“How I lost 18 pounds in 2 days and 40 pounds after 4 emotional shifts – diet and exercise had nothing to do with it.”
Competition windsurfing at the Olympic level requires 4-6 hours of training six days a week. This became the norm for me from 1990-1999. Ever since I remember I have always been active. As a kid I would prefer to be climbing a tree or riding my bike, swimming in the ocean or going for walks rather than watching TV. My father would always take us on hikes into the mountains with heavy packs on our backs and I was lucky to be introduced to the outdoors from an early age. I grew up two doors from a beautiful beach on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne, Victoria. Our own garden had many wonderful trees to climb and space to kick the football and be active.
During my windsurfing years I trained like any other professional athlete, full time. I loved training whether it was going for one hour runs, which I did four to five days a week, or going to the gym for strength training or on water windsurfing and kayaking. Basically I am a water baby and always have been. It was my love of the ocean that enabled me to win in windsurfing. From the very beginning at age 12 I used to spend hours on the water mucking around on my windsurfer. After spending an entire summer falling in, getting bruised and battered, sore hands and getting rescued by the yacht club rescue boat, I finally mastered the art of being able to turn the board and sail back to the beach. When I raced as a young teenager I would beat the older guys in their twenties, not because I was stronger, but because I understood the wind shifts better than they did. Windsurfing at the Olympics is like running a marathon and playing a game of chess at the same time.
When I was growing up I never ever thought about my weight. I was a fit and healthy kid and had broad shoulders and strong legs. My competition weight at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics was between 58-60kgs. This was my healthy fit body weight. I had a lot of muscle at the time too and was lean.
However, in 1994 I had an accident windsurfing in New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean. I was racing in an island hopping race, where you sail from one island to the other, and a flying fish flew straight into my left knee. It sounds pretty crazy but these particular fish – Un agrieet in French as they are called, are actually like gar fish and swim very fast and occasionally glide over the water through the air. Unfortunately one happened to glide straight into my knee whilst I was windsurfing at about 40km per hour. This accident resulted in me having to be flown in a helicopter to the Noumea Hospital to have my leg operated on in emergency surgery. The sharp nose of the fish had gone right through my knee and into the bone. It had punctured the outer wall of my main femur artery in my thigh and to top it off it had over 200 baby teeth which were very poisonous.
I ended up having two operations on my knee to get it back to normal. The main problem I suffered from this accident was not so much the surgery, as my knee healed well, but it was the antibiotics that the doctors gave me to stop any infection.
My body shape started to change after taking the antibiotics and two operations. My lymph system started to struggle. The lymph system is vital in removing toxins and waste from every cell to the bladder so that they can be released from the body. About three months after the fish accident I still felt very weak. Three months late I had a blood test and it showed that I was not absorbing the sugar and nutrients from my food and I actually had the blood sugar level of some one who was fasting. My entire digestive track had been compromised.
My body had put on about six kilos and for some reason I was holding lymph in my skin. For an athlete this really messes with your head as you have skin fold tests at the Institute of Sport to measure how much fat you are carrying. Suddenly I was being told to lose weight. For the first time in my life I became focused on my weight. I kept saying to the sports doctors that I could not understand why I had put on this weight; my diet was exactly the same. In fact my diet at the time was extremely healthy (like most athletes) and was also wheat, sugar, alcohol and dairy free. I had decided to go on this diet because I had had some digestion problems six months before and had become intolerant to certain foods.
My automatic reaction to the slight weight gain was to train harder and harder. To be a few kilos overweight in the Olympic windsurfing class was a major disadvantage. Now I was suddenly disadvantaged because of my weight in the light winds. My focus became on my weight instead of winning and for the first time in my life I started to compare myself with other people. I would look at all the naturally skinning girls on the windsurfing circuit and found myself getting annoyed that I was not that body shape. But what was happening was that I was no longer my natural lean body shape and because I could not work it out my focus became on everything external. It was the only way my ego was able to handle it at the time.
Not only did my body shape change after this accident my bladder also seemed to have been affected. Every night I found my self getting out of bed to go and urinate at least 4 times in a night. This was very disturbing to having a good night sleep. I felt like I had constant pressure on my bladder. I would also find that my legs would swell up after a long three hour bike ride. My body was not coping but instead I still trained harder and harder. I went to every doctor I could find and they could not help me. From 1994 to 1999 I must have spent over $20,000 on vitamins, supplements and doctors visits to try and find the answers. The doctors I went to simply did not know why. In frustration I started to research as much as I could and I tried every new vitamin, mineral supplement and ‘super food’ I could find that my help my lymph system.
