Why I Built SHIFT

I didn’t grow up with safety. For ten years of my childhood, I was in the child protection system. I was the kid with the bad case file, the one with “severe trauma” written across it. Survival wasn’t just what I did. It was who I became.

By the time I hit adulthood, things weren’t getting better. They were getting worse.

I had promised myself from the start: I would be nothing like my family. I would break the cycle. I would not live trapped in the same groundhog day I grew up in. That mission drove everything in me.

But survival wiring doesn’t just disappear with determination. I would catch myself in constant catch-22 situations, stuck in groundhog day cycles. Sometimes it felt like the same problems, just a different year, different people, different scenery. No matter how much I pushed, nothing ever seemed to move the needle far enough for me to believe life could actually be better than it was.

How Survival Became My Strategy

I threw myself into work. Hard. I became the classic workaholic. Sixty-hour weeks didn’t scare me. High-pressure jobs? Easy. Juggling funerals, health problems, relationship breakdowns all at once? That was my baseline.

Because after walking on eggshells for so long, high stress felt like home. Where other people burned out, I just kept going.

But here’s the thing: while I was proud of my drive, it came at a cost.

• Work was my escape.

• Productivity was my armour.

• Overdrive was my identity.

And underneath all of it, I was emotionally empty.

I couldn’t feel love. Not from others, not for myself. It was like a disconnect between my heart and my brain. I was functioning, but emotionally half-dead. A walking zombie with no self-worth to draw from.

Why the Old Tools Didn’t Work

I tried everything. Therapy. Self-help. Spirituality. Christianity. Coaching. Mediation. Yoga. The list goes on and on. Every tool or practice I could find, I was open minded and I tried it.

The best my psychologist could offer me was to “look into Buddhism” because she had run out of suggestions. I was too self-aware. I saw the patterns coming before she even named them. I could recognise cycles like a psychic, reading the warning signs before they unfolded.

And yes, that pattern recognition became a kind of superpower. I was risk-aware to the extreme, assessing every option, calculating every angle, always choosing the path with the least risk or the most possible progress.

But it didn’t free me. It trapped me further. Because being hyper-aware doesn’t equal being free.

No matter how much I “understood,” the loops kept firing.

The Disconnect That Drove SHIFT

I knew something was wrong. Deeply wrong.

I was cup-half-full by nature, sometimes even three-quarters. But optimism wasn’t enough. I swear I just couldn’t feel love. And if you can’t feel love, you can’t feel self-worth either. All the confidence in the world and not a shred of love for me or anyone. Surface level connection with a heart so deep I needed rawness to feel any type of connection. I was compassionate towards others. I had this almost ridiculous ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes, even the worst of people. But empathy? That one skipped me. Laughable. Not this little duck.

That was the crack that split everything open.

And here’s the thing, it wasn’t some big cinematic turning point. It was more of a stubborn knowing inside me, a refusal to believe this was all life had to be. Maybe I can thank Stacie Orrico’s music for planting that seed, who knows. But I couldn’t accept the idea that life was destined to be the same cycles, the same pain, the same “this is just how it is.”

If trauma could be created in a single moment, then surely healing didn’t have to take years of dredging and spiral. There had to be a faster, safer, smarter way to collapse the loop.

So I stopped looking for outside answers and started building my own.

Building SHIFT

Building SHIFT

I studied neuroscience, psychology, subconscious mapping, anything I could get my hands on. I pulled apart what the industry was teaching, compared it to what I’d already tried, and asked the hard question: Why isn’t this creating lasting change?

Because here’s what frustrated me most: walking into therapy, pouring your heart out, and walking back out a triggered mess, left to pick yourself up for the next three weeks with nothing but raw emotion. For someone as results-driven as me, that was torture.

Meditation gave me calm moments, sometimes even tears that felt healing. But I couldn’t stop in the middle of a high-stress workday, when someone pushed my buttons, and go sit cross-legged to breathe. I didn’t want a coping tool. I wanted lasting results that meant I didn’t spiral in the first place.

Child protection services had drilled it into me young, psychologists came and went. Just as soon as I felt safe, they’d leave for maternity or move departments, and I’d be left telling the same story all over again to someone new. Nobody read the notes. Nobody joined the dots. And while I know talk therapy has its place, for me it was a nightmare of repetition without resolution.

Coaching wasn’t much better. I met people who helped others, but nothing they offered touched me. I was told to write benefits lists, to find the pattern in myself, to be grateful for the pain. But I was already so self-aware I could predict what they were going to say before the words left their mouths. Awareness didn’t change the loop. It just gave me new language for the same pain and expect me to thank my lucky stars ✨

So I became my own guinea pig. I researched. I tested. I dissected. I only kept what produced real change. Everything else went in the bin. I pushed every tool I found against the deepest wounds of my past, the family who broke me, the people who hurt me most, and tested whether the reaction would finally disappear.

If I could look back and feel nothing (not re-triggered, not falling to the ground crying, just logically or a type of objective feeling about it), I knew it worked. If I could look at myself and feel genuine love or empathy, I knew I was onto something. Reflection became my greatest weapon.

That’s how SHIFT was born.

It wasn’t about copying what everyone else was doing. It was about solving what nobody else could. I used every skill survival had drilled into me:

• Extreme pattern recognition.

• Risk assessment down to the finest detail.

• The ability to walk on eggshells while still mapping emotional loops like an engineer.

And I set non-negotiables:

• It had to be fast, not years.

• It could not re-traumatise.

• It had to collapse the loop, not just soothe it.

• It had to leave someone regulated at the end, not cracked open and raw.

• It had to be safe.

SHIFT wasn’t built to keep clients coming back forever. If it worked, they wouldn’t need me for years on end. That’s exactly what happened. People didn’t stick around because they were loop-free, not because they were managing better. That’s the point.

I didn’t create SHIFT as a business plan. I created it out of desperation. Out of the endless catch-22s, the groundhog day cycles, the “same shit, different year, different people” life that never moved the needle far enough to believe it could get better.

I built SHIFT because I knew there had to be more. Because optimism wasn’t enough. Because compassion without love wasn’t enough. Because I was tired of functioning like a walking zombie with no self-worth to give.

SHIFT was never about being impressive. It was about survival. And when it worked, when people saw the change in me and asked for it themselves, then it became a business.

From Survival to Service

At first, SHIFT was just for me. A way out of my own loops.

But when people saw my results, they wanted it for themselves. And suddenly, I wasn’t just healing. I was helping. A business grew out of results that spoke for themselves.

Now, four years later, I’ve released SHIFT Australia wide and am now using social media to see how many other beautiful humans I can help. Where it will be in another four years? Who knows. But here’s what I do know: I love what I do. And I am more inspired by my clients’ results than anything else in this world.

Because I know what it’s like to feel stuck in patterns you didn’t choose. I know the exhaustion of doing all the work and still spiralling back. And I know how different life feels when the loop finally breaks.

That’s why I built SHIFT. Not to talk about transformation, but to deliver it.