Experience and Qualifications
Official Experience
Youth Centre: working with teenage mums, young offenders, and all the other lovely people who just happen to be between twelve and twenty-one.
Primary Schools: Social and Emotional Wellbeing classes for Confidence At Play on the Gold Coast, QLD.
Supervised Contact Volunteer: we accepted the request to help an individual who needed someone they could trust to accompany a child during visitation with a flight-risk, allegedly abusive parent.
Private Practice: one-on-one, workshops and online counselling using candlemaking, sound therapy, journalling, oracle cards, dreamscapes, and more.
Miracles and Wonder Co-founder: administering and designing on-and-offline programs, we practised all of our innate and certified skills not just with clients but also with our co-founder who became our biggest advocate.
Fringe Experience
We have been listening to people in a way that they find therapeutic since childhood. It is something that comes naturally. It's as if there's a file that opens when people need to process, which gives us all the information we need. Then it closes and the data is deleted so we don't remember the details.
This ability has allowed us to be the listener in every job we've ever held. We call this 'fringe' experience. Whether behind the counter or at the office, our people processing skills have never stopped. It's one reason we don't quite fit in the corporate world where an interest in the customer as a means to a profit is tantamount. We simply couldn't perform the tasks that required repeated, daily disconnection from caring.
Here are just some of the places we have gained our fringe experience:
Bartender: Having worked at the infamous Bourbon & Beefsteak in Kings Cross, Churchill's Sports Bar in Kingsford, and Kirra Liquor Barn on the Gold Coast, all before their makeovers, we have ample experience in nonviolent communication, persons with depression, addiction, and lifestyles of the underworld.
Data entry clerk: Working for closed court legal cases, little old men in their jewellery store, and big construction companies, we were hired to fix other people's mistakes, such is our attention to detail. On the counselling side, these positions were mainly about relationships - how to communicate needs and deliver performance assessments with humility.
Personal Assistant: Anyone who's been in this position knows how delicately one must poise their absolute confidence and ultimate deference while both taking orders and providing a sounding board for all the things your boss won't say on the phone or at home but has no qualms sharing with you.
Secretary: Keeping track is easy. Managing meetings can be akin to herding cats. At a table where no-one was saying what they mean, we opened up channels of communication and played parent.
Curator: For the longest time we organised Eclectic Exhibitions, requiring careful relationship planning and therapy as well as a surprising amount of tech-help and business mentoring.
Co-director of an art organisation: Back in the mid to late 1990s, we worked with the lovely Natasha Thomas on all things IContact, hosting events at iconic Bondi Beach, Mascon Festival, Newtown and more. Our counselling and mentoring skills came in very handy not just within the organisation but also out and about at galleries where people find the time to stop and think about what's going on for them.
Diploma of Counselling
The Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors, 2015
Counselling & the Counselling Process
Communication & the Counselling Interview
The Counselling Relationship
Personality & Development Theories
Learning Theories
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Person Centred Therapy
Gestalt Therapy
Solution Focused Therapy
Narrative Therapy
Legal & Ethical Issues
Counselling & Personal Reflection
Relationship Issues
Family Therapy
Client Suitability & Clients at Risk
Case Management
Working With Diversity
Group Counselling
Bachelor of Arts in Society, Life & Learning (Sociology)
Macquarie University, 2015
Australian & Global Society
Introduction to Popular Culture
Philosophy: Reason and Moral Choice
Critical Thinking
Text, Image, Culture
Education: The Psychological Context
Education: The Social and Historical Context
Introduction to Human Behaviour
Defining Women: Social Institutions and Cultural Diversity
Youth and Society
Myth in the Ancient World
Ethics
Power, Difference and Recognition
Methods of Social Research
Practical Ethics
Body and Mind
Culture and Healing
Terrorism: It's Causes and Consequences
Understanding Contemporary Societies
Human Services: Organisations, Structures and Policy
Sociology of the Public Sphere
The Intimate Sphere: Love, Friendship and Family
Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Research in Cultural Studies