After reading more about these particular tropical fish in New Caledonia I discovered that the poison can actually affect the Lymphatic system. People who had been stung by similar fish or jelly fish had had troubles with their lymph system afterwards.
Finally I was getting some idea but still nothing I did with my diet seemed to help. Even lymph massage only helped for a short time. From 1994-1999 I still competed in windsurfing but I was now 64-66 kilos instead of 59 kilos. This may sound trivial to the average person, but to an athlete it is a big deal. Even though I won seven world titles in windsurfing and competed at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 I never ever realized my dream of Olympic Gold. I share more of my story in the book Spirit in Sport. Looking back on this I have to realise that no matter how trivial, my body weight played a significant role in me losing my focus on winning. The increase in body weight also affected me emotionally, even though I was largely not conscious of it at the time.
In 1999 I retired from windsurfing and went into a corporate sales role. Suddenly I was a full time employee and this was new to me. Ever since I was seventeen I had pretty much worked for myself or run my own businesses. Throughout my windsurfing career I had an event management business that kept me going and as a teenager I had a windsurfing school. When I needed extra cash in between overseas trips for windsurfing I would also work in a café. And in the late 1990’s I ran my own Personal Fitness Training business.
After 9 months in this sales role I realized that the only thing I liked about it was the consistent cash flow. To me that was not enough to hold me in a job that I no longer believed in. When I walked away from the six figure income to set up Barakaya and do what I do today people thought I was crazy. But I had to follow my heart. I have always been someone who has had followed thier heart, even in the face of opposition. My parents for example told me to give up windsurfing when I was 19. They wanted me to get a ‘real job’ and some security. At 19 I was Australian Champion and had won two world titles and was preparing for the 1992 Olympics. To give up then to please a parent would have broken my heart. As it turned out I managed to secure sponsorship to fund my windsurfing campaigns for eight years. Later on my parents realized that it was not such a bad decision after all, especially after I became an Olympian.
Besides I never did my sport for money. I did windsurfing because I loved it. I made enough money to compete but had none left over for investments. This did not bother me at the time because I was doing what I loved and following a dream.
In 2001 everything in my life changed. For the first time everything I tried to do failed. I had gone back working for myself in marketing and sales contracting. There were several clients that failed to pay me for the work I did because they either went bankrupt themselves or had internal disputes going on which affected me. Suddenly my finances were in the red and this created a great deal of stress.
The only way I thought to handle the debt situation was to work longer and harder to pay it off. I took a job selling real estate to help get back on track financially. During this time I was also trying to set up Barakaya so I was working 7 days a week. This was ok if your heart is in what you do but the real estate job was killing me – spiritually. It was not where I wanted to be and the only reason I was doing it was for the money. During this time I ended a five year relationship with my partner. It was my decision to leave him. I simply had to at the time. We had grown apart and I felt a tremendous need to be free. I had also snapped my ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) in a ski accident and a week later prolapsed a disc in my lower back which caused me great pain. I could not get out of bed for a week and was able to move only very slowly around the house. A few weeks later I decided to have a knee reconstruction on my knee to mend it as soon as possible so the knee joint would not wear out. The general anesthetic took its toll on me and the anti-inflammatory drugs for my disc in my back made me feel sick. The health I had taken for granted all my life was gone. For the first time in my life I could not exercise in the way I wanted to. I could not run because of my knee or ride a bike because of my back. So I did nothing for nearly an entire year. During this time I was engulfed by a heavy feeling of sadness.
Over a six month period my body had put on 20 kilos and I had no idea why because I had not changed my diet. I was not able to face myself in the mirror because I did not like what I saw. My face was swollen and puffy. I had lost all the jaw line and fine features of my natural face, my stomach has swollen out about 4 inches and my thighs were carrying a lot of fluid. I even had fluid on my calf muscles and triceps. Via stealth it seemed I had gone from a size 12 to a size 16.
Each day I would wake up with pain in my pancreas and liver. Finally I decided to go to a doctor that a friend recommended. He was qualified in western and eastern medicine. He spent a lot of time with me taking tests using vibrational medicine. Basically I was a ‘walking toxic waste dump’ he told me, in a nice way. My body was shutting down and my lymph system was not coping. I had cancer cells in the body which would become a real problem if I did not immediately start treatment. At the time I did not even have the money for extra vitamins let alone other medical related expenses. I was too proud to ask anyone for help. I simply wanted to do it on my own. And the last thing I wanted was to tell my family exactly how bad my health had become. When I walked out of the doctors surgery that day I felt deep in my heart that even if I did have all the right ‘physical’ treatment (which was alternative and natural, because I do not believe in chemotherapy) and go on strict diet, nothing would make any difference. There was a whisper from my soul that said I needed to find the answer at the spiritual level.
