Name: My name is Marion but I prefer to be called by my middle name Mona especially by those close to me 

Where you are from: I was born in Melbourne Australia, having lived most of my life here apart from 5 years living in Asia and 3 years living in London.

Where you live: I live where I was born by the beach in inner Melbourne , Australia with a secret wish that I lived in the forest. 

This is who I am in the world…. I am first and foremost a mother at this time in my life, that has been my plight, deepest passion and by far greatest challenge for the past 13 years. I have held one value close to my heart all of this time , to be a present mother.   My son is a great shining light in my life, that has called me to be many things I thought I was not capable of, a warrior, a lioness, an open heart, a student, a leader and so much more- he is the one force in my world that can make my heart swell, contract and crack open in an instance. 

Beyond the world of home and family ...

Ayu Puspita Dewi
Bali, Indonesia

My name is Ayu Puspita Dewi. I am a Balinese, a mother, a teacher, a healer and a lover of life. This is who I am in the world: the whisperer of powerful kindness and compassion. I live to learn ways to honor life and the essence of life: love and compassion and to share it with others. That love and kindness transform lives. That we do have the power to access this and to communicate this.

This is the story I want rewritten for women: to stand strong in love, to communicate love, to nurture and create love and kindness for themselves and others. That women are so powerful, and that this power can be strong and firm; and yet gentle and nurturing at the same time. Women are like water: healing, nourishing, persistence, gentle, powerful, graceful, ever moving, flowing and nurturing: one of the key elements of all life. That when women hold hands together, they hold the community stronger: they nurture their children, they gracefully co-lead their househo...

I am a powerful female entrepreneur who is building an empire . When the pandemic hit, I was forced to look at my business and change direction. With unemployment at an all-time high globally and systemic barriers for certain people and classes. I want to create businesses that would provide opportunities for people that would not necessarily have those opportunities in the mainstream world. My areas of business are Retail and Personal Development. Icy-May is an online store which is named after my grandmother. The vision for the platform (bit.ly/Icymayfashion) is to be the number one online platform for sustainability not just in fashion but also in the way we treat our employees.

DFG International Professional Woman is my online coaching company which supports female entrepreneurs setting up and creating profitable businesses by using Christian and Spiritual Principles. As a community or sisterhood our mission is to learn how to create and build generational wealth as well as learni...

This is who I am in the world….

I am a writer/copywriter and moreover, an increasingly conscious life author. I believe we’re all constantly writing and rewriting our own life stories. The question is: who (or what) is moving YOUR pen?

This is the story that I want rewritten for women…..

The entire story of their own lives – as they see fit. Mostly, the story of complacency, compliance, and subordination. However, I am not one to say what’s important for others. That’s why I say “as they see fit”. I would love to help others identify what’s truly important to them – authentically.

We are powerful beings with the ability to create and destroy worlds as we go. We are already doing this constantly, whether we are aware of this or not. But women and men alike are able tap into their innate power to make sovereign choices that align with how they truly wish to express themselves in the world. I want to remind them of that.

We have the unwavering, limitless potential to be whoever we wa...

Every single one of us is a space holder. Every single one of us takes up space.

If there is one thing that we can do in this lifetime that will make a difference, it is to be present in the space that we share together.

Often missed, though blatantly obvious, the core of humanity is the quality of our relationships- from start to end.

When bringing mindfulness into schools became a “thing” a while back, it arrived like it was a fancy new concept…. And yet, it is one of the most fundamental remembering’s that has existed as long as we have walked on Earth.

It is a reminder of how we so often complicate the core of what we all need and what makes us human.

It is the space from where we innately know what is needed and how to respond.

It is the space from where being anything other than who we are, how we are and in our own version of genuine-ness, compassion and empathy is not required. We immediately let the masks fall away and we see one another as we truly are.

And our experie...

''I was told that the best way to handle being a Social Worker was to choose a tree on the way home from work and to stop thinking about work each day when I drove past. This is what a lot of us were told, and still are told. 

I have always found this perplexing, as it does not make sense to me in how this helps any of us to grow into people centred work or navigate it. 

Over the years, and a few rounds of burn out later, I have learned and figured out a bunch of things that have really helped. And so many of them are the pieces that have become The Societe.

The thing is, that each time I have burned out, I have asked myself if this really is for me… and every time, a big fat solid yes has been the response. 

If it hadn’t been, I would likely be a florist by now.

This means that I have had to become much better at navigating what I do. 

Change is successful when it is sustained, and we are sustained as leaders. 

Yes, we can do epic things in the world. 

Yes, yes, yes we can!

A...

“Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world” – Marianne Williamson.

I was in my early 20’s and at a conference for work. My name was chosen out of a hat to be the only staff member to travel interstate with Senior Management to attend this event. At the time I could count on one hand how many times I had left the state I lived in my lifetime. 

A key note speaker shared this poem. I had not been exposed to anything like it before. She had given every person a page full of motivational quotes and told us to put them everywhere. 

I still had this little scrap of paper with this poem on it on my work desk when I left in early 2020. The language that this woman used and the way that she spoke, it was so foreign to me, and yet something in my fumbly early adulting ways began to shift and re-orient itself.

This is the thing, playing small isn’t going to create the c...

This pic was taken when I was invited to speak at the AIFP Annual Conference about passion in my work some time back.

We are offered new opportunities every single day to stand a little bit taller and to open ourselves up to a bigger world that we did not see as being possible just the day before.

To sit with something where you know that you have a bolder presence in sharing, and to not offer this thing a voice, it feels doable for a period of time.

However, at some point our refusal to pay attention and act on the seemingly scary stuff, leads to a whole bunch of unfathomable synchronicities that begin showing up and running havoc across our lives. And when we try to tell ourselves that it does not matter if we share this thing, it sells our reason for existence desperately short. 

What is worse than this is that we begin to bury ourselves just a little bit.

Maybe we don’t even realise that we are doing it in the beginning, however over time, our trajectory edges m...

Magic happens when we shift from naming and expressing our own experience to opening ourselves up and creating the same for others.

A number of years ago, I asked a group of young people to explain their experience since foster care to me in one word. Around the table we went until we stopped with one young woman. “Fight” she said. I dug into this a bit. 

We got to the point where another young person said “yeah, it’s like that song, ‘Fight Song’ [Rachel Platten]”. We ended up listening to the lyrics and the young woman concurred that this song summed up her experience well.

“This is my fight song, take back my life song, prove I’m alright song, my power’s turned on, starting right now, I’ll be strong……”

I got it.

When I used to train young people, one of my favourite transitions was the one from “this is sh*t” to “how can I improve this so that no one else has to live like I have?”.

It was a transition that suggested growing into a more whole sense of self and ...

When we recognise ourselves as creative and active decision makers who have much greater potential that can be channeled and can influence the world around us, we become much more powerful in all that we set out to do. 

The way that we express ourselves is a form of energy that expands beyond us. How we hold ourselves is typically how we hold others. We only really ever offer others an expansion of who we are.

Back in late 2020, while contending with one of many versions of “expansion of self”, I stood in the pool and looked up to the Bali sky. I asked myself, “what is this thing? What else could it possibly be? After all that has happened and that I’ve moved through, what else could be here?”. I stared for a few moments until a little whisper of a single word came to me.

“Confidence”

What?

“Confidence”

I burst out laughing. 

Are you serious? Confidence? That’s it? Just a bit of confidence. A thing as easily resolvable as finding a little bit of confidence, ...