This isn't just a list of qualifications.
It's why I work the way I do, which matters more.
Why this work matters to me
I built a career for the wrong reasons for a long time. Prestigious roles in media and finance that paid well and didn't light me up, chosen because the money made sense and because nobody had ever shown me a better way to decide. That worked until it didn't.
Then came the part most women recognise. A marriage that ended while I was raising kids. A body that staged a full walkout in my 30s and made its position clear. A late AuDHD diagnosis that explained roughly four decades of confusion in a single appointment. And a career still asking more of me than it gave back, right up until I stopped asking it nicely.
At thirty I finally did something for myself rather than for money or survival, and trained in polarity therapy, then counselling. It took a while longer to work out what I actually wanted to do with that.
Here's what I learned, personally first and professionally after. Women rarely lose capability. What changes is capacity - energy, health, priorities, tolerance - and the strategies that got you here start taking more than they give back.
That isn't weakness and it isn't failure. It's information.
Soul Compass exists because that information deserves to be taken seriously. There was no version of this available when I needed it, so I built the thing I would have wanted.
How I approach this work
I think the story lives in the space between the notes. That's a musician's way of putting it, but it's genuinely how I work. My job isn't to tell you what your story should be. It's to listen closely enough to hear the spaces, and help you find your own voice in there.
In practice that means I ask more than I advise. Nobody arrives here needing another person with opinions about their life - you've got plenty of those already.
The professional foundation underneath it is real. Postgraduate study in career development with a focus on women's careers, evidence-based practice, actual Australian labour market data. Alongside that, years of study in mind-body therapies and Ayurveda.
Those lenses don't replace professional career practice. They deepen it. They're why I understand burnout and capacity strain as physiological realities rather than attitude problems, and why I can spot when a career strategy stopped working because your body changed, not because you stopped trying.
I work holistically, but not vaguely.
Grounded, not prescriptive.
Thoughtful, not rushed
About Narelle Vigor
@soulcompasscareers
Ask me about myself and I could list the roles. Mum, stepmum, wife, ex-wife, daughter, sister, aunt, career counsellor. All true. None of them the answer.
Underneath all of it, I'm a musician.
Music found me before walking did, apparently - crawling to an old record player and hauling myself up on the cabinet to dance. Later my dad rescued an upright piano from the local tip and coaxed it back to life with paperclips and bias binding. It was horribly out of tune. To me it sounded like possibility.
By high school I'd vanish into the music room every lunchtime. Piano, trumpet, drums, anything that made a sound. Jazz mostly - Miles, Duke, Coltrane - because jazz is messy and unpredictable and full of possibility, which suited a brain I wouldn't understand for another thirty years.
Stage fright ended the performing. I never became a professional musician. I also never stopped being one. These days you'll find me between client sessions belting out Missy Higgins at the electric grand in my office, which the neighbours have learned to live with.
I'm over fifty and considerably less worried about what people think than I was at thirty-five, which turns out to be the actual superpower nobody mentions.
Who I work with
Mostly women in midlife. Some organisations. In short, I work with complexity.
Women in mid-life
Women who've accumulated experience, responsibility and a great deal of invisible labour over the years, and who are now asking how the work actually fits with the life, the health and the values.
That includes women who are burnt out, running well past sustainable capacity, late-identified or questioning neurodivergence, or carrying care for other people alongside a job that hasn't adjusted for any of it. For more information you can start here.
Organisations
Career EAP and outplacement for organisations that want to do this properly. Retention support for people who need to renegotiate how they work rather than leave, and transition support when roles genuinely go.
It's work that helps individuals through change while helping the organisation keep its dignity and its reputation intact., start here.
What I actually believe
This is shaped by practice, study and having lived a fair chunk of it, rather than theory alone.
Capacity is not capability
Capacity moves. Energy, health, priorities and tolerance all shift, and pretending otherwise is how capable people end up burnt out and gone. Sustainable work needs an honest relationship with limits, not endless endurance.
The system isn't neutral
Traditional career models were built for someone with an uninterrupted run at it. Somebody benefits from that design and somebody is quietly disadvantaged by it, and it's worth being clear about which is which.
Transition isn't failure
Career change, burnout and redundancy are events, not verdicts. They get treated with respect here, and without shame.
Clarity, not urgency
Decisions made under pressure tend to recreate the exact pattern you were trying to escape. I'd rather you took the time.
Careers happen inside a whole life
Bodies, relationships, health, history, the lot. Work has never existed in isolation from any of it, and advice that pretends otherwise isn't much use.
Difference is information, not deficit
Gender, neurodivergence, health, life stage - all worth understanding properly rather than working around.
Engagement matters more than employment
I'm interested in work that lets you stay connected to your life, not just employed at any cost.
Things I think about a lot…
The questions I keep circling back to, professionally and otherwise.
Why capable, experienced women keep being lost from workplaces that then wonder where all the senior women went.
What happens to a person when their body changes faster than their job description does.
How much unpaid work sits underneath the paid kind, and why none of it appears on a payslip.
Whether a system that rewards endurance and sameness has any idea what it's throwing away.
How to simplify things for someone drowning in competing advice about what she should do next.
What women actually do with the years after fifty, given nobody seems to have planned for them having any.
How I’m Qualified To Help You?
Graduate Certificate in Education (Career Development & Counselling)
Diploma Polarity Therapy
Cert IV Counselling
Cert IV TAE
Dare to Lead training (Brene Brown)
Ayurvedic Wellness Coaching Certificate (Shakti School)
Mental Health First Aid Certified
Almost twenty years in private practice as a counsellor and coach, including over 2500 hours of one-to-one career transition work
Professional Member of the Career Development Association of Australia (CDAA)
Registered Professional Member of the Career Industry Council of Australia (RPCDP)
Lived experience, which isn't a qualification but has taught me more than any of the above
A final note…
If you've made it this far, something about the way you're working probably isn't sitting right.
You don't need a crisis. You don't need to know what comes next. You just need somewhere the question gets taken seriously by someone who's qualified to hold it.
Book a conversation. We'll look at what's actually available to you - no hype, no hard sell, just two women working out where to from here.