Pivot Club

INTRODUCING FULL PLATE! In this episode of Full Plate, Liz Ellis sits down with Karen Moore, a firefighter stationed in one of Western Sydney’s busiest districts. After a decade in a corporate office, Karen made the life-changing leap to firefighting at age 43. Now, her "office" involves extreme heat, heavy gear, and 24-hour shifts where the call to action can come at any second. We dive dee...

Sometimes, a pivot isn’t triggered by a failure. Sometimes, it happens because you keep looking for a way to make the world a little bit fairer. Anne Aly was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to Australia when she was just two years old. Her parents worked hard in factory jobs to give their family a foothold here - and those early experiences of displacement, resilience and possibility st...

Sometimes, a pivot isn't triggered by a failure. Sometimes, it happens when you’re winning. You can have the perfect life on paper - the apartment by the beach, the successful business, the long-term relationship - and still feel a quiet, persistent exhaustion. It’s that slow build of burnout that whispers: you are running 100 k’s an hour in the wrong direction. But what happens...

What happens when the "dream job" you hustled so hard to get...suddenly disappears? You're trapped in the story of who you think you should be, convinced you only fit into one box. When life tears up the script, that loss of identity can be paralysing. But what if that ending is actually the best thing that ever happened to you? What if the thing you’re doing as a "side hobby" is actually an...

What happens when a six-month holiday turns into a 14-year life chapter? You pack a bag for a gap year in the snow and accidentally stumble into a whole new world - a career, a husband, a mortgage, and three children. On paper, it’s the fairytale expat dream. But eventually, the adventure stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like distance. Georgia Louise was living that dream as a s...

What happens when you need a gap year from real life? When you’ve worked hard, climbed the corporate ladder and saved every penny to buy your first apartment in the big city, only to find yourself in a trap? Tim Abbott was living the quintessential city life. By 28, he had cracked the Sydney property market, secured a stable corporate career, and built a thriving side hustle making memes for...

What happens when you have the ‘perfect’ corporate job at a top-tier firm with a clear path to partnership, but deep down, you feel a pull towards something else? For Alex Marks , the founder of New York’s cult-favourite ‘Sushi Counter’, that pull wasn’t just a distraction - it was the catalyst for trading a high-flying legal career for a world of total uncertai...

What happens when you're not just climbing the ladder, but standing at the very top? For Lize Ratliff , that meant achieving her dream job as Head of Podcasts at Mamamia , after 10 years hustling to get there.  Lize’s journey is a masterclass in pure tenacity. She started at 19 as an intern from a small country town, so determined to work for Mia Freedman that she "literally didn't leav...

What happens when you decide to take the leap with a dream you’ve been sitting on for years? For Lyndi Cohen , that dream meant pivoting into an industry she knew nothing about, long after she’d built her own successful empire.  Lyndi’s first journey began after a decade-long battle with binge eating, leading her to build an anti-diet media brand from the ground up. She shor...

What happens when your entire identity is built on being the best in the world? For Jana Pittman , one of Australia's most famous athletes, the singular goal of Olympic gold was repeatedly torn away by devastating injuries and gut-wrenching losses. You might think her biggest pivot was swapping the running track for the bobsled, becoming one of the very few athletes in history to compete in both t...

What happens when you achieve the biggest dream of your life at 16? After national treasure Jessica Watson sailed around the world solo at 16, she had to figure out what to do next. The world expected more adventure, more record-breaking, something bigger and more dramatic. But, her first pivot was one no one saw coming: she went back to school, went to uni, got an MBA and built a career as a mana...

Welcome to Pivot Club, where we sit down with people who've spent years building their lives… and then one day completely changed direction.  Whether it's celebrities who walked away from fame to study their true passion at university, corporate leaders who took up comedy and "fell up", or your neighbour who left teaching to world to start a food truck – we're here to uncover the...