Reminder: Focused Passion Makes Luck Happen

My head is still spinning.

I’m writing this post to get my feet back onto solid ground. On Friday last week, I travelled to Sydney to receive funding for a pilot program. We sat in a room with 36 other grant recipients, most of whom were strangers to us. But moving forward, everyone who attended will be stakeholders in Australia’s first community where family violence can no longer exist.

For a decade, I’ve been searching for answers on how we can end family violence. It’s a path I hadn’t planned to take, but when I became aware of the scale of the issue in our communities, I couldn’t walk away without contributing.

Domestic and family violence has infiltrated 20% of Australian homes. According to a recent Australian Child Maltreatment Study, almost 40% of Australians have been exposed to domestic violence in childhood, with long-term consequences in adulthood, such as a higher likelihood of mental disorders. While some parts of the sector say our nation is at a family violence crisis point, it is a “national emergency” that has been occurring since colonisation.

My search for answers led to the creation of Run Against Violence and the Broken Hill to Sydney Virtual Team Challenge. Those platforms allowed me to engage in conversations at every level of the community across Australia. For ten years, I’ve been asking three key questions:

• Why haven’t past efforts to end family violence succeeded?
• What factors will drive our success?
• What are the roadblocks to getting there?

As the answers emerged, I began building the RAV Blueprint model, which primarily existed as a picture in my mind and a few slides in a presentation.

Now, it will rise above the page and become a living, breathing entity in our communities.

On the surface, it looks like I got lucky.

I was curled up in the lounge, watching the Paris Olympics, when the news came through. My mobile phone sat next to me, pinging with the madness of RAV chatter. This year’s RAV Challenge commences on 30 August, so things are hectic.

I knew the odds were good that the pilot program would be supported, but I dared not believe it because it seemed to be an opportunity born of pure luck.

A chance conversation 11 years ago set me on the path toward family violence prevention.

Random roadside meetings led to the creation of Run Against Violence 10 years ago.

Three years ago, I was going to skip a local networking event because I was tired. At the last minute, I decided to go and meet Pearl.

Pearl invited me to speak at a local Rotary club, where I met Kerrie.

Kerrie turned out to live 6 km away and has an incredible international track record for leadership and governance. What is the chance of that when the hamlet where we live has a population of about 100?

There was no chance I was letting her walk away.

Two years ago, Kerrie joined the RAV Committee and began working with me to finetune the organisation’s future direction, including developing the RAV Blueprint.

That changed the shape of the conversations I was having in the community.

Four years ago, a chance conversation led to a meeting and resulted in a partnership with NAPCAN and RAV’s $400,000 national investment in respectful relationship education.

I’ve often talked with the NAPCAN team about the RAV Blueprint, getting feedback and bouncing ideas. One day, they chatted with a stakeholder who commented on a frustration they felt within their community. NAPCAN connected the dots and made the introduction.

A Zoom call became a trip to Sydney, which resulted in an invitation to file a significant grant submission within six days. Kerrie and I pushed everything aside, sweated the detail and made it happen.

Lucky timing. Chance conversations.

Right time. Right place.

The fickle finger of fate poked us in the right direction.

But our luck didn’t just happen, we co-created it.

My luck didn’t happen by chance.

There’s no way I could have predicted we would reach this point. Ten, five or one year ago none of this was in my plan.

As Steve Jobs famously said in his 2005 Stanford commencement address; “The dots only ever connect looking backward.”

When I dared to imagine the RAV Blueprint I knew I was moving into new territory, like a sailor traversing a wide, unexplored ocean. I used RAV’s mission as my compass, my passion gave wind to the sails and it has delivered me to a place that is far more extraordinary than anything I could have imagined.

Those meetings and moments didn’t happen by chance.

The method I’ve developed to set goals channels my passion and builds my self-belief so I can expose the gaps in my knowledge and open my mind to learning. I chose to give it all to the mission, to have courage, and to leave the safety of the crowd. I decided to learn and invest thousands upon thousands of volunteer hours to get the work done without knowing I would arrive at a destination.

Focused passion created a flywheel of energy and momentum that generated those chance meetings and opportunities. Focused passion made the luck happen.