what the idea is so it's a little bit like having an end vision but it's all human centric it's all about the person so if I'm a business owner I'm not just coming up with an idea because I think it's a great idea and there is an organic demand for it it's coming up with an idea based on okay that person over there is suffering from this i wonder how many other people are experiencing this discomfort or this suffering what can i do about that and there's this entire process of

design that supports that you know the um the clarifying the information then ideating for it and synthesizing the ideas prototyping early and often going through um trial and error as quickly as you can so getting a first viable product out there and then changing it um it's all about how you connect with people all through that journey um you know it might be shadowing people while they're shopping to work out the pain points of uh a you know family budgeting or it might be um you know oh gosh any any number of different ways of being with people to understand what they're experiencing as a part of the design process so really thinking about how we can embed that into everything that we do increases the chance that our products and services and

ideas are going to be applicable to more people and are going to be solving an unstated need or meeting a pain point in a way that eventually is going to end up making our idea in demand if you like so that's that's the that's the thing we can keep the next generation to help them come up with ideas that are needed i love that it's not looking for the obvious ideas longing for the for the problems that we think we have it's looking for the problems that are actually there we can't see them is what i'm hearing you say there which is exactly right which is uh taking it to a much deeper and and more satisfying level for everyone ultimately tell me how that wraps into you know i'm guessing there's a connection here but i i love you know

you've been quoted as talking about problem hunting which i think is a is an awesome and refreshing way of of reframing this can you sort of talk to us a bit about what problem hunting is and and how that might be a useful technique uh not only for the community you're working with but for the the listeners in terms of uh it's applicable applicability that what they're doing every day? Yeah, I absolutely believe that we should all be problem hunters. I think we should all be, particularly those of us in business or about to start a business, we need to be identifying those things that are causing the pain points, that are causing the wastage or the leakage of resources or time or money. We need to be able to identify these things and innovate

for them as I said if you can do that then initially in your design process you've got a very clear vision about where you need to get to and the end result that you're hoping to create but you're also going to create something that's already needed it's an unstated need so it's all about looking for those problems as opportunities and not just thinking oh I need to solve this reactively because it's a problem but looking for problems to solve in a way that that synthesizes really well and meshes really well with your, you know, what you care about and what you're good at. So that's really how it ties in and a big part of the work that we do

with Champions Academy is once we've unlocked the sort of human behaviour element, we go on to talk about what makes money go around in a community and then we go around to, well, what are the different ways that I can have an impact on my community? One of those ways is becoming an entrepreneur or an innovator and creating an idea that will then go on to stimulate economic growth or economic activity within a community or social impact within a community. So that's how problem hunting really ties into our framework.

Yeah, I love it, love it. Now, we've sort of touched on, you know, the importance of mentors a bit during the discussion. And again, mentors is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. I'd love you to sort of put a bit more flesh on the bones in terms of, you know, what does a mentor mean for you? Perhaps give us a couple of examples of mentors that have been instrumental in your journey so far and then lead that into, you know, if the listeners are looking to either be a mentor or looking for a mentor, how they should be approaching that. yeah look a mentor is anyone who can challenge you and ask you questions about things that you can't see and it might be because you don't have the same life experience or it might just be that

they're an objective third party to what you're going through so a mentor can be anyone they don't have to be older than you they can often be younger than you they can be people who aren't afraid to hold a mirror up to you that are people who aren't afraid to call it as it is and just say bluntly a mentor is someone who can help you arrive at your own learning without giving you the answer they can ask you the questions or more importantly they can just hold the tension until you have that aha moment that penny drop moment they can do that with generosity they can do that with patience and respect and kindness sometimes it's tough love but essentially they're they're the factors that i would attribute to a mentor and i guess some

examples of people who have done that for me um so so generously are people like shelly wilde who is there's no one on the planet that knows more about human behavior than this woman she's just absolutely brilliant and i'll be forever grateful to her for what she has invested in me um through you know being a mentor and someone i can aspire to another person who i've had a great opportunity to to use as a bit of a touchstone if you like at different points in my life is andrew griffiths you know he was my chair when i was at rda but um as a person who um he can call bullshit if it's bullshit you know he's he's a great radar for me i said he might have been thinking about doing this what do you think he'll really he'll really tell me what

