The Turning Point: A Journey into Personal Transformation - Series Introduction
Brisbane Airport setting off on my trip to the USA and Canada, June 2023
Introduction
Life has handed me my fair share of transitions — leaving home, moving across continents, changing careers, becoming a wife, becoming a mother, then learning how to live again when the house became quiet. Some of these shifts were planned, others just unfolded around me, as life tends to do. I adapted. I adjusted. I kept going.
But this time… this time feels different.
This isn’t just a transition — it’s a transformation.
Unlike the changes that simply happened to me, this current chapter feels like it’s happening within me. I’ve started to see the patterns I’ve been repeating, the beliefs I’ve been carrying, and the ways I’ve kept myself small or silent without even realising. There’s been a slow but steady unravelling — not in a chaotic way, but in a way that’s making space for something new. Something more true. And for the first time, I’m not just adapting to change. I’m choosing it.
As I try to make sense of this experience, I find myself drawn to the idea of personal transformation as a process — one with stages, rhythms, and cycles. A quick search online led me into a world of models and frameworks, most of them varying in how many steps they outline, but all circling around similar themes. After some reflection, I distilled it down to five key stages that seemed to resonate most deeply:
Precontemplation
Contemplation
Preparation/Determination
Action
Maintenance
What stood out to me most was the understanding that transformation is rarely linear. You don’t just climb the stairs neatly from one stage to the next. Sometimes you loop back. Sometimes you get stuck. Sometimes you leap forward unexpectedly. There’s no fixed timeframe or predictable path — and that’s what makes it such a deeply personal journey.
In this blog series, I’ve used these five stages as a framework to tell my story — a narrative reflection of my own unfolding transformation. Each chapter explores one stage through the places I visited, the people I encountered, and the emotional terrain I moved through. This isn’t a how-to guide or a roadmap. It’s just my story, shared in the hope that it might resonate with someone else navigating their own turning point.
If I had to trace this shift back to a single moment, it would be just before I left for a six-week trip to the USA and Canada — and all the emotional turbulence leading up to that departure.
About a month before I was due to fly out, my Aunty, who I was very close to passed away. She had a fall in late 2022 and was admitted to hospital. A second fall there led to a broken shoulder. From that point on, her health declined rapidly. She moved into residential aged care early in the new year, and although she was looked after with care and kindness, her body simply couldn’t recover. I visited her often — through the hospital stays, through the care home transition — and I was with her when she took her last breath.
Her death hit me in a way I didn’t expect. It stirred something. A quiet reckoning. Time is short. Life is fragile. And here I was, healthy, mobile, and yet feeling stuck — as though I were waiting for something to shift on its own. Her passing reminded me that the waiting game is a dangerous one. Nothing changes unless we do.
To add to this emotional load, work became overwhelming. A series of upsetting events left me feeling raw and exposed, and just one week before I was meant to leave, I broke down. Completely. I questioned whether I should even go. But deep down, I knew I had to. I didn’t know why yet — I just felt it in my bones.
This wasn’t my first trip to the US. I’d been before — as a twenty-something chasing nightlife and adventure, and later in my forties on a dance tour with my daughter, seeing the world through the lens of theme parks and family-friendly shows. But this trip, in my fifties, felt different. I was craving something deeper. I wanted to see new places — smaller towns, regional areas — and connect with people who shared my creative and professional passions. There were workshops and conferences I’d been dreaming of attending. I had online colleagues I was excited to finally meet face to face. And my best friend from primary school — now living in the US — was waiting for me, too.
After the stillness of COVID lockdowns, this felt like the perfect time to move, to reconnect, to gather new inspiration for future projects.
What I didn’t anticipate was that this trip would become the catalyst for something much bigger.
Looking back now, I can see how each destination, each conversation, each unexpected moment was nudging me gently toward change — not all at once, but layer by layer. It was as though the journey had already been mapped for me — not in my itinerary, but in my spirit.
This was the beginning of my transformation.
And this is the story of how it unfolded.