Specialist Workshops
Inspire Workshop
Breaking the busy cycle:
Creating capacity for what matters most
Tuesday 24 November | 1:00pm - 3:15pm
Room 210 & 211
Earn up to 2 CPD hours - Client Care & Practice
Session Overview
Financial advice is demanding work. Between client expectations, competing priorities and the pressure advisers can place on themselves, it is easy to operate at full capacity without stopping to consider whether the way you are working is actually sustainable.
This highly interactive workshop invites you to step back and examine the mental, emotional, and cognitive load shaping how you work. Through reflection, discussion, and practical exercises, you’ll identify the beliefs and patterns that consume capacity, explore strategies for setting boundaries and recovery.
You’ll also consider the choices you make when capacity becomes available, including capacity created through technology and automation, and how to protect that space rather than simply filling it with more work.
Leave with practical strategies, greater clarity about what matters most and a personal action plan you can put into practice immediately.
Meet your speakers
Amanda Balcombe
Health & Mental Fitness Coach, Still Wellness
Amanda Balcombe is the founder of Still Wellness and an award-winning Health & Mental Fitness Coach, with a focus in stress management, burnout recovery, and mental fitness. After 17 years in corporate as a Financial Adviser, she understands firsthand the pressures of high performance and the hidden toll it can take, having experienced burnout in 2021.
Through her science-backed approach, Amanda equips leaders and teams with practical tools to strengthen mental fitness, build resilience, and navigate stress and pressure more effectively.
Amanda is a Professional Member of the Health Coaches Australia and New Zealand Association and was named the HCANZA Health Coach of the Year in 2025.
Her mission is simple: to empower people to build the mental fitness to perform, lead, and live well—without burning out.
Karen Eley
Behavioural Money Coach, Women Talking Finance
Karen Eley brings together more than 25 years in financial services, over 18 years as a financial adviser, and deep expertise in money psychology, behavioural change and financial wellbeing.
Having co-owned and led a financial planning practice with 26 staff, Karen understands the demands placed on advisers — the client responsibility, commercial pressure, compliance load, emotional labour and constant juggling between work and life. She also brings lived experience as a single mother of two, giving her a grounded understanding of the pressures many professional women face in managing time, energy, ambition and family life.
In 2019, Karen sold her share in her financial planning practice and founded Women Talking Finance, a money coaching and financial wellbeing business that blends financial education, behavioural science, psychology-informed coaching and practical life systems.
Over the past seven years, Karen has coached hundreds of individuals, including financial advisers across Australia, helping them explore the beliefs, patterns and behaviours that influence their money, confidence, career decisions, time management and wellbeing.
Karen is a Certified Money Coach (CMC)®, qualified financial adviser and experienced facilitator who has delivered more than 200 financial wellbeing workshops for organisations including Medibank, Cisco, Rio Tinto and Discovery Parks. She is also a regular media commentator, having appeared on television, radio, podcasts and news media, including ABC News Breakfast.
Karen’s facilitation style is warm, practical, engaging and highly relatable. She combines professional credibility with real-life honesty, helping participants feel both understood and equipped to take action.
In this FAAA Inspire workshop, Karen will share psychology-informed strategies, adviser-specific insights and practical tools to help time-poor female advisers reduce mental load, use AI and technology more effectively, challenge the mindset of busyness, and create more ease, capacity and confidence in their professional and personal lives.
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