A week later I was on my way to work the real estate sales job and I pulled the car over on the side of the road and burst into tears. I was completely physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. For the first time in my life I felt totally out of control, burned out and disconnected from any happiness and joy. I could not go on working seven days a week and playing ‘catch up to the creditors’. The pressure I was putting on myself was killing me. The job I was in was soul destroying. I called mum in tears. “I can’t do this anymore.” She understood and with some warm and caring words made me feel ok for making a decision to quit this real estate job. As soon as I made this decision I felt like a huge weight was being lifted off my back. I had no choice but to surrender to my soul at the time and pursue what my heart really wanted to do which was run personal development programs.
The creditors would just have to wait. I had no idea at the time how much a slave to money I had become. Being in debt had made me feel guilt and shame about being a ‘bad and hopeless person’. Even though the debts were business related I still felt like a failure. What happened to the confident, healthy, vibrant happy windsurfer that I once was? That person was no longer. I had fallen so far emotionally that I did not even know who I was anymore.
It was a dark night of the soul. During this time I was defiantly lost in Dante’s dark woods. Day after day I would drive the car down to the beach and consider just driving it off the pier, or swimming out into the ocean never to return. In fact I really just wanted to curl up in a ball, go to sleep and not wake up. If suicide was an easy thing to do, and did not affect other people in your life, then there was a part of me that would have definitely done it.
Lost in despair I did not know who I was anymore. I was lost with no direction. I did not fit in anywhere and I was too embarrassed to go out and see my friends because I looked so overweight and felt ‘ugly’. (I did not know at the time but I was going through a tremendous spiritual awakening and as a result everything in my physical world was being torn apart to be ‘re-built’.) I became so lost that one time I remember driving the car to the supermarket to get some groceries as my fridge was empty. I could not find a car park and became so angry that I simply drove home without any food. I had looked down at my swollen stomach and burst into tears. For a period of 8 months I had also buried myself in alcohol to numb the pain – to stop feeling. My self esteem was rock bottom. I was too embarrassed to be seen. Instead I buried myself in research.
I sold my four wheel drive, got an old bomb to drive around, cut all my overheads took a part time job and spent 25 hours a week researching. I was determined to find answers about what was happening in my own body. In 1998 I had attended a metaphysics course that basically said that we create our reality from our thoughts and feelings. What we think about is what we create. This had made sense to me but purely on an intellectual level. I remember walking out of that workshop recognizing that I had created all the good things in my life but I found it very difficult to comprehend that I would in fact have created all the injuries, chaos and pain in my life. Why on earth would I have created that?
As I read book after book and attended workshop after workshop on quantum science, sacred geometry, emotional freedom technique, heart coherence and human behaviour the same message was there – we create our reality. Or our consciousness creates our own reality. Meanwhile I was desperate to find answers as to why my body was so bloated still. I went to a reiki healer who helped to balance my chakras. This seemed to work in some way but still my weight did not change. I had stopped drinking alcohol and had started to kayak three to four times a week. But still no change in my body shape.
In January 2002 I flew to Sydney to meet with a lady who used a machine to ‘bring my spirit back into my body’. I was desperate at the time to find answers. I held on to these two metal handles and she told me that my spirit was 8 metres from my body. She brought it back in and immediately my lymph system started to gurgle. Within two minutes I went to the loo and started to urinate. My lymph started to clear. This definitely made a small difference and I felt more grounded. But still my body shape did not change. I read book after book that linked emotions with the body. It made complete sense to me. Finally I began to understand just how powerful emotions were. Every experience we have ever had is recorded in our own mind ever since conception in the womb.
So I started to delve into childhood memories to see if they were affecting me right now. When I was a 4 week old baby the doctors operated on me to cut out a cyst that was in my small intestine. As a result they had left a 40cm scar across my stomach and cut out 1/5th of my small intestine. The stitches later ripped in hospital and they kept me in a humidity crib for 4 months. As a kid growing up this trauma as a baby seemed to never have affected me in any way. My health had always been good but maybe this memory had something to do with my body blowing up now? I could not work it out. I went back and searched and healed each memory from this life.
