Before Migrating Back to Australia, I Hired a Life Coach to Challenge My Bullshit: The Extraordinary Version

The Difference Between Moving to Australia at 25 and Returning at 40

The first time I moved to Australia, in 2014, I didn't plan my life. I barely planned the trip. And honestly? That was the whole point.

At the time, I had what most people would probably call an amazing job. International travel, decent money, living with my parents, and spending most of the year on the company’s dime. I was 25, financially comfortable, professionally credible, and equipped with the specific brand of dangerous confidence that belongs exclusively to people who still think life goes up in a straight line forever. It's a beautiful delusion. I recommend it to nobody and understand completely why everyone has it.

The career was quietly falling apart, though. I'd been hired to build a local engineering team in Brazil. Instead, I ended up in a forced arrangement under a boss whose leadership style could be generously described as retired navy captain discovers people aren't submarines. We didn't exactly flourish together. So while still employed, I started secretly putting a getaway plan together. Once the visa came through and takeoff was a few weeks away, I quit. No dramatic speech. No heroic exit. Just a man quietly removing himself from a situation before it gave him a permanent twitch.

I also refused to research anything. No videos, no forums, no cost-of-living spreadsheets. Nothing. I wanted to arrive with as few mental images as possible and let the place hit me directly in the face. Looking back, there's something beautiful about that. Slightly deranged, yes, but beautiful nonetheless. In a world where people watch seventeen reviews before buying a toaster, I moved countries with the emotional preparation of a golden retriever entering a dog park for the first time.

I don't regret a single second of it. That version of me got on the plane, took the risk of leaving behind a good job and a respectable life laid out for him. I followed my instinct, and everything changed from then on. Australia became one of the most important places in my life, second only to my parents' home. And the woman who, at the time, held that emotionally ambiguous place of friend with benefits, the one with a secret smile she used only for me, is now my wife.

So I'll only mock 2014 me a little bit. He had courage, savings, and a migration agent. Pretty much everything that makes up a solid starter pack.

The first time I moved to Australia, I had an escape route and an adventure. This time, I need architecture. Which is deeply annoying for an engineer to admit, given that we've spent generations pretending architects are just people who draw beautiful things while leaving us to explain why your walls are structural. But in this case, the metaphor fits. I don't need just calculations. I need a great design. A blueprint. A life that can actually hold weight.

Because I'm not 25 anymore. I'll be almost 40 by the time I plan to take off.

I'm married, and Thali isn't some side character in my personal reinvention story, patiently clapping in the background while I go find myself with a backpack and unresolved ambitions. She's a whole person with her own needs, rhythms, identity, friendships, and future. This move has to make sense for her too, otherwise it doesn't make sense at all.

We're also actively trying to bring mini-us into the world. Not in the vague "one day, maybe, who knows" way people use to avoid commitment. We're trying to put a bun in the oven right now. Yesterday, if possible. And that means the decisions we make now might shape where our kids grow up, which schools they attend, what community surrounds them, how they have their nonnas and pops around, and probably several future therapy sessions we're already budgeting for. No pressure.

At 25, migration's a leap. At almost 40, it becomes a design problem with feelings. The question isn't whether we can land somewhere new and figure it out. I know we can. We've done that. The question is whether the life we build there can actually hold the weight of who I am now, not just the appetite of who we were a decade ago.

So the first serious thing I did wasn't book flights or scroll through Sydney apartments at midnight. Although I've absolutely done that too, because apparently I enjoy emotional suffering with floor plans.

The first serious thing I did was hire a life coach before migrating — someone to challenge my bullshit.

Why I Hired a Life Coach Before Migrating, Not a Migration Agent

Not a migration agent. Not a lawyer. A life and career coach. Someone to help me think about who I'm trying to become when I get there, not just how to get there. Because getting into a country is one problem. Building a life worth returning to is a completely different one.

And that's the first question my coach challenged me to face. Not the small career question, or "what job can I get?", or "how do I recreate the safest version of my old life in a new country?" No. The bigger question. The more dangerous one. The one that feels indulgent until you realise it might be the whole point.

What would be absolutely extraordinary?

Career Design: Where Engineering, Coaching and Psychology Finally Meet

Professionally, the extraordinary version starts with an admission that is both obvious and slightly inconvenient: I've been an engineer my entire adult life.

