What? Is that actually even possible? When I look in the mirror, I just don’t see it, I think I have that opposites disease. I have honestly had a pretty amazing life.
It all started on the 19th of July 1960. It was a Tuesday, I was born under the sign of Cancer, the Australian Prime Minister was Robert Menzies, the US president at the time was Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican).
In that special week of July, Make Mine Mink, directed by Robert Asher, was one of the most viewed movies released in 1960 while The Enemy Within by Robert F. Kennedy was one of the best selling books.
On the 19th of July 1848 the first Women’s Rights Convention Seneca Falls NY
1877 the first Wimbledon tennis championships held.
1880 the first public library starts lending books
1957 the first rocket with nuclear warhead was fired
And
In 1961 the very first in-flight movie is shown on an airplane.
It’s super cool to look back. Just for fun have a look at the day you were born, see who was born on the same day, and see what happened over the years on your birthday.
A little more about ME.
I’ve had a pretty amazing life to be honest. Born to parents, Elaine and Jerry Exton, I can say that my childhood was most definitely memorable, it was a very happy time, I had older sisters, Debby and Julie, until I was eleven when my little sister, Sheree, was born. I was popular, I was thin, I was pretty, I was smart, I was good at sports, playing netball and then becoming a runner. I was a Queensland Champion middle distance runner (800 and 1500 track and field and cross country) from the age of 11 till 16, at 16 boys took over from running. I left school at 15 and started working in a solicitor’s office, Gilshenen and Luton in the centre of Brisbane. I just googled them and they still exist, wow, that’s pretty cool 45 years later, and they weren’t new when I started. I spent a lot of years travelling the world and have been fortunate enough to visit over 80 countries. I had a few jobs after the solicitor’s office and eventually ending up working for Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for 11 years as a communicator. I figured it would be a great idea to let the Government pay for my travel. This was a pretty special time in my life where I was fortunate enough to have two postings, one to Islamabad in Pakistan, and another to London England. I am so grateful for that period of my life. I had two amazing children, a gorgeous little girl, Ashleigh born in February 1991, and then a son, Jamie, born in 1992. To this day these are the best two things I have ever accomplished. After leaving Foreign Affairs and Trade, I went on to become a Beauty Therapist and ran my own beauty salons for the next 11 years. On the 15th of December 2001 I met Mr Magic, who would become the absolute love of my life, my rock, my soul mate, to this day he makes me laugh each and every day, and I know in my heart that he and I are a FOREVER thing, twice the MAGIC.
I digress, back to my story a frozen shoulder resulted in my changing to radio sales and the rest as they say in the classics, is history. I found out I was really good at sales, and just loved the advertising world. Ever since I have worked in advertising and media, culminating in owning Matters Magazine in early 2010. The past ten years have just been incredible, living on the Sunshine Coast is by far our favourite spot to live. We live less than a minute from the beach at Buddina and I honestly have to pinch myself to believe this is my life some days.
I started out with the magazine, just selling advertising. I loved writing but wouldn’t really say I was a writer, I did everything backwards, I did an editing course, a publishing course and ultimately ended up becoming a journalist. I am pretty proud of that accomplishment to be honest, doing the course while working full time on the magazine. But to this day, I am pretty proud of this. The magazine is all about WHAT MATTERS MOST ON THE SUNSHINE COAST, we pride ourselves on that very local content.
We always aim to bring you everything that MATTERS and to inspire you to focus on what MATTERS to you. I went on to create weekend getaway retreats for ladies and for the last ten years these ‘You MATTER retreats have been inspiring and empowering women to live their best life, to master their inner superpowers and to find the happiness, contentment and freedom, they want for themselves. Putting on these retreats made me want to learn more, so that I could share more, to lead more ladies towards to love their lives, so I decided I needed to become a coach, yep again in my spare time, ha. Don’t they say, the busier a person is the more they will be able to get done. I absolutely loved the learnings from becoming a coach and of course this helped my own personal life more than I could have ever imagined, and so MATTERS coaching began.
I always had a thought that I had to decide one day which way I would go. Would I focus on the magazine? Would I focus on the retreats? Or would I focus on the Coaching. Since Covid I have had an absolute epiphany, I now realise MORE THAN EVER that these three businesses are all just arms of the exact same PASSION, the PASSION to inspire people to focus more on WHAT MATTERS. It’s all about what MATTERS, everything is about what MATTERS. We have to find what MATTERS, to us, and then focus everything we can towards that.
So, I just love how these three businesses all focus on what MATTERS and inspiring my clients towards living their best life, this of course in turn helps me to live my best life. So it’s a win win win.
I have to say that inspiring and empowering others to LEVEL UP is what I wake up for each day. Through MATTERS Magazine, MATTERS Coaching, You MATTER Retreats, and now just launching MATTERS courses, I get to empower people who are upset or angry about something that happened in their past, or who are overtaken by anxiety, worry, overwhelm about the future, who are living in fear, (of failure, of lack of worth, of not succeeding), people who lack confidence to have the courage to live their life to the max. I know that it is not their fault, just like it was not mine, we are all a product of our upbringing, our surroundings, situations, incidences, we can’t change that, but we can change ‘what now’.