During this time I started to facilitate personal development workshops. I had finally overcome all my fears about finances, body shape and my life and surrendered to my situation. I had stopped resisting my life and started to live again.
There was nothing to fear any more. I was doing what I wanted to do, facilitating workshops, and I had started to generate income again. Yvonne Evans, a good friend, and I decided to combine services and facilitate programs together. Yvonne is a mystic and healer, as well as being a corporate coach. For the first time I started to really understand the unseen spiritual realm.
Everything is a vibration of energy. Our five physical senses of touch (kinesthetic), smell (olfactory), taste, sight and hearing makes us feel like everything is physical. However when we break the body down into tissues, cells, atoms and molecules the body is energy. Under the microscope quantum scientists realise that when they look at the atom of a cell it is actually waves of energy. When this energy is observed with physical eyes it appears to be electrons and positrons but when it is not observed with the physical eyes it is actually waves of energy. Quantum scientists have realized this since the 1920’s; mystics, sages, Indigenous shamans, healers and spiritual teachers have realized this since the dawn of humanity. We are energy. The physical world appears solid to our eyes but it is actually vibrations of energy.
We are spiritual beings having a human physical experience.
What we can see with our physical eyes is less that 5% of what actually exists at other levels of vibration. For example we cannot see radio waves or television waves or even microwaves, but they still exist. The astral realm for example is the next vibrational range up from our physical realm. Spiritual teachers, mystics and psychics can see what goes on at this level of vibration. It exists simultaneously with the physical realm but is simply at a higher frequency of vibration. Many people who see spirits or ghosts or colours or sparks of light tune into this level of vibration. I had started to realise the importance of our own thoughts and feelings and how thought forms in the astral can attach and affect our own physical body. Yvonne guided me through a process of clearing my own energy field – the aura. After doing this clearing process with Yvonne for the first time in three years I felt grounded and properly in my body. The pain in my pancreas went and my hips rotated back to their correct position. I had not known it at the time but I had had astral interference that was affecting my physical body shape. I discuss this in detail in Section 1.
A week after clearing my energy field Yvonne and I were sitting in a coffee shop discussing my swollen stomach and trying to work out the cause of it. Suddenly out of my mouth came “I think I have been stabbed in another life.”
Yvonne tuned into my soul story. (A mystic can access higher vibrational information that resides at soul level whilst remaining grounded in physical consciousness.) “You have been disemboweled on a battle field as a soldier,” she said. When she said this a burst of energy ran up my spine and I saw flashes of this life time in my minds eye. The ‘me’ that had died on the battle field was stuck in the astral level and had not gone to the Light (connected with the soul properly). I guided (in my mind’s eye) this aspect of me to the Light and felt suddenly overcome with peacefulness and love. Yvonne suggested I drive home and get some sleep to allow my consciousness to re-sort. There was a lot going on within me at the unconscious level.
As I crawled into bed this particular past life memories started to come through. I had my first physical catharsis. A physical catharsis is when your physical body releases emotional memories. This one was one from a past life. My body shook and contorted in amazing ways as the memory of being disemboweled flashed through my mind. This was not painful but it was certainly overwhelming and exhausting. The pain at soul level was being released via my physical body. This catharsis lasted for two and half hours. I had no choice but to surrender to the experience. I had to be in a state of observation without getting attached to what was happening and being released. When the contortions and muscle spasms finally subsided I lay in bed absolutely amazed at what I had just experienced.
My physical body had literally morphed!! My stomach had gone in three inches. I went and looked in the mirror. My face had changed back to normal and my body felt leaner. I could not believe it. In 2 days I lost 8 kilos! Basically I had read book after book and research article after research article from leading scientists who all talked about the body being vibrations of energy or a holograph of Light and now I had proved to myself that I was actually just that – pure energy. The discordant energy that was in my energy field from this ‘past life memory’ was now cleared and as a result my physical body was able to adjust back to its normal and healthy shape. This was amazing. I was so excited I wrote everything down.
(The mind has the template to self heal. When we allow the mind to heal it can heal. But first we must address any emotional wound or discordant thought energy that is in the mind and release it so the body can heal. The mind is the eternal aspect of self and is a field of energy – or pulsating Light vibration. The mind resides in every cell of the body and is also independent of the body. I explain this in detail in Section 1.)