It's the language I speak natively. The room I can walk into blindfolded. The identity that makes sense on paper, in interviews, and to anyone who needs a clean explanation at dinner. But for the past seven years, something else has been getting louder. Since 2019, after completing Tony Robbins coaching training, I've worked with private clients as a life and results coach. I love the work itself. What I do not love, what makes me want to walk calmly into the freezing ocean and let LinkedIn finish me off, is hunting clients on the internet.

So the question my coach and I started exploring wasn't whether to abandon coaching. It's how to take it somewhere I could actually shine without requiring therapy on a daily basis.

One answer keeps surfacing: people and culture. Not admin HR. Not birthday cupcakes and passive aggressive policy emails. I mean the kind of work that sits close to the business. People partner, business partner, organisational development, leadership support, culture and performance. The kind of role where I'm working alongside managers and executives to shape how people actually function inside a company. Not just how the company describes itself on the careers page while everyone quietly burns out in Slack and calls it alignment.

This pathway makes sense because it connects pieces I already have. Engineering gave me systems thinking, business acumen, and the ability to operate under pressure without becoming decorative furniture. Coaching gave me the human side: goals, resistance, identity, behaviour, fear, self-sabotage, all the messy stuff that refuses to fit inside a Gantt chart. A psychology degree is giving me the academic foundation to back it up with something more rigorous than motivational confetti.

There are gaps. I know that. I may not enter at the same seniority I'd have in a pure engineering environment. But I'm not starting from scratch either. I've managed hundreds of people. Worked with thousands of clients. Built things, sold things, fixed things, led teams, and survived enough corporate dysfunction to recognise it wearing a name badge. That's not nothing. In fact, that's quite a lot. It just happens to come in a slightly weird shaped box.

The number I had in my head was $85,000. Sensible. Respectable. Conservatively adult. The kind of number that wears sunscreen and checks the tyre pressure before a road trip. But this chapter isn't here to wear sensible shoes.

The extraordinary version is landing a people and culture role inside a company that genuinely excites me: tech, SaaS, EdTech, or a values-driven organisation where culture isn't a poster on the wall but something that actually shapes performance. A place where my engineering background, coaching experience, entrepreneurial history, and slightly unreasonable enthusiasm for human behaviour aren't seen as a confusing career mash, but as exactly the combination that makes me interesting.

And if we're being properly extraordinary, the right number has gone up. It's now $150,000 to start.

Not because money is the whole point. But because money changes the shape of a life. It changes where we can live, how we support a family, how often we fly back to Brazil, and how much breathing room we have while building something new.

The extraordinary version also includes flexibility. Not fake flexibility, where a company says "work from anywhere" and then quietly expects you to be emotionally available inside a two kilometre radius of the office. Real flexibility. The kind where spending a few months in Brazil with family doesn't mean pressing pause on my career. The kind where I can be present for the people I love here while still building the life we want there.

That's not a job. That's a bridge.

Choosing Where to Build a Life: Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne?

The extraordinary version isn't just about the job. A job happens somewhere. A life happens around it. Annoyingly, humans aren't LinkedIn profiles with legs.

And if we're doing the ridiculous, dangerous, beautiful exercise of asking what would be absolutely extraordinary, then the city matters. The suburb matters. The walk to the beach matters. Life isn't lived in annual income. It's lived on Tuesday afternoons, grocery runs, morning walks, and the quiet feeling of coming home without needing to convince yourself you made the right call.

Brisbane is the easy love story. Thali and I lived there for five years, and in many ways it already feels like home. I know the roads embarrassingly well because when we ran a frozen meals business, I was also the delivery man, a human GPS with mild lower back trauma and a Tupperware empire. Greater Brisbane, north to Noosa, south to Ballina, twice a week, every week for years. If there was a roundabout between Brisbane and Byron, I probably had an emotional relationship with it.

But Brisbane isn't just familiar because of streets. It's familiar because of people. Friends who feel like family. A community we actually built. Our families visited us there. And then there's UQ's St Lucia campus, where I started my psychology and neuroscience degree in 2020 and used to show up even without classes, just to sit among people who were evolving into something. I savoured every drop of it, knowing it was temporary. That campus did something to me I still haven't fully named, which is inconvenient because naming stuff and pretending to understand them is kind of my jam.

