She’s The Boss Leaders

Nafisa's story is absolutely fascinating. From growing up in Hong Kong and being 'good at maths as well as art, Nafisa studied for her medical degree to please her parents. As soon as it was finished, she started an activewear fashion brand that went global and she ran that for ten years before deciding to pursue her first love, portraiture. She went on to found Portraits Artists Australia, an NFP to support artists. She went on to win the Archibald Prize and the Gold Medal for Painting at the Florence Biennale and her work hangs in the National Gallery. 

Another of Nafisa's great loves throughout her life has been wildlife and animals. She is now dedicating the rest of her life to wildlife protection as the co-founder of Animalworks International where they will be raising funds for specific equipment - and focusing on solar-powered water pumps. This is a woman who excels at everything she turns her mind to. A total inspiration!

Lisa Andrews is, as she says, 'actively working on solving the global grand challenges' by using technology and innovation to make the world a better place. She has not had your average career. With a deep love of numbers, she went down the accounting route for many years, resulting in her creating a firm with 82 employees, before she chose a completely different path and started to explore working with entrepreneurs and visionary disruptors. 

Lisa has also experienced two kidney transplants, both times with kidneys donated by family members, and to a certain extent, it is her experience of having an 'invisible disability' that has shaped her dramatic change and exciting future!  Lisa has really had an extraordinary career, including spending hours, one-on-one with Richard Branson on Necker Island, and going to Davos in Switzerland. By the time you get to the end of this interview, you should be all fired up and ready to take on the world!

Lisa Cox wants to change the way disabled people are featured in the media. By the end of this episode, you will feel the same way.  Lisa's story is quite shocking as she had a stroke and then got sepsis in her 20s whilst in the midst of her career trajectory in advertising. After the initial 3 years of rehabilitation (which included two years learning to type again), she optimistically went out to reclaim her career, with the same resume and awards, but rather than being embraced back into the fold, she was basically patted on the head, told she was 'brave' but no one offered her a job.

 Lisa knows firsthand what it is like to be affected physically but to be treated as if she is mentally impaired. She also knows that there are very few disabled role models that are 'normal' people - not Paralympians or geniuses - and she wants to change that. This is a super inspiring episode.

Rochelle Courtenay is one inspiring woman! Not only has she built Share the Dignity into a huge brand that has built awareness of the lack of sanitary products available for homeless women, or as she calls it, 'period poverty' but she has also agitated successfully for the removal of the GST that was applied to tampons and sanitary products for years and years. And that's not half of it! 

Watch the show to find out how she grew a volunteer network of over 5,000 'Sheroes, how she created free vending machines with 'period packs', and what she doing to help our indigenous sisters and the women caught in the bushfires or caught out by COVID. She explains the challenges she is facing right now, as many of her annual drives have been canceled because of the pandemic, and what she is doing to get around the obstacles. Share the Dignity is more important than ever as we come out of the pandemic and lockdown, with more and more women needing access to sanitary products.

Angela Vithoulkas is perhaps the most entrepreneurial of all the women I have interviewed so far, having started and sold almost 30 businesses in her life. She is passionate about helping the small business sector (SMEs) have a voice, both politically and in the media. It's something she knows so well. having been brought up with parents who also ran businesses. So much so that she founded the SME Party that stood for the last Federal Election, she has also been elected twice as a City of Sydney Councillor, championing small business, and she has won numerous awards, including Telstra Businesswoman of The Year for NSW.

Moving on to the media, Angela founded her own radio station, Eagle Waves Radio in Western Sydney for years, again focusing on small business. These days Angela can be found hosting and producing her own TV channel, SME TV, twice a week. There's no doubt that she won't stop there! Watch this show if you want to be totally inspired.

Wendy Squires is one of Australia's top journalists and her story is truly inspirational. From a terrible start, being homeless in Year 12, she ended up getting a job as a copygirl at the Herald Sun. From there, and after two long years, she became a cadet and that is when her life took off! From spending years in New York working across most of the Australian magazines, she returned to Australia to start her stellar career with News Ltd and Channel 9.

She talks about the amazing women that were at the helm of the ACP magazine stable, like Lisa Wilkinson and Mia Freedman, at a time when magazines were hugely popular and there were exciting new titles being created all the time. Lachlan Murdoch asked Wendy to start Australian Style and then she went on to work on a variety of titles including Who Weekly and The Australian Woman's weekly. Her story is so exciting, this is one episode you will not want to miss!

Christina's entrepreneurial spirit is inherited. So many members of her family, from her father to her uncles, invented and innovated. Choc tops, Violet Crumble and Talking Books were all a result of her family's fresh way of looking at things. And Christina is the same. As a young Greek girl, Christina felt she didn't really fit in at school, but she excelled at schoolwork. 

After killing it in her exams, she decided against studying law (much to her mother's dismay) and instead, went into The Arts. After studying Drama at uni, she then started her career in the television industry and there have been lots of interesting twists and turns since then. These days she is the Co-CEO of SingularityU Australia. These days she describes herself as an eternal optimist, idealist and seeker of opportunities, on a mission to inspire and empower leaders to find solutions to humanity’s grand challenges. She works with corporates, startups, scale-ups and universities and creates programs and retreats to activate innovation and growth.

It’s hard to know where to start with the accolades for this incredible woman of many talents! An early adopter of digital technology and a huge fan of yoga and ‘being of service’, Polly’s interview is fascinating. On her website, she describes herself as an ‘All Purpose’ human but she is also an author, speaker, business strategist, yogi and good hustler,  As one of only 400 people worldwide to have attended Brene Brown’s master course and become a Certified Dare To Lead facilitator, these days she and her business partner, Zoe Coyle (who also did the course), are running workshops around the country through their company Pilot Light. 

Jules and Polly have known each other for a few years now so they discuss how they met and their combined love of startups, female founders and innovation in all its forms. They move on to Polly’s emergence from academia and her curiosity about the digital world. She has been at the forefront of innovation for decades now.  Polly’s lust for life, her certainty that she was put on this planet to be of service to others and her mixture of ‘woo woo’ and business savvy make this an interview not to be missed.

Lucy Bloom is one in a million (and it's not just the luscious pink Mohawk!) and she’s a funny, generous, insightful guest. Her experience in advertising land and then morphing to work in an NFP, ultimately becoming CEO is so inspiring. The accident that nearly cost her a leg, her great advice around being ‘let go’ as a CEO and her brilliant tips and stories around being a speaker make this a great interview!

The latest episode of She’s The Boss Leaders features the fabulous Zoe Coyle who is just wonderful to talk to and sounds a little bit like Joanna Lumley! Her start in the theater set her up well for her coaching and speaking career as the Founder of Pilot Light Consulting. She is also a voiceover artist, speaker, entrepreneur and the author of a new book, 'Where The Light Gets In' which came out in early 2022.

Zoe is also one of only 400 women worldwide who have been taught directly by Brene Brown and she now teaches the Certified Dare to Lead course. She is amazing!