Shantelle Thompson OAM is a dreamweaver warrior and Barkindji warrior, weaving together her lived, learned and earned experiences to inspire and empower people to write their own story. Here, she yarns about the importance of aligning values with capacity and having purpose in your work.

Shantelle: Morning Sis, it’s really good to be here. Just want to begin by acknowledging and paying respects to Country and to our Elders, where I’m based on Latji Latji, Nyeri Nyeri and and our neighbours, the Barkindji. I’m across the river from my own country., so it feels a bit weird to me to be saying that and just want to pay respects and shout out to our community down here and the ongoing resilience and support work that our Elders and our leaders do in our community to keep our Mob going.

My name’s Shantelle Thompson. I’m a proud Barkindji Ngyampaa European woman of descent. I identify with my Barkindji and Ngyampaa; that’s who I am, that’s how I move through the world.

I am a mum of six. I’m based on Latji Latji Country in the North-West of Victoria, and I’m just really excited to be here to have a yarn about all these things that are just so important and that we don’t often get to yarn about.

I’m known in my community as the Barkindji Warrior because of my my fighting background and I’m what I call a life and dream walker. So, I weave together different roles and I walk my life guided by my dreams.

Larisha: I really want you to tell us a little bit about yourlife right now and everything else that you’ve got on the go.

Shantelle: Look, it’s definitely not ideal. Doing what I’m doing is not what I want to be doing, in the context. And I think that’s really important to start with because I am busy, but I don’t want to be busy and I am doing a lot of different things and spreading myself too thin, which was not a message I would have shared prior to 2022.

It wasn’t until my oldest daughter started Year 10…. So, her schedule last year was she was in Year 10, she was Vice Captain of her school, she was working for me in my foundation and supporting me in my other business. She was a full-time, her own full-time athlete in Brazilian jiu jitsu., doing cultural things, being the oldest sibling. And on top of that, she decided to take on a Year 12 or Year 11 subject at school and try and do a TAFE course. And when I saw her schedule, I thought ‘This kid is setting herself up for burnout’. And then I really had to start to step back from that and look in the mirror and say, well, where’s she learning this from?

We are women with high capacity. We’re very high functioning. We can do a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the right thing.

So right now, currently I’m like I say, based on Latji Latji Country. So I grew up in this community, moved home at April 2020 when COVID really became a thing and showed that it was going to have a hold over the world for the foreseeable future, not knowing what that was going to look like. So currently my current roles, we have six children, five at home, my nieces, we count her as our kinship daughter and my oldest is 16. I have 13-year-old twins. We have a 13-year old foster daughter, eight-year-old niece, and a 20-month-old who thinks he’s going on 15.

I have three businesses. I have the Kiilalaana Foundation and our current focus is on our program where we work with young First Nations women, the ages of 11 up to20, around self-determination and sovereignty and self-empowerment around who do they want to be in the world before they’re expected to belong to other people and building their cultural strength and their capacity to write their own story and walk their own path in life.

I have my storytelling and consulting business, where I share my lived experience and my story through podcast, stages, and I do consulting in the reconciliation space, sharing my lived experience of being an Aboriginal woman to try and support the reconciliation movement and make change, and just sharing my experience around wellbeing and the warrior heart.

A lot of this came about because I’ve been a full time athlete or an elite athlete for nine years now and I’ve had to try and find a way to take care of my family, work, often studying, competing and being a mum. And it just wasn’t sustainable.

In 2016, I had the opportunity to speak at a youth program and they said, ‘Look, all you need is an invoice and an ABN and I Googled how to do both of those, and that was my start in business.

So, being the founder of a program supporting our young women in our community really held a mirror up to me, and next to being a mum around going, “Who am I being in the world? And how am I going about being that woman in the world and learning my culture and supporting the next generation?”

When you raise kids, you learn very quickly that they do what you do. They don’t do what you say necessarily. And for me it’s been reflecting a lot on what I’m doing and where I’m at in my life so that I can start to realign my values to my capacity and what’s important in my life. And that’s not always easy to do considering financial constraints, resources, responsibilities.

So, I’ve just made a return back to competition in jiu jitsu, which I explored in 2022, thought I was retiring and have felt the calling to come back. I’ve just had my first competition for the year, which has left me ranked number one in Oceania for the month, number two, I think for adults and I’m in the I’m in the top five in the world for in this particular federation for the master’s level and top ten in the world for the adults. And for me, that’s really setting the stage for where I want to take my sporting career because we have ten young women, young Aboriginal women that train jiu jitsu herein Mildura.

I guess to get back to your question right now, I’m a mum, an entrepreneur and a businesswoman trying to figure out how to make the business both profitable and purposeful to support the work that I’m doing in the world to have impact and allow me to take care of my family in a way that allows me to have wellbeing and be thriving as well.

I’m the current leader of the Kiilalaana Foundation and I’m reassessing the role that I’m playing in that, recognising that I’m at the edges of my capacity to lead this organisation to the next level. The role that I actually play is not the role that I’m equipped or capable to play. And a lot of that was driven by Jacinda Ardern stepping down from her role as Prime Minister, when she had the courage to come through and say, I’ve recognised that I’ve come to the end of my ability to serve this role for, for what it needs and who it needs to be in it, and her courage to recognise that her capacity had to serve that role really encouraged me to look at the role that I’m playing in my own organisation and the role I’m playing, supporting out being a mum of a young family. Never having built an organisation before, but also choosing to do these other things of being a storyteller and taking my story to a global stage. Also, going back to full time sport, which is a self-funded sport. Both me and my daughter now have international careers as well.

So that’s why it’s really important for me in this stage that I’m really reassessing where I’m at and how I’m going to move forward in the transitions that are going to have to be made to do that, because there’s a lot of us doing a lot of things as Blak women and we just got to sometimes we are put into positions where no one else is going to do it and we get up and do it, but then we sacrifice ourselves in service of others. But then there’s the risk of burnout. There’s also the risk of others not playing or doing their fair share to carry the load of the work, so that it’s relied on a few of us rather than the many of us. And that’s kind of where I’m sitting in my current roles in my life.

To hear more from Shantelle, visit tomorrowmoney.co/rbw.