For six months leading up to this catharsis I had been meditating for two hours a day. During these meditations I was drawn by spirit to do toning. Toning is when you use the voice to resonate certain sounds that correlate with our chakras. The chakras are the ‘wheels of energy’ that represent our Light body. They connect us with the etheric and spiritual aspect of Self. When I toned my entire body would buzz with a higher vibration of energy. This higher vibration of energy is also called spirit – Light. The Indians may call it Prana, the Chinese may refer to it as Qi (Chi), and Christians may call it the Holy Spirit. It is pure source energy – or pure divine love from the creator (God/Goddess/All there Is). This high vibration of Light would flow right through my body and often last for over two hours. I would feel incredible divine love and in a bliss state when this would happen. At the time I intuitively felt it was my own Higher Self healing me. So from these experiences I understood that we were simply vibrations of Light. So when my body morphed after healing the past life of being disemboweled it only confirmed to me that we are a hologram of Light – that appears to be solid to our physical eyes, but is not solid at all.
When you heal the energy field (or the mind field) – at the spiritual and emotional level you can heal the physical body. So much for diet I thought!!
The day after I healed this past life I bumped into my neighbor and she could not believe the differenced in my appearance. My entire face and body shape had changed. “What on earth happened to you?” she exclaimed. She could not believe it, and of course I could not put into words what had actually happened at the time, it was all a bit ‘out there’ for anyone else to understand.
After this experience my full mystical abilities returned and I was again able to communicate with the Angelic realm. I had been able to do this as a child but had lost the ability as a teenager. Yvonne had told me in a meditation in early 2003 that the Arch Angels were going to ‘wake me up’. I did not know what that really meant at the time, but simply went along with it. I had not idea what kind of ride I would be in for.
For a period of two years I would have one past life memory flood through my consciousness to be healed and transformed, to the Love, after another. With every new memory came new awareness about self, pain and healing. I realized that I was able to help heal the pain that my clients had and also help them heal past life memories that were affecting their current life, or ability to have healthy loving relationships. (All of our lives are happening in the eternal now moment at soul level. Beyond the third dimension of the physical world there is no such thing as time and space. Einstein confirmed this in his own scientific research. What this means it that all of our ‘past lives’ are in our hologram of mind right now and very often there is unfinished business that we have to heal in this life. I discuss this in detail in Section 1 and the nature of learning spiritual lessons in this life.)
With other clients I would help them heal physical pain in one hour that stemmed from deep memories in the unconscious mind – at soul level. With practice I developed ways to clear the energy field. My clients would burst into tears because they felt spiritually grounded and connected to their Higher Self and their Soul (the true Self) for the first time. When Yvonne and I facilitated our Soul purpose and emotional intelligence programs we could bring in the higher frequencies of Divine Love and fill the room with this energy so people could experience it. Some people would burst into tears having never felt divine love before. At our highest level, the Soul, we are divine love. Anything less that divine love is the ego self which is stuck in the emotional roller coaster of life. (I discuss this in detail in Section 2.)
Finally I was back feeling great, happy with my body and enjoying life again. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to finally fit back into my size 12 jeans. I could even look at myself in the mirror again without feeling emotional pain.
It will not be every person’s journey to go through such amazing mystical experiences. However, it just happened to be my own journey to learn to heal many different emotional wounds and to understand consciousness at these levels. The more emotional wounds that I healed on myself the more I would be able to help other people to heal their own. We all have emotional wounds in the psyche, and for some of us they affect us in our lives now as physical symptoms, conflict, weight gain, chaos or illness.
It is important to look at the body in a wholistic way. We are not just physical. We are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. The spiritual and emotional affect the physical and the physical can affect the emotional, mental and spiritual. For example the fish accident affected me physically which affected me emotionally. The drugs in my physical body affected my ability to connect to the higher vibrations of Light and my spirit for example.
When I was a Personal Fitness Trainer I realized within the first month that there was more to weight loss than simply doing exercise. How could I get my clients to be self-motivated? Why would they do the exercise with me only to go home and eat all the wrong foods, or too much food? It was my days as a Personal Trainer that contributed to me becoming interested in being able to understand human behaviour.
This book will discuss in a simple way what we can do at the physical level, the emotional level and the spiritual level to help balance the body, mind and soul. I speak not only from the perspective of being a Personal Fitness Trainer and former professional athlete but more importantly from the perspective of being a mystic, metaphysical counselor and healer. My work is about healing and addressing the ultimate cause of any thing that we suffer from rather than treating only the symptoms.
There are thousands of diet and exercise programs out there for people to choose from. So rather than giving you what you already know in the physical body chapter I will give you some tips on diet and exercise that perhaps will be new to you.