thinks and if he doesn't know he's not afraid of saying look i don't know but i do know someone who does would you like me to put you in touch um and sometimes you know we don't know the answers and apparently that's a human thing we don't have to all know the answers but a great mentor will channel you to another pathway um so you know that's a couple of ways that i use mentors but you know i regularly reach out to um networks you know all of the social change fellows that i went through um my fellowship with and the wider westpac 100 network is a great source of mentors for me the rural women's award mentors the alt mba um ruckus makers as they are um they're just the most wonderful group of people to put a question out and be

vulnerable in front of and and to be able to have um insight that's not your own i guess just a beautiful definition and great examples you've just given there i think that that's the best definition of a mentor i've ever heard uh sarah because it encompasses all of the stuff that normally doesn't get talked about being a mentor uh which i which i think is absolute gold uh tell me if if i was going to be looking for a mentor uh in the context of what we're talking about there what sort of qualities uh am i seeking if i'm really going to get someone that's going to help me make some positive changes yeah look there the strange thing about mentors is that they're quite often people that we don't necessarily um expect um they can be people who

we might have known our entire lives but until a particular issue comes up we might not realize that they're the perfect person to be dealing with about this issue. So if I'm looking for a mentor, what do I look for? I look for honesty. I look for the ability to not be too emotionally attached to the issue. It really does help for people to think strategically rather than reactively and, you know, with their emotions. I look for people who aren't afraid to impose boundaries

on the relationship. It's really important that if you're looking for a mentor, you recognize that it is a huge investment of their time and energy so um it's a great proactive strategy if you want to be mentored by someone to say listen um bushy i i would love the opportunity to learn from you um is there any chance that you might have one hour a month that we could have a zoom chat um this is what i'm hoping to get out of the relationship this is what i could potentially do for you as a result um and and really be clear about that because it it's a it's a pretty big commitment to to mentor someone that being said they're also informal mentors that you might just

have a coffee with um you might just catch up and just you know when they say what's happening in your world you can say look there's actually something i'd really appreciate an opinion on Do you mind just, like, letting me know what your thoughts are on this? So, you know, you can have your informal mentors as well and they might be a one-off thing. I have lots of people who I've connected with in that way and they've been invaluable connections at that point in time. And I guess if you flip the cup, if you flip the cup

and you're mentoring other people, I think it's really important to realise that other people might be already looking at you as a mentor and you might not realise it. In fact, quite often people are looking up to us and learning from what we're saying and doing. So it's really important to be conscious of that, particularly if you're working in a community environment, that you are more than likely a role model already.

And so making sure that you're making choices that are demonstrating, you know, that you've thought through an action or that you've thought through a choice and that is the right choice to make. So being able to turn around and teach someone as soon as you learn something is a great way of, I guess, being an informal mentor and it's something that we can all do. Yeah, make a very good point there.

Teach someone as soon as you learn something because that takes a level of confidence and security, though, that a lot of people are nervous about because if I teach someone else, perhaps I'm going to make myself redundant. is often the sort of response that you get to that. So there's this, I'm going to hold this information because that's my power. How do you break through that, Sarah?

Oh, I know, and I face it all the time, particularly if you think about a small country town sporting club, you quite often have those people who are like gatekeepers of information and you think, oh, either they're very closed off and they don't want you to know what they do because knowledge is power, or you just think, oh, no, I wouldn't touch that role with a 10-foot pole, quite often that person, if you are willing to reach out and show them the respect

that what they do is a lot of hard yards that they have earned their stripes and they have the knowledge, if you're willing and able to reach out and say, I really look up to you, I would love to learn what you're doing, can I shadow you in that role? Or, you know, if it's not through that kind of scenario and it's just in life, if you can demonstrate to them that you have very high regard for what they do,

what you might actually find is that they actually get a huge thrill out of teaching someone else. They may never have been asked that before. They've never given the opportunity to turn around and say, oh, I'm so passionate about this and I've never met anyone else who actually wants to learn about it. Here, let me show you. And the problem after that might be asking them to stop showing you stuff.

opening the floodgates yeah that's a you're absolutely right it's uh being being acknowledged and then then respected is a is a great great gateway to to open the the flow of learning which is which is a it's actually a very simple but something that most people would overlook uh so some some great insight there um tell me In the context of that and what we've been talking about around this and sort of linking it back to the Champions Academy and game changes and the other work you're doing with NextGen that you briefly mentioned earlier on, how can people get involved and how can they help you

to further the cause in that regard, Sarah? Yeah, look, if people are interested in the work that I do and would love to get involved in Champions Academy, Probably the easiest way to reach out is on my website. Just fill out the contact us form at the bottom. The important thing to know is that we have existing programs that we have that we can roll out in a moment's notice, but we never, ever say that that's it.

