Psychotherapist & Learning Tech Consultant
Interactive Consultancies

Adrian L

00:00:02 Currently I work as a psychotherapist,  I work as a counsellor, I work as a workshop leader for personal development workshops and I also have a parallel career as a consultant in learning technology, especially in the field of medical education and veterinary education.

00:00:23 School, in my prep school was awful.  I was bad at sports, I could see no point in ball games and so I was always bottom of the heap.  But once I got to public school, really started to develop some real enthusiasms for science and biology and that was just great.  I was a horse-mad teenager, I rode horses whenever I possibly could and I thought, “Right, well, I’m going to be a horse vet, that’s what I’m going to be.”  But once you get to be a vet and instead of riding them and grooming them and cleaning them, you’re sticking needles in them, then horses are pretty dangerous and violent animals and I found that, no, it wasn’t my thing but I wasted a lot of time pretending that I was a good clinical vet.

00:01:18 Looking back on my career I can see that I have had consistently two parallel tracks running and they are a head based, thinking based work and heart based feeling type work.  I qualified as a vet and then I became a run of the mill veterinary pathologist doing post mortems, doing biopsies and teaching vet students.  Then I got seduced by computers and I realised that the computer was beginning to be useful as an amazing teaching tool and so ultimately I wound up helping university teachers to use computers in their own teaching which I still do.

00:02:01 On the heart based I love to dance.  Ultimately I did something like 55 productions on the amateur stage either as a singer or as a dancer.  Then I went back to class, as it were, to extend my career as an amateur dancer.  What actually happened was that I got spotted by a couple of my teachers who said, “Look, Adrian, you’re a natural teacher, we think you should be teaching in the theatre as well.”  So, I took the most enormous risk and started teaching actors how to move and ultimately that got me choreographic work.  I’ve done three shows as a professional choreographer and then getting interested in performance psychology, eventually I journeyed through into personal development psychology and ultimately trained as a psychotherapist because that seemed to be the next thing.

00:02:50 Did I think that I was going to be doing what I do when I was younger?  Absolutely not.  If you’d have told me that I would be on stage with a girl on my shoulder, with applause coming up from the audience, no way.  If you would have told me that I would have been, have a global reputation advising the University of Sydney as to how to develop its policy around learning technology, no, I’d have laughed in your face.

00:03:16 Work life balance is complete pants.  I was a dangerously workaholic for a good section of my career but…over my multiple careers.  I’m doing better now.  I do take breaks, I do take vacations but I tend to be a bit of a compulsive worker.  I’m too passionate.

00:03:42 What’s next?  Do you know, I don’t know.  There is something else.  I do know I’ve got more choreography in me if I get the chance but what else I don’t know.  I also feel that I maybe need to slow down before that whatever it is will reveal itself.

ENDS