In the emotional intelligence section you will learn the importance of feeling your emotions and how to interpret them and transform them so that the body can be freed up of emotional charge. All emotions are stored in our mind and also in every cell of the body as polarized electro-magnetic charge. It is our subconscious and unconscious minds which run our physiology. When we transform emotional charge our physical cells are more freed up to operate in a balanced and optimal way. All addictive tendencies such as over-eating stem from emotional, physical and spiritual imbalance.
The majority of emotional themes and patterns of behaviour are unconscious – meaning we are not conscious of them. We do not know we even have them. This chapter will help you identify the behaviour traits, beliefs and emotional wounds that affect you today, whether it is over eating or self destructive habits. It will also help you to understand why you have put on weight in the past even when it has had nothing to do with what you put in your mouth.
In the Section 1 (Taking back our spiritual power) I explain several techniques that you can apply to clear yourself energetically of negative thought forms that you pick up in your environment. There is a meditation process to help ground your energy field properly in your body and help balance the chakra system. In this chapter I discuss the importance of understanding the chakra and energetic systems in the body. Each chakra is connected with the endocrine gland system of the body. The glandular system of the physical body needs to be in balance for us to have physical and emotional health. The glandular system is largely ignored and misunderstood by many Western trained physicians.
When we are overweight the reasons will vary as to why we are overweight. For example many people blame it on their genetics. However research shows us that genetics only account for less than 25% of the whole. So we cannot blame it all on our genetics. We must take responsibility for Self and when we learn more about the ‘bigger picture’ and why we do things then we can be truly free to change.
We all have free will – the ability to choose what we think, say and do. We make our own choices in life. If we do not like the way we are, or do not like the fact that we eat too much food then we can change. As soon as we become aware of those parts of us that are either addicted to food or simply have no discipline we can work with each of them. To be disciplined is to be a Disciple of Self – the True Self, the Soul, rather than a slave to the ego. As we work with each of these parts of our self – each persona, we can heal each one, one at a time. We have the power; we just need the right tools.
In regard to weight loss, when we shift what is playing out at the unconscious level of our own mind our body can shift very quickly. I lost 8 kilos (approx. 18 pounds) in 2 days, and 18 kilos after 4 major emotional shifts. In my case diet and exercise had little to do with my weight gain.
Fiona Taylor
92 Olympian,winner of 7 World Titles in Windsurfing, consciousness coach and mystic
Copyright February 2007.www.barakaya.com
Founder of Barakaya and Brave-Heart Leadership, mystic, 1992 Olympian and former world champion windsurfer
Fiona is a high performance coach with expertise in understanding human behaviour and transforming consciousness. She is also a mystic and metaphysical counselor who works closely with the Arch Angels in her healing practice. As a winner of seven world titles in the sport of windsurfing and a 1992 Barcelona Olympian she knows what it takes to win, set and achieve goals and inspire individuals and teams. Her coaching and programs are founded in the physics of consciousness, complexity theory, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Her programs and coaching not only provide the theory, but the practical ‘how to’ to achieve real growth and transformation. She is the author of two ground-breaking books Spirit in Sport: peak performance & the zone in sport, and An Olympian’s Guide to Weight Loss.
Fiona is also a recommended sales trainer of the Australian Sales & Marketing Institute. Her understanding of human nature and what it takes to excel serves to both inform and inspire. Her ability as a strategic thinker, plus her understanding of the micro and macro (’cause and effect’ complexities) is profound. Her current and former clients include CEO’s, senior executives, Olympic Gold Medalists and World Champion athletes. She founded Barakaya to offer a team of experts in their respective fields to provide the most up to date and leading edge programs and consulting services. Her corporate and business experience includes over 15 years in corporate business development, marketing, sales training, event management and professional sport in the USA, Europe and Australia. She has also worked as a Personal Fitness Trainer and Sports Coach.
Her professional speaking (and celebrity ambassador) engagements have included clients such as Cadbury Schweppes, Telstra, Siemens Mobile, Tab Corp, AMO Inc, Accor Asia Pacific, South Mel Football Club, Rotary and corporate luncheons. Fiona is an inspired communicator who has reached over 12,000 students and adults Australia wide. In 1993 she was awarded the Victorian Young Achiever of the Year Award (Overall and Sports award winner) and the Victorian Yachtsman of the Year.
Fiona’s media appearances have included Good Morning Australia, The Dr. Pat Show Seattle, Channel 9 Wide World of Sports, SBS Sports Woman, Channel 7 Sportsworld; Time Magazine (Australia), New Idea and key articles in The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Sun Newspapers. Fiona is a powerful Australian presenter and in demand as a key note speaker