It's always about tailoring the needs to what a group or a individual or a community needs. And if it's something that you're interested in doing, there might be one particular stream that's important and we can you know we can do all sorts of things or I can tailor keynotes around things that your team might need to hear and it's not just with rural communities you know I get asked to speak to corporates and all sorts of different demographics whether it's youths or retirees it's it's a really broad application um the human behavior and um you know the the idea of living with intent um by design instead

of default it's it's something they can just jump on the website and send me um send me a note and i'll come back to them as quickly as i can with some ideas yeah i love that the um we sort of wrap this back into a more overarching discussion around sustainable success for a minute because you know and again another another term that gets thrown around a lot but ultimately this is where we're all trying to take things what is how do you define sustainable success in in the context of what we're talking around community building and and all the benefits that go with that yeah i would define it probably as saying that it's something that you are excited to launch out of bed and do every day I think that I define success by that feeling and sustainable success is

that you don't lose that feeling that you know not just what you need to do but you know why you're doing it and you are excited to be doing it so that's sustainable success to me to me and it's really about the um it probably comes as a result of that magic pair that I said before of knowing what you're good at or what your assets are and what you care about and it's usually sustainable success will be found where those two things intersect yeah it's a it's a great way to bring it together in terms of something that is going to work for you individually and then then beyond that drilling down into the personal level then from own if i can sarah uh you've got a big vision of where you're wanting to revitalize rural australia and and beyond what does your

ideal world and lifestyle look like if we're going into your imagination and painting a picture of what your life looks like in 10 years time can you put some color around that for us i can um i would love to see a world in which we empower other people to champion a cause greater than themselves and to me a champion isn't a person who you know is winning trophies and getting accolades to me a champion is a person whose actions motivate and inspire others and leave a legacy i'll say that again their actions motivate and inspire others and they leave legacy so i would love to be able to see a world full of people who are championing a change that's important to them but is bigger than them and that they recognize the importance of the legacy

that they're leaving whether they're doing it as a role model or mentor whether they're doing it as an agent of social or economic change, whether they're just doing it for an altruistic purpose, I would love to see a world where people have the courage to create the change that they want to see. And that could be any age person, you know. I want to see children being empowered to play a more active role in shaping the future that they're going to grow up in as well.

And, in fact, that's what our school programs are exactly about. Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's ultimately where the future lies. If we draw a bow then between that and the times that we're currently in, and unfortunately, you know, we are deluged with this fear factory exercise that spews out of the mainstream media that, you know, if we listen to it all would be jumping off cliffs. But I'm not sure why, but I love opportunities and times like this

because it's great change that creates great opportunity because it really gets us in that innovative zone. What do you see as the potential impacts and opportunities that are flowing out of the current pandemic and how it could possibly influence what you're doing and the revitalisation of regions as a result? it's it's hard isn't it to to see past the um the things that we're hearing in the media and the way that we're seeing limitations being imposed on on society and it's really hard to

see the opportunity but i would say to people who are struggling right now to recognize the feeling of discomfort and ambiguity as being a great opportunity for change for them. Like I said about my own experience, when things became so uncomfortable and so prickly, just lifing, it gave me impetus to move away from that feeling and perhaps that's what COVID is doing. I would say irrespective of whether that's the case,

this is still a perfect opportunity to take a bit of an introspective gander, I would say it's the perfect time to figure out, get a pen and a paper and write down your non-negotiables as a person. You know, when I went through my time of great life change, my non-negotiables were things like health, number one, no matter what, health has to come first. Number two, be surrounded by people I love and care about,

not by people I feel obligated to be. number three earn enough money to put food on the table and a roof over my head anything else is cream and I did that because I was in such a successful role and earning so much you know attached to that that life had become quite materialistic and I needed to get back to roots so I'd say to people right now what are your non-negotiables sit down and ask yourself are you getting those things those human needs met and if you're not why keep doing things the way you're doing them what is it that you can change that's within your control I'd encourage you to think about your sense of place and reimagine it somewhere else to re-meet those human needs

as I've said to other people as well as yourself off the air Bushy I think that you know there's this great demographic sort of shift out into the regions that sort of happens in these sorts of times. But we can do it with intent and we can do it in a way that really does meet our non-negotiables. So you can be looking at the intangible assets, not just the physical assets when you're doing this, of reimagining your sense of place and your opportunities at your disposal.

