After 22 years in the financial services industry, the Adelaide mum-of-two—sons Max, 10, and Angus, 8—knows finances inside out. What she was less familiar with when she joined TCI was … herself.
“There’s no better word than transformational,” she says of coaching.
“It is life changing, and once you have that awareness about what’s going on you can make long lasting changes. It was about doing the work myself then being able to share it with clients.”
While she “loved” being a financial adviser Karen questioned what her purpose was: “Now knowing that and being on the right track, it lights me up, it’s fun. I go to the office and I play.”
How did you find TCI?
I reckon it was on a Facebook ad. I was in a career change and thought perhaps coaching might be something that would be useful in my new career.
Where are you at with your TCI journey?
Pro Coach. I joined in April 2019 and I upgraded to Pro Coach at FOCS.
What has TCI given you?
Lots of things, both professional and personal point. Understanding myself better, being able to relate to myself, being able to identify the patterns and strategies that I run automatically. I feel I’m in control of my life, having that conscious awareness around what I’m doing. Before I just went with the flow. You can live by design or default, and I was living by default.
What have you struggled with?
You can have all the theory and awareness but rewiring the patterns and changing those, it’s hard work. I don’t think I’ll ever be, ‘I’m fully on top of this, I’ve got it all together’ but I’m getting okay at it.
Where are you at with your business?
I’ve niched in just helping women between the ages of 30 and 55, that’s when we kind of have this alarm bell go off: ‘I earned all this money and I have nothing to show for it’. I look at internal solutions to external problems. I work with about ten clients at a time. I get into the office at 9.15 after I drop the kids at school. I leave at 3 to pick them up. I do some of my admin stuff when they go to bed and I work on a Saturday morning with client sessions. It’s very flexible.