Through my courses and through my coaching and through the magazine, I get to help people level up, to live in the now, to have more confidence and courage than they ever thought possible, to live their life happier and more content with no fear.
My goodness gracious me, this is the most rewarding life. I just jump out of bed each day unable to wait, unable to focus on anything else, THIS MATTERS more than anything on the planet. It is my goal, it is my purpose, it is my future to empower as many people as possible to live the most authentic version of them. To have no fear to be who they are.
Until just last year, I can share that I personally lacked confidence, I hated who I was. I truly believed that I was an absolute fraud. You see I had been trying to lose weight for over 15 years. Whatever I tried, did not work, I felt that I had no control and I just couldn’t do it.
This was devastating to me because I was saying that I could help people to be do and have whatever they wanted, but here I was unable to get the one thing I wanted. A slim body. Unable to achieve the thing that was so important, not just for my confidence, but for my health, for my longevity, for my future. I was pathetic, I was a fraud, I was a failure.
Personally I can tell you that I struggled for years with my weight, the words, “I can’t” came out of my mouth on a daily, sometimes hourly basis when it came to stopping myself from eating the foods that clearly were making me remain overweight.
One day I was coaching a girl and she was telling me over and over again how she couldn’t do something. I have tried this, and tried that, and the other thing. Nothing works for me, I just can’t, she said. I remember saying to her, “I am sick to death of hearing you say I can’t, you have been saying this now for six months, about this same thing. Honestly, it’s enough”. So, I said to her, “Instead of telling me and the world and yourself over and over how you can’t, let’s do a ‘HOW CAN I?’ braintstorm.” So, we brainstormed how she could.
We brainstormed listing everything she could do towards making this happen. We brainstormed everyone she knew who had achieved success in this area. We listed what they had done. I then asked her which of the things on that list she had tried, and which she hadn’t and which she would be prepared to try. It was so successful at and the end of the session she said, “Vickie, I actually can, I know it. I can feel it, this is it.” And it was. From that day she literally changed from I can’t to I can.
However, I left that coaching session and sat in my car and bawled my eyes out. I was her, I was, “ I can’t, I can’t, I can’t”, about my weight loss, I had been up and down and up and down for over ten years. I just couldn’t do it. I truly believed that I could not. I truly believed that I just couldn’t stick to anything. I just can’t, I would say it over and over, I was just like her. That was my truth. When it came to weight loss, the words I CAN’T were my absolute 100% truth.
So, that day was the turning point for me, I went home and brainstormed. “How can I?” I asked myself who I knew who had been successful, what had they done? Could I do that? Would I do that? I knew at that stage about five people who had had gastric sleeve surgery and been very successful. I was scared out of my brain, I wouldn’t do that, I couldn’t do that. Or could I? So, I started my research and within a week had booked in. I lost 48 kilos in a year, yes you read right, 48 kilos. And I can honestly say, it is one of the best things I have ever done in my life. Taking me back to the real me, the me that I always felt like I was inside. When I would look in the mirror and see this other fat version of me, sometimes I didn’t even recognise her. Right up until the age of 40 I was never really overweight, getting to only 69 kilos fully pregnant with my babies. So, stepping onto the scales and seeing 113 kilos come up, well for a long time it just didn’t click that that was me. I felt like a foreigner in my own body.
Having now lost the weight now FOREVER, I feel like me again.
Having brainstormed and come up with something I could do and getting rid of the ‘I CAN’T’ once and for all, I was able to finally get myself back to a healthy me. And quite honestly a happy me.
I now have the confidence to live my life out on the skinny branches, to take risks and to put myself out on a limb. I now have the confidence that I am living my authentic life, I just love walking into an event now, walking into a room now, I feel proud of how I look, of who I am. I love to walk into a shop and buy from the rack, rather than having to go only to a few select shops that had clothes large enough for me.
I now basically eat for nutrition, eating is definitely part of my life, and I love it, but it is no longer MY WHOLE LIFE.
Because of this I can now live my life with absolute PURPOSE AND PASSION and feel confident that I am no longer a fraud, telling people that they can have whatever they want, while all the time wishing I had something different for myself that I just couldn’t get. I now stand tall with pride that I did what it took for me to become the person that I already was inside of me.
I stand tall, beaming with pride of who I am and the abilities that I have to empower others, and you know what I truly believe that each and every human deserves to stand tall and be proud of the person they are, be authentic and not care what others think of them, I truly believe that each and every human deserves to be heard and deserves whatever it is that their heart desires, and my life, my purpose, my passion is to ensure they can.
If you would like to take a peak at an ebook I have written called ‘Wake Up You’ve Got This’ click here for your copy. It’s yours free.
www.VickieMagic.com.au