You can be saying, okay, well, if being connected to my community is important to me, Maybe I need to live in a smaller community. If being stuck in traffic is something that is a great annoyance to me, then maybe I should live somewhere where there's less traffic. If social media and internet and this always-on society is driving me to absolute despair, you know, why not live off the grid? If, you know, there are so many ways that we can see the opportunities

and, yes, there are limitations imposed by COVID that prevent us from travelling, but form a plan. And when you have gone to the trouble to do that, resist the urge to go back when things go back to the new normal. Continue moving forward towards that plan and continue to invest your energy in that direction because you deserve to. You deserve to meet your own non-negotiables.

Absolutely. I 100% agree and I think the massive opportunity that's before us because there is already and has been a bit of a, you know, the old sea change, tree change, I can't even say it, the sea change and the tree change move in recent times that I think the massive opportunity that the COVID has put the oxy torch on is a need for safety, a need for security, a need for space. And, you know, if we look back through history, Sarah,

and we look at the pandemics of the past, people have started to move to the regions and the exciting part about the time we live in right here, right now, is that we can live far more cheaply, we can live a much bigger and better and healthier lifestyle, but there's still the opportunity, if you're in the right place, through the technology connections, to be working from home but doing work and significant work with people all over the world.

And I think COVID has actually broken the nexus between the need to have to be physically looking at someone in the eyeballs to do business to an acceptance that, hey, we've actually done business pretty well, not having to sit face-to-face. We can actually do it via webinars and all the other connection mechanisms that allow us to communicate from anywhere to anyone.

i think that's the exciting bit for me and i you know as a country boy i mean i've been living that way now for quite some time we live on acreage uh we have a fantastic lifestyle out amongst nature and with our dogs and you know we're blessed but we've still got the connectivity to be able to do some major stuff to help people in a significant way uh remotely but without necessarily ever having to meet them physically so what's your thoughts around that oh look i couldn't agree more i think that if covid's taught us anything it's that the boundaries aren't where we thought they were it's that we can even though it's forced change it's being forced upon us we can actually evolve and do things in a different way and why not take that and run with it you know

I'm certainly an advocate for people migrating into rural regions and I would say to you that there are communities crying out for people to move there and to put kids in their schools and to increase the demand for a doctor to be put back there, to increase the demand for the local community store to have more fresh fruit and veg, you know, to have more people on football and netball teams. You know, you would be seen as a rock star for moving

to some of those communities. But do it for yourself first and foremost. Obviously, I think there are so many advantages that, you know, clearly there's wide open spaces, a lower cost of living and a lower price of land and things like that. But as I referred to before, like the intangible assets of sense of place and social cohesion and belonging to a community and the feeling of well-being that that gives you can't be understated.

You know, your kids being able to grow up with a backyard which they can kick a footy in or, you know, there's just so much that I think that we need to look at the possibilities on and reimagining that sense of place for us as individuals and where we need to base ourselves in order to be meeting our own human needs. I think that this timing is just critical. Yeah, and it's significant.

I think it's a massive opportunity, a big wake-up call and a great opportunity, as you say, to do some reflection, drill down to what's really important to you in terms of your own non-negotiables and if you overlay that with intangible benefits that come from living in the regions, having grown up there myself, a perfect fit. So really exciting. yeah exactly and this is the you know we don't need to live eat and breathe and and survive on

the business we're doing in our backyard we live in a world now where and i know myself in the the last few years we've transitioned to helping people with you know invest in in their future from overseas and all across australia and we we do it from our um uh studio office at home it's just a magic time to be alive in that regard hey i'm going to shift into what i like to call the ambush round which are just five quick questions that the the audience always like to glean your words of wisdom on sarah and the first of those is what's your favorite quote and why well i'm gonna have to uh throw back to a very important matriarch in my life my grandmother Nana who lived next door when I was a kid once wrote in my autograph book if you know people

still remember those love many trust few always paddle your own canoe and I didn't know what she meant at the time but I think that it pretty much sums me up as a person I think you know we need to show generosity and kindness to as many people as we can we need to make them earn Now trust, not just believe them on face value, and always, always, always trust your gut and do what you believe is the right thing to do. Yeah, beautifully said. And good old Nana.

Hi, yeah. My Nana, I had a little granny and a big granny because my little granny lived until she was 103, and the words of wisdom that would come out of her mouth that were just pieces of gold, just like you've just related there, really simple quick memorable things that have packed with meaning and depth let's translate that into into the book world for a moment uh what's the top book that you'd recommend people read and why yeah i think one of the books that changed my life for the better um was a fortunate

life by albert facey he you know he's a bloke who lived in such time of hardship generally as a nation but he faced real adversity things that the rest of us can only imagine and has had to overcome so many different things and yet he always considered the life that he led a fortunate one and it gave me a completely different perspective to view things through about you know what was happening to me and why it was happening and just recognizing the power of positivity I guess and a sense of optimism and hope for the future. Gee, what a bloke and what a life. I strongly recommend people to read A Fortunate Life if they haven't.

