Specialist Workshops
Inspire Workshop
Sustainable success for financial advisers
Tuesday 24 November | 1:00pm - 3:15pm
Room 210 & 211
CPD hours will be awarded for this workshop
Session Overview
Financial advisers are trusted to guide clients through uncertainty, complexity and some of life’s most significant decisions. Yet behind every client conversation sits an adviser balancing emotional labour, business demands, compliance obligations, leadership responsibilities, and personal commitments. The challenge is no longer simply time management—it’s managing the mental, emotional, and cognitive load of modern life.
At the same time, AI and technologies are reshaping our profession, creating new opportunities to reduce pressure, automate routine work and create capacity for what clients’ value most: human connection, empathy, trust, and meaningful relationships.
This interactive workshop explores how you can build sustainable success as a financial adviser, demanding both technical excellence and human connection.
Drawing on behavioural science, wellbeing strategies and practical technology solutions, participants will examine the hidden factors that contribute to stress, burnout, and decision fatigue, and discover how technology and mindfulness practices can work together to support your professional and personal lives.
Through facilitated discussion, (audience polling, practical reflection exercises, AI demonstrations and hands-on wellbeing activities), you’ll gain practical strategies to take away and use in your professional and personal lives to reduce mental load, increase capacity, reclaim time and energy, and focus on the things that matter most. Whether you’re leading a practice, managing clients, raising a family, building your career—or all the above—this session will help you work smarter, recover better, and create a more sustainable path to success.
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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