The Woman Behind the Work
This isn't a bio. It's a story, one that started at eighteen with fire in my belly and a refusal to be ordinary, and has woven its way through businesses built and sold, hearts broken and healed, and a life that continues to exceed anything I could have planned. I'm Krista. And I'd like you to know the real me.
I was sixteen years old when I sat down in one of the salon chairs.
Not to rest. To see what the clients would see. I wanted to feel the angle of the mirror, the quality of the light, the way the space held you when you first walked in. I wanted it to be perfect.
My boss sent me back to work. And in that moment, I knew, I wasn't built for someone else's vision. I was built to create my own.
I grew up with fire in me. An obsession with making things, building things, with the feeling of something coming alive under your hands. I saw the world with more detail than the people around me. More nuance, more precision, more care. It wasn't arrogance. It was just the way I was wired, always asking how this could be more, better, truer.
When I finished my apprenticeship I walked out and never looked back. Working for someone else had felt like being a caged animal. There was no fear in leaving. Only this enormous, electric sense of freedom and a level of belief in myself that, looking back, bordered on delusional.
I had no proof it would work. I just knew it would.
And it did. The salon became a six-figure business unlike anything else in the area. I married at twenty-one. Became a mother just before I turned twenty-three, my daughter Ayana, who cracked me open in ways I am still discovering.
Motherhood changed the shape of everything. I sold the salon. I couldn't give it what it deserved and give her what she deserved — and I have never been someone who does things halfway. So I let it go, and I started again.
Three health cafés came next. Paleo food, fifteen years ago, before the world had a name for it. Before the world was ready for it. I was always a little ahead, always pointing at something people hadn't seen yet.
Then a storm tore through Brisbane. Our biggest café couldn't trade for three months. I remember standing in it — this beautiful, broken space — and feeling something shift in me. Not panic. Clarity.
I didn't contract. I expanded. I built an entire catering division from nothing, and within months it had outgrown the café itself. We fed Westpac, Boeing, Flight Centre, Deloitte.
Every storm in my life has done this, cracked something open that wouldn't have opened any other way.
Eventually I sold everything. All of it. The weight had become too heavy and I wanted to know what it felt like to put it down. For the first time in my entire adult life, I stopped.
And I fell apart.
Quietly, completely, necessarily. Without the businesses I had spent my whole life building, I didn't know who I was. That unravelling was the most disorienting thing I had ever experienced. And the most important.
It was in that emptiness that coaching found me or I found it. A decade ago, before it was the industry it is now. I didn't have a strategy or a brand or a five-year plan. I just had this unshakeable knowing that I wanted to help people build something true.
What I didn't know yet was that the most devastating chapter of my life was still coming.
I want to tell you this part. Not because it defines me, but because it shaped me in ways nothing else could. I have been a single mother twice. My daughter's father and I separated. I healed, I rebuilt, I found love again. I got engaged. I believed, with everything I had, that I had found my person.
And then, four years ago, my son Jonah was born. He was three weeks old when his father left.
I didn't have the language for what I had survived until much later, when I finally understood I had been in a narcissistic relationship. But in the immediate aftermath, there were no frameworks or words. There was just me, alone, with a newborn and a daughter, trying to find the floor.
I rebuilt myself from the ashes. Two and a half years of the kind of healing that nobody sees, the 3am kind, the crying in the shower kind, the slowly, slowly learning to trust yourself again kind. I kept coaching through all of it. Kept showing up for other women while I was quietly learning to show up for myself.
I have not built a life of ease by living an easy life. Every version of freedom I now experience has been paid for in full.
And then, on the other side of all of it, I met him. My partner. The most loving, devoted, extraordinary man and father I could have ever wished for. The kind of love that makes you understand why everything else had to happen the way it did.
My life now is a different world.
Freedom. Presence. My beloved partner, my daughter Ayana who is fourteen and breathtaking, my son Jonah who is four and ferocious and tender all at once. We live at the beach. We eat beautiful meals. We laugh. We are here, genuinely, fully here , in a way I didn't know how to be for a long time.
My children are my greatest teachers. They have given me wonder, patience, and a love so profound it has no edges. It is for them that I am constantly becoming better. It is for them and for you, that I want to change the world.
I have become myself through all of this. Fully, unapologetically, without apology for how much space I take up. I am not fazed by the opinions of others. I know exactly who I am.
And my life, the real one, the one that doesn't fit in a caption, is more exquisite than any Instagram post could ever capture.
Here is what twenty years of building, selling, losing, and rebuilding has taught me:
You are the centre point of your business. Not your strategy. Not your funnel. Not the framework you bought or the mentor you followed or the version of success you inherited from someone else.
You.
The more you come home to yourself, the more you shed the learned layers and the borrowed beliefs and the performance of having it all together, the more everything you actually want begins to find you. Your clients don't need the perfect strategy. They need to stop running from themselves.
I built every business I've ever had by believing in something greater than me.
The woman reading this has already built something real. She knows it. She can feel the success and she can also feel the ceiling. The quiet ache of more. More freedom, more joy, more ease, more of the life she actually imagined when she started all of this. She didn't build a business to live in a jail cell. And yet.
That woman is exactly who I am here for.
Women in my world don't just grow their revenue alone. They grow into themselves. They create the truest definition of success, in their business, in their relationships, in the way they inhabit their own lives. They become someone they genuinely love being.
If you felt yourself somewhere in this story, that recognition is not an accident. It never is.
