ABOUT INGRID
I didn’t plan on starting over in my sixties.
Following a medical emergency that stopped me in my tracks, I found myself asking the question so many women quietly carry:
When did my life stop feeling like mine?
I had spent years building businesses and helping other women find their feet. What I had not done was turn that same care towards myself.
This space grew out of that reckoning.
THE ROAD HERE
For most of my life, I was the woman who had it handled.
I ran businesses. I built things. I helped other women do the same.
If you had asked, I would have told you I was fine and I would have half believed it.
Then, following a medical emergency, everything I had been holding up quietly set itself down.
In the stillness that followed, I found myself facing a question I had spent years stepping around:
Was this the life I actually wanted, or simply the one I had ended up with?
EXPERIENCE THAT SHAPED THE WORK
A life spent helping women back themselves.
I have run my own businesses since 2008.
In 2017, I founded the VA Institute that went on to help more than 2,000 Australian women launch businesses of their own - work I remain deeply proud of and which earned national recognition along the way.
I had written three books and spent the better part of two decades helping women find confidence, direction and the courage to back themselves.
What I had not done, in all of that, was turn the same attention towards my own life.
Business owner since 2008
Founder of the VA Institute
2,000+ women supported
Author of three books
National award recipient
Speaker and facilitator
This was not a breakdown.
It was not a crisis to be managed.
It was something steadier and more honest than that:
in that moment I stopped performing the life I was supposed to want and began returning to the one that was genuinely mine.
WHAT I BELIEVE
You are not a problem to be solved.
You do not need fixing, tidying up or improving into a better version of yourself.
The woman you are looking for is not somewhere ahead of you.
She is the one who was there all along underneath the roles, the responsibilities and the decades of being everything to everyone.
You are not behind.
There is no timetable for returning to yourself.
Wanting more does not make you ungrateful.
It may simply mean a part of you is ready to be heard.
You are not done yet.
There is still more life, creativity, contribution and connection ahead.
WHERE THIS WORK LIVES
Where my work lives now.
These days, my work is for women in the middle and later chapters of life who feel that restlessness and recognise it for what it is.
It lives in three places.
A LITTLE MORE PERSONALLY
The things that bring me back to myself.
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long walks by the water
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writing before the day becomes noisy
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honest conversations over coffee
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time with family and friends
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laughing at the absurdity of trying to have life completely sorted
