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I recently found out two of my old music teachers have made a pivot into life coaching. The industry is having a moment and it’s easy to see why — life coaching is unregulated, psychologists have long waiting lists and we’re into our third year of “unprecedented times”.
This article from the Sydney Morning Herald is a good overview of the current life coaching boom. Did I mention it’s completely unregulated?
“Life coaching focuses on the future, unlike therapy, which can dwell on the past. Lawyer Vanessa Emilio, whose online firm Legal123 helps coaches with contractual issues, has about 200 life coaches on her books; five years ago, there were five. She attributes this partly to its popularity among Millennials. “They can’t really describe what they’re doing,” she says. “They just want to help somebody.”
On the topic of changing your life and yourself, journalist Olga Khazan gave herself three months to transform from being a grumpy judgmental stick-in-the-mud to a fun, grateful person with mixed results. The line “neuroticism had kept my inner fire burning, but now it was suffocating me with its smoke,” hit a nerve for me.
Flooding has been part of my life since I was a tiny girl watching my family’s inner-Brisbane backyard fill with water. Some of you might have been following my work since the early 2010s, when I covered the deadly floods in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley. The stuff I saw will always haunt me, and the past week’s floods have got me thinking about it again. Grantham was one town I visited, which got completely obliterated in 2011. I loved this longform article from 2010 about how the local, state and federal governments all worked together to rebuild Grantham on higher ground. This piece by Rick Morton about the disaster in northern NSW is beautifully written and wide-ranging.
Old houses have also been a big part of my life. I recently moved from a 110-year-old 3 bedroom house into a 2 bed 2 bath apartment that was built in 2019. It’s been a revelation — the developer of our block didn’t skimp on design and materials, which means it’s cooler, quieter and more livable than our old weatherboard in Footscray1. Australians have this weird set of brain worms around apartments being inferior to houses as a general rule, but housing affordability and urbanisation could be changing all this. This article in the Guardian does a decent job on the issue, but quietly leaves out the fact that the apartments sold by the likes of Nightingale are not actually that affordable. Compare this to the historic Cairo Flats in Melbourne (profiled in The Design Files this week), which were built nearly 100 years ago with the same urban community and sustainability and ideals… but with a price tag to fit. We know so much more about how to build fantastic dwellings that marry form and function and the fact that governments keep letting developer crank out these shitboxes really grinds my gears.
More
Why the US (and those to have tried to emulate it) need an abundance agenda
Organisational culture = “who here really matters, and what do they want to see from me?”
I’m loving the historical/rural romances by Aussie author Kim Kelly for a bit of a mental break. I’ve most recently finished This Red Earth and learned more about WW2 Sydney than I’d expected.
Music
The Sound of Music soundtrack
I’m really excited about seeing Wolf Alice next month — it’ll be the first international artist I’ve seen since July 2019. Their most recent album is their best yet and I’m obsessed with the track Lipstick On The Glass. This live performance with choral vocals is fantastic.
Camp Cope’s recent Sam Fender cover for Like A Version is one of the best things they’ve done, right down to the tasteful lyric changes to make it more Australian.
The new album by Rolo Tomassi is the first heavy guitar music I’ve connected with in a long time.
Podcasts
This is a picture of my grandmother Daria (on the left) with her parents Sophia and Gregor and and brother Ihor (Vic). It was taken the day they began their journey to Australia after fleeing Ukraine 7 years earlier. It’s a privilege to be upset by the situation in Ukraine as opposed to living it, and an odd realisation that one decision made by my great-grandfather in the 1940s means that I’m working on a computer by the beach in Australia instead of hunkering down in a bunker, fleeing over the border or joining the armed forces myself. There’s a lot out there on Ukraine, but here are a few links:
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks unsettlingly like my brother, and I’ve been enjoying watching his show Servant Of The People on Youtube (with subtitles, of course), where he plays a school teacher who unexpectedly gets elected president of Ukraine.
“After Putin’s invasion, my country has shown its true colours”
Kyiv psychologist suggests angry Ukrainians take out their frustration by building fire bombs
My old house in Footscray cured me of all my romantic ideals around old houses and has made me really passionate about insulation.