3 Business Trips to Sydney

One of the best parts of working with Brett and also being an entrepreneur is all of the business travel I get to do.  I managed to find myself in Sydney 3 times, Perth once, Melbourne once, and the Gold Coast once, all for business.  In this post I'll tell you about my 3 trips to Sydney.

May 17-19, 2013 - MINDD Forum 

This was a holistic conference all about brain health, with a distinctly Paleo spin.  There was a stream for practitioners, a Paleo stream, and one for parents.  I obviously attended the Paleo stream lectures, and I also managed our booth for The Business of Wellness Coaching.  Brett was the MC so I got to tag along and meet all sorts of interesting people.  The highlight was definitely meeting Nora Gedgaudas, author of Primal Body, Primal Mind (and one of the speakers - top left in both pics).  We were at the conference pretty much the whole time, so no sightseeing on this trip!

June 21-23, 2013 - Parker Chiropractic Conference with Greenhill Family Chiropractic

Brett promised us if we met a certain practice goal he would take the whole team to Sydney for a chiropractic conference.  This time we had a little extra time for sightseeing since we were staying at a hotel right at Sydney Harbour.  We had beautiful weather, the speakers were great, and it was a ton of fun to go on a team trip.

John Gray - Author of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus

June 13-15, 2014 - Millionaire Coach Intensive with Taki Moore

My last trip to Sydney (again without Ryan) was a personal business trip to learn more about how to make money as a coach.  I have to say, of all the trainings I've ever attended, this has been the best one.  Taki Moore is brilliant, and the people I met were awesome.  To this day I'm still in touch with Emma Franklin Bell, who I bonded with because neither one of us were making enough money yet to join Taki's high-level mastermind!

Again I had very little time to explore, but during the lunch break on the first day I walked as fast as I could so that I could get to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  It's something I wanted to do during every trip there, so I wasn't going to leave Australia without doing it!  I didn't get all of the way across, but that's okay with me.

On the last night before my flight I had dinner at the Sydney Harbour restaurant (the same one we went to when mom and dad visited), and just enjoyed my last hours there.

On my way to the train station I passed this guy playing amazing jazz music.  I spent my last $10 on his CD with the intention of giving it to my dad as a souvenir when I got home.  However, since I'm oh-so-gullible, sure enough when I got home to listen to it the CD was blank!  Bummer!

Sydney was an incredible city with SO much to explore.  We never made it to any of the outskirts - especially the wineries and the beaches.  Next time!

Melbourne Wellness Summit - Aug. 16-18, 2013

Unfortunately, Ryan and I really didn't spend much time in Melbourne during the years we lived in Australia.  Melbourne is known for amazing food, a great art scene, and I think it's quite different from Sydney.  So when I got to go for the Wellness Summit, I wanted to make the most of it.  Ryan couldn't come, but Brett and Janah were there, even though I didn't spend a ton of time with them.  

One thing I had heard about was the interesting graffiti in alley ways, so I did some research and looked up the best places to check out.  I guess I probably should have been nervous by myself at night, but that's the beauty of Melbourne!  Everything was actually really well-lit, and I really never felt unsafe.  The artists were quite prolific - even the dumpsters were painted!  I only had a short time to explore on the first night so I wandered around and made the most of it.

The next morning we went down to the conference area bright and early to get set up for the day.  Because I co-hosted That Paleo Show, and the summit was put on by The Wellness Couch network, I got a table to promo our show and my coaching.  It was so fun to get to talk to our fans, and talk to people about their experience with the wellness industry.  We also got a lot of people interested in our course about how to be a wellness coach.



And the venue was packed!  600+ people, and some amazing speakers.  It was a really fun event.

After everything was cleaned up, I did a tiny bit more exploring before falling into bed.  I think it was my first time in a major casino (and certainly the biggest conference centre/hotel/mall/casino I've been in), and I was shocked at how everything was still open at midnight.  A Pink concert had just finished and there were people everywhere.  It was nearly impossible to find my way back to the hotel after exploring...that's how they getcha!  

The trip was super short and sweet, but I'm glad I at least got to see a little bit of Melbourne.

What I've Been Up To

I had originally intended for this blog to be primarily a way to share my travel stories, but for the next few months I will mostly be travelling for business so it's about time I did a post about how my career here has taken shape.  In a previous post I explained how I started working for Greenhill Family Chiropractic and was training to become a Wellness Coach, but a lot has changed since then.