Yeah, I haven't read it. It's great. I'm an absolute massive reader, so that's going straight into the Kindle tonight. So thank you for that. That's awesome. This one's a little bit left field. A lot of Aussies still believe they pay too much tax.

What's the top legal thing that you've done to minimise the tax that you pay, Sarah? it was probably completely accidental leaving my job yeah i i became self-employed uh i worked as a you know a shadow for people um words and numbers for people who didn't have the time or means to to do it for themselves and when i became a contractor um i recognized that there were a lot more tax effective ways to do things Yeah, it's spot on. Yeah, absolutely spot on.

Circling back into the investment sphere for a minute, what would you consider to be both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received so far? Well, if I talk about money investment, I think spread your risk is probably the best investment I ever got. but something that it's actually caleb's grandfather my husband's grandfather says he now he retired last year at the age of 94 off of our farm and he had a belief that you need to learn something new every day and he still to this day learns something new every single day

so i took it upon myself to to make that investment invest in yourself learn something you every day and i'm going to try and stick at it love that love that that's that keeps keeps the brain active and keeps us engaged uh what about a personal habit that you believe has contributed most to your success today yeah i think um it really would come down to the way that I try and unlock the behaviour and potential in other people. The personal habit would be holding the space for them, holding the tension for them, being a listener and asking questions that help them to arrive at their own conclusions

until I can finally hold a mirror up to them and say, see what you just did? I believe in you. And being able to tell someone you believe in them and just watching them levitate when you do, you know, They just hold their head that bit higher and their shoulders back and, yeah, being able to be that person for someone else is the way that I contribute to my investment in other people. Yeah, I love that. Holding the space, what a great term.

It's sort of letting people know that you believe and support them, but also it's telling them that they can believe in themselves and that they're actually capable of coming up with their own answers if they're given the space to do so. Love that. Love that. Final question, Sarah, and it's a big one. If I gave you a microphone that spoke to every single one of the 7.7 billion people in the world today and I gave you a minute to talk, what would you say? Oh, gosh.

I'd tell them to break autopilot, Bushy. I would say stop just doing things out of routine because every single action is a choice to be made. Every single action is an opportunity to either learn or grow or move forwards why would you want to let any of those opportunities just float straight past you and i'm not talking about the big changes we need to make in the world here i'm talking about every choice in your day is an opportunity and if you can make a choice that breaks your cycle of auto pattern and shifts your brain into upper upper brain mode instead of the lower risk you know

reactive fight or flight brain if you can get up to the upper brain where your complex problem solving and strategic decision making brain is in charge by doing simple things like brushing your teeth with the other hand or taking a different route to work or sit at a different place at the table when you eat in the staff room kitchen or you know hop from one womb to the next you know trick your brain break autopilot this is how you will recognize those choices to be made and this is how you will make them consciously in order to reach the end destination that you want to be at because every decision we make is leading us somewhere and the question is is it where we want to be going that's what i'd say gold yeah absolutely beautifully said

and it's true that it's so so many of us are so time poor that we simplify the world by by just getting into habits that we're not even aware of and just by doing those simple things like taking a different route to work or jumping out of the other side of the bed or, as you say, a great analogy there, brushing your teeth with the other hand. It sort of ties back with your good grandfather's advice of learning something new every day

and then firing and rewiring parts of the brain that haven't been used so that the world becomes an area of discovery and by doing so then ties into helping us link into building communities that you're doing so well with all of your work with the Champions Academy. Look, it's been a fantastic discussion. I feel like we've only just skated across the surface today, Sarah.

There's a lot of stuff I would have liked to dive in to deeper and that opens the door to have you back on at a later point to do exactly that as time moves forward. Oh, I can't wait to have any time. It's been awesome. Really appreciate you spending some time with us and right behind you and all the fantastic work that you're doing to help individuals become communities through the initiatives there

with the Champions Academy, Game Changers, NextGen and all the other related exercise. So we're very keen to support you on that journey. Thanks for spending the time today, Sarah. Thank you so much, Bushy. We'll talk soon. Thanks for that. Bye.

Well, Freedom Fighters, how good was that? To get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening.

And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.