What is the highlight of your career?
What Is the Highlight of Your Career?
At the end of 2024, I returned to Alice Springs for the first time since leaving more than
twenty years earlier.
While visiting the primary school I attended as a child, I had the opportunity to meet
students and teachers and take part in a Q&A.; At one point, a student asked me:
“What is the highlight of your career?”
I could have answered easily — the expected responses were right there. My debut. My
first goal. Representing my country. The Olympics.
But that didn’t feel true.
So instead, I answered honestly.
“Coming back to Alice Springs.”
That moment touched me on many levels. But above all, it was the feeling — and the
witnessing — of inspiration.
Change tends to come from one of two places: inspiration or desperation.
For many people I speak with — friends, family, clients, even passing acquaintances —
change often arrives through desperation. We wait until something breaks. Until pressure
builds to the point where avoiding uncomfortable truths is no longer possible. We stay
within a familiar discomfort because it feels safer than uncertainty — until we’re forced to
act.
From the outside, life can look successful: financial stability, leadership roles, family, the
new car or boat. Yet beneath it all, there can be a quiet sense that something is missing.
This isn’t necessarily an ineffective way to change — but it is a costly one.
Sun Tzu wrote about placing soldiers on “death ground” — positions backed against rivers,
mountains, or forests, where retreat is impossible. With no escape, soldiers fight with
double or triple their usual spirit because death is viscerally present. Desperation sharpens
focus. It extracts effort.
But is that how we want to live?
Is it sustainable?
Do we really want to spend our lives fighting just to feel whole — living in a constant state
of pressure, urgency, or fight-or-flight?
The mission of Game Changer Coaching & Mentoring is simple:
To inspire change through inspiration, over desperation.
Awareness of how we meet change gives us choice. For a long time, my own life was lived
from desperation — pushing, striving, proving, surviving. Returning to Alice Springs stirred
something deeper. Engaging with the community, business owners, former teachers, and
familiar faces was profoundly moving. It felt like a full-circle moment.
Not as a success story — but as a reminder.
A reminder that it is already in us to live a life worth living.
I know that growing up in the Red Centre can feel like the odds are stacked against you
before you even begin. Yet I also know what’s possible. And I believe we don’t have to wait
until breaking point to change.
We can choose to live from a different frequency.
A frequency of inspiration.
I want people to know they don’t need fixing. That they can express their authentic selves.
That they can be inspired — and inspire others — without first having to collapse.
Because whether we step forward through inspiration or desperation, many of us reach
that edge without the tools to begin.
And that’s where the real work begins.
At the end of 2024, I returned to Alice Springs for the first time since leaving more than
twenty years earlier.
While visiting the primary school I attended as a child, I had the opportunity to meet
students and teachers and take part in a Q&A.; At one point, a student asked me:
“What is the highlight of your career?”
I could have answered easily — the expected responses were right there. My debut. My
first goal. Representing my country. The Olympics.
But that didn’t feel true.
So instead, I answered honestly.
“Coming back to Alice Springs.”
That moment touched me on many levels. But above all, it was the feeling — and the
witnessing — of inspiration.
Change tends to come from one of two places: inspiration or desperation.
For many people I speak with — friends, family, clients, even passing acquaintances —
change often arrives through desperation. We wait until something breaks. Until pressure
builds to the point where avoiding uncomfortable truths is no longer possible. We stay
within a familiar discomfort because it feels safer than uncertainty — until we’re forced to
act.
From the outside, life can look successful: financial stability, leadership roles, family, the
new car or boat. Yet beneath it all, there can be a quiet sense that something is missing.
This isn’t necessarily an ineffective way to change — but it is a costly one.
Sun Tzu wrote about placing soldiers on “death ground” — positions backed against rivers,
mountains, or forests, where retreat is impossible. With no escape, soldiers fight with
double or triple their usual spirit because death is viscerally present. Desperation sharpens
focus. It extracts effort.
But is that how we want to live?
Is it sustainable?
Do we really want to spend our lives fighting just to feel whole — living in a constant state
of pressure, urgency, or fight-or-flight?
The mission of Game Changer Coaching & Mentoring is simple:
To inspire change through inspiration, over desperation.
Awareness of how we meet change gives us choice. For a long time, my own life was lived
from desperation — pushing, striving, proving, surviving. Returning to Alice Springs stirred
something deeper. Engaging with the community, business owners, former teachers, and
familiar faces was profoundly moving. It felt like a full-circle moment.
Not as a success story — but as a reminder.
A reminder that it is already in us to live a life worth living.
I know that growing up in the Red Centre can feel like the odds are stacked against you
before you even begin. Yet I also know what’s possible. And I believe we don’t have to wait
until breaking point to change.
We can choose to live from a different frequency.
A frequency of inspiration.
I want people to know they don’t need fixing. That they can express their authentic selves.
That they can be inspired — and inspire others — without first having to collapse.
Because whether we step forward through inspiration or desperation, many of us reach
that edge without the tools to begin.
And that’s where the real work begins.