Then there's Sydney. Sydney is Australia pretending to be dramatic, which is adorable if you grew up in Rio de Janeiro. Australians describe it like some chaotic urban beast, and I'm standing there thinking, mate, this is a coastal city with a gym membership and a mild superiority complex. By Aussie standards, intense. By mine, it's still wearing floaties in the deep end.

That said, we loved it. Bondi Beach gave us one kind of beauty. Dee Why gave us another. We lived there during the hardest season of our lives. Finances collapsing, marriage under siege, everything falling from the ceiling at once, and somehow Sydney was still magnificent. A city that stays gorgeous while you're falling apart has earned some serious respect. Or at least a second inspection. There's also a Flamengo crowd that meets regularly at 4am to watch football like sleep is a colonial conspiracy, which is the most Rio thing I've ever witnessed outside of Rio.

And then there's Melbourne. The least familiar, which is part of the appeal. Every visit, it felt alive in a different way. Street art, live music, strong coffee opinions, that slightly moody creative energy of a city that owns several black turtlenecks and means it. Melbourne feels like the kind of place that would correct your pronunciation of "existentialism" and then recommend an amazing vegan bakery.

My university is there. The company I'm quietly obsessed with working for again is headquartered there too. The Jewish community is strong, which matters deeply to Thali. Professionally, academically, socially, it keeps making sense in ways I can't ignore, which is rude, because I was hoping my heart would just pick one city and save us both the spreadsheet.

The extraordinary version combines the apparently impossible: inner city energy, beach within walking distance, university atmosphere, cultural texture, strong community, and enough coastal light to make daily life feel like a genuine choice rather than a survival strategy.

Is that too much to ask? Obviously.

Will reality arrive eventually, clipboard in hand, ready to ruin my party? Absolutely.

But that's not what today is for.

The Heart of a Life: Marriage, Children and Belonging

And then there's the part of the extraordinary version that matters more than the job, the city, the suburb, the salary, the campus, or whatever spiritually cleansing fantasy I have about living within walking distance of good coffee and saltwater.

There is us.

Thali and I have been together for 11 years, and we're still properly ridiculous about each other. Not in the Instagram anniversary post way, where two people pretend marriage is just sunsets, matching linen, and emotional stability. I mean in the real way. The we-have-seen-some-things-and-somehow-still-choose-each-other way.

We went through the permanent residency marathon together. Hospitality, construction, cleaning, waitering. The kind of work where the main intellectual demand isn't losing your soul before clock-off. After that, instead of resting or socially drowning in booze like normal mammals, we studied for the bloody IELTS exam, which I only took 9 times. NINE!!! At some point it stopped being an English test and became a legally sanctioned psychological experiment.

We also spent almost three years in Biloela, a country town of five thousand people in central Queensland, which in Rio is not a town, it's a moderately busy street. We didn't hate it. It gave us what we needed at the time. But it taught us something useful: we're city people. We need movement, culture, different languages in the air, restaurants that don't close emotionally at 7.45pm, and the possibility of walking outside and feeling the world's still happening.

The extraordinary version has to honour that. Cosmopolitan enough for us to feel alive. Grounded enough for our family to grow inside it.

And family matters now, because we're actively trying to bring little-us into the world. Which means the city is no longer just about what we enjoy. It's about schools, hospitals, parks, safety, grandparents visiting, future routines, future chaos, future tiny humans asking impossible questions while we're late for something.

It also has to include Jewish life. We aren't religious in the traditional sense. I personally psyched myself out of mandatory religious classes at nine and have been spiritually freelance ever since. But I've seen Thali light up in reform Jewish spaces, and I've seen what it gives her. Not obligation or pressure. Something softer. Belonging. Memory. A way back into something she once had to push away in order to become herself.

So yes, the extraordinary version includes a strong Jewish community. Not because we're building some perfect religious life from a brochure, but because I want Thali to have full access to that part of herself. I want our kids, when life gives us that gift, to inherit roots and wings, which sounds dangerously like something embroidered on a pillow, but happens to be true.

That's the real dream underneath all this. Not just a great job. Not just a beautiful suburb. Not just a beach, a campus, or a city with better coffee than its self-esteem can handle.

The extraordinary version is a life where our marriage can breathe, our children can grow, Thali can belong, I can evolve, and the whole thing feels less like another migration experiment and more like a home we chose on purpose.

Which brings me back to the question that started this whole thing:

What would be absolutely extraordinary?

Maybe it isn't one thing. Maybe it's the rare, stubborn, slightly unreasonable combination of all of them.