When we got back from our Canada trip I really got focused on preparing myself to be a coach.  I had to start my own business and meet with Brett so he could teach me the skills I needed for coaching.  In my own time I just kept reading and researching, and I was able to take my first clients in January 2013.  For the first month Brett sat in on the sessions with me and gave me feedback, and since then I have been coaching on my own!  I do lots of sessions in person, but I also have a few clients from across Australia that I do Skype sessions with.  More recently I've been working on adding some new services to my business.  Soon I will start offering personalized home visits for people who want help cleaning out their pantry, reading food labels, meal planning, cooking demos, and even grocery store or market tours.  I have found that a lot of people are interested in nutrition but don't really want to be coached through it; some people just like to rip off the band-aid and get started!

But if that was all I was doing, I would have had a lot more time to write this blog!  I actually have a few other projects underway at the moment.

My favourite of them all is the podcast I'm co-hosting with Brett and the other chiropractor at the practice, Janah.  The three of us get along great and we decided to start a podcast called "That Paleo Show".  We're all very passionate about helping people get back to eating real, unprocessed food, and we're having a lot of fun with the podcast.  It has been extremely popular, hitting #1 health podcast in Australia on iTunes in the first week, and pretty much staying there ever since.  We have doubled our listeners each week, and this week we're up to the #26 ranked health podcast in the US, which is AMAZING considering how many podcasts there are there!  It's so cool to get emails and messages from friends and family, and even people I've never met, saying that they're enjoying the podcast and it's helping them stay motivated.  If for no other reason, then that makes it a success to me.  Check it out:  http://thewellnesscouch.com/that-paleo-show

My other major project is the workshop I'm planning with Brett called The Business of Wellness Coaching.  We found that once I started advertizing my services as a coach, people were actually more interested in becoming a coach themselves.  The industry is not regulated at all so actually anyone who has passion and knowledge can do it, so we decided to put together a workshop detailing exactly how to take the steps to start a Wellness Coaching business from scratch.  Brett has been writing a coaches guide for awhile, and I'm doing all of the worksheets, extra resources, and appendices, along with designing the flow of the workshop and of course the logistics.  Some people may see this as essentially training my competition, but I see it as the more people doing Wellness Coaching, the more people there are marketing it, and the more it will gain popularity with clients and help the world get well.  It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned.  You can check out our website here:  http://www.thewellnesscoach.biz/

And of course, that's not all I'm doing!  On top of all of that I'm also taking more courses!  The major one that I'm taking is a year long at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  It's a Health Coach training program, covering topics in nutrition, how to start a business, and coaching skills.  The network of students is amazing, and many of the students are even in Australia.  The course is all done online but I'm hoping to meet up with some of the local students eventually.  Everyone taking the course is incredibly inspiring, and the graduates have all taken really unique paths in wellness.  In fact, that's where I got the idea to do home visits in addition to coaching!  I think this course is just what I need to help me focus my efforts and really make a difference.

I've also found an awesome website called Coursera where anyone can take select university courses for free!  You don’t get a credit of course, but the courses are all from credible universities taught by actual professors with university quality material.  I've already taken a course called "Growth to Greatness: Growing your small business" and I'm currently taking "Introduction to Human Physiology".  The physiology course is really hard for me since I don't have a science background, but even if I take away 25% of the information, that's more than I knew when I started!  I've also signed up for a Biology course, a Chemistry course, and an Epigenetics course, but they don't start for a few months yet.  For anyone who just loves to learn, you should definitely check out the website:  http://www.coursera.org 

Well, I think that's about it from a business perspective.  I've got a few trips lined up to go to seminars and training, but I'll post about them when they happen.

On the home front, summer is just coming to an end here and my garden has been amazingly productive!  I had more basil, red chilies, tomatoes, and lemongrass then I knew what to do with, and the chili plants just started flowering again so I'm sure I'm in for another massive batch.  I'll bet  I've harvested about 800 so far already!  I just planted a ton of spinach and salad greens, and I'm about to plant some garlic.  I hope it's hot enough for garlic this time of year, but we'll see.  I never considered myself to be a gardener, but I now understand the satisfaction of eating right out of your own garden.  And I know they're not covered in chemicals!  The neighbours majorly pruned the lemon tree, but I can see a few more growing so all hope is not lost.  Maybe in a few more months we'll have lemons again.

Ryan and I are doing our last trip for awhile in 2 weeks.  We're doing the "Great Ocean Walk" which is about a 100km hike along the Great Ocean Road outside of Melbourne.  It's famous for being the most scenic drive in Australia, so we're hoping the walk will be better!  We've hired a service to drop off our gear and food at our campsites each night, so we'll only have to carry our day packs which will make it a lot more fun.  Hopefully we're in good enough shape to do it!

Thanks for being patient and reading my long story (if anyone is still reading my blog), and I promise all of my travels will be recorded eventually!  This is my journal, after all, and I don't want to forget any part of this amazing adventure.