In the inaugural episode of "Unmasked Minds," Sarah Wills introduces herself and explains why she started the podcast: to provide relatable stories, tools, and advice that help women overcome their own challenges. She recounts her early life as one of seven children in a fragmented family, describing her mother’s alcoholism and her role as a parentified child, as well as her father’s emphasis on financial stability, which together forged a schema of unrelenting standards and approval‑seeking. Sarah excelled academically, earning three university degrees and a 15‑year corporate career that culminated in senior leadership, a path that satisfied her need for external validation. At age 30, after marriage, motherhood, and a deep sense of emptiness, she confronted a mid‑life crisis, self‑soothing with alcohol and sleeping pills, and a painful divorce. The sudden accident and eventual death of her mother forced her to re‑evaluate her values, leading her to leave her corporate job, seek intensive therapy, and pursue a more holistic, biopsychosocial approach to health. She trained as a personal trainer, created the "W Tribe" – a free morning program combining mindfulness and fitness for women – and expanded it into a women’s wellness centre on the Central Coast that emphasized inclusive, judgment‑free community. Recognising that many women’s struggles stem from mental blocks rooted in childhood, she returned to university in her mid‑30s, earned a psychology degree, and began practicing as a psychologist while continuing to run intensives, retreats, and online programs. A successful retreat venue, Glen Eden Estate, was later sold, freeing up time for this podcast. Throughout, Sarah acknowledges the messiness of balancing roles as a mother, wife, psychologist, and entrepreneur, and commits to sharing raw, authentic experiences to help listeners live more authentic lives.
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So it is the last day of 2025 and I promised myself and my community that I would start a podcast in 2025. And here we are on the 31st of December, me finally getting my shit together to record the first episode. Nothing like a last minute bit of urgency to create the DOP needed for me to get this done. I guess one of the reasons I've procrastinated with this for so long is because I often ask myself, why me? Why would women want to log in and give their precious time to listen to me rattle on about my life and the things that I know I want to be here, to be one of those women that you can look to and think, yeah, she's done a lot and yeah, she's been through a lot, but I see myself in her. What she talks about is really relatable and not only is it relatable, she talks about ways of overcoming it. She gives tools, she gives advice and she shows us that it is possible for us to overcome our own situations or to move through our own lives in ways that align with us better. So that is why I'm here. I am Sarah the psych and welcome to Unmasked Minds, the podcast. So I thought I would start episode one with a little bit about me and how I got to where I am now. So thinking back to my childhood, I'm 43 years old now. I grew up in a family, a really large family. I'm one of seven siblings and my mum and dad separated when I was about 6 years old. Now, whilst there was a lot of love in my family and a lot of connection with my siblings and my parents were physically there for me, I am able to also acknowledge that a lot of my needs weren't met and a lot of what I experienced was childhood trauma and it has affected who I am today and who I have been for my life. Now, just very briefly, my mother had a really difficult life herself and grew up with a lot of adversity and her way of coping with a lot of mental health challenges was to self soothe. So she had a lot of mental health issues and she had a lot of addiction issues as well. So my mum was an alcoholic for as long as I can remember. Now she was also an incredibly beautiful, compassionate, wonderful woman, but she didn't have the support she needed to move through those challenges and she relied on alcohol to do that. Now don't get me wrong, I can see it from this lens now, but there are many, many times throughout my life where I hated her. And I resented her and I was deeply, deeply angry for this life that I was given and this childhood that sometimes felt like it was robbed from me as I was parentified and needed to look after her and look after my siblings in ways that children shouldn't have to. On the other side there was my dad who again was present, but he's a Chinese man in Australia in the 40s and he had a really, really tough life as well. And so he really value financial stability and security and achievement. And whilst that was great and that would push me to achieve more and be more, it also impacted me in a way that I started to believe when my brain was growing and wiring. I believed that who I was as a person wasn't enough. My validation came from what I achieved. And as all children do, all we want is unconditional love, support and validation from our caregivers. And when that's not given in a way that resonates with you, you will change and find ways to get that from your parents. And so for me, I developed what we call a schema of unrelenting standards and approval seeking where essentially in order to feel enough, I will do whatever it took to impress or to get feedback from people around me, whether that was my parents, my teachers, other people's parents. And you know, when I was growing up, we call it now, the good girl generation, I became the good girl. And I would jump through whatever hoops people wanted me to jump through because that was the only way I would feel some level of love and connection and acceptance. As I grew up, my achievements became a part of my identity. And so I did really well in my hsc. In hindsight, there were so many challenges I faced, but I just sucked it up and got through it. And then I went off to university. And when I went to university, I also started working in the corporate world. Now let me tell you, the corporate world is a haven of, for people with approval seeking and unrelenting standards schemas. Because basically in the corporate world you can see the path. You can see if I do this, this and this and I will get this level of acceptance and validation and feedback, it'll be a promotion or a pay rise or a well done. And so for me, I left the family unit and went into this environment where I felt so sad, seen and so accepted. As a 19 year old I got into this like talent program where they would pay all my university fees and give me the time to study as well as move me through different roles in the organization. And very quickly I started to feel at home in this place where they valued me and saw me and you know, in my eyes, loved me in a way. By the age of 24, I'd finished three university degrees. My Bachelor of Management with a double major in accounting and entrepreneurship, my cpa, which is my accounting degree, and also my mba, which is a Master's of business. Because I just had this space where I could do and be whatever everyone wanted me to be. So I did it all. And look, don't get me wrong, it served me very well. I spent 15 years with this company and I traveled the world. I worked through all different departments, finance, sales, operations. And I ended up in a really senior leadership role, managing a team of hundreds of men in a manufacturing environment. It was such an experience. But fast forward to turning 30 and all of a sudden I was married, I had two small children and something started to shift within me. All of a sudden, this jumping through every hoop that everybody gave me didn't feel like enough anymore. And so whilst on paper I looked like I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve. I had this incredible career, I had investment properties, I was married, I had healthy children. I wasn't happy. And it took me a long time to admit that because I felt so much guilt and so much shame in acknowledging that I wasn't happy. There was something not right. And the way I coped with that misalignment for years was through self soothing. So I would go to work all day and come home to this beautiful family. I would drink a bottle of wine and then take sleeping pills to go to sleep. And so whilst I looked happy on the outside, I certainly wasn't on the inside. But I had no tools or no idea why or what was going on. And I don't think that's from a lack of parenting, although I certainly think parents can support their children through that. But I think it was just this lack of alignment with what was truly important to me. I had lived my life based on what everybody else had expected of me and never actually, actually asked myself, Sarah, who are you and what's important to you? What is it that you want out of this life? And I think as I said, the big shift for me was becoming a mother and starting to realize that this doesn't quite feel right. Now while I was sitting in this discomfort, there were problems in my marriage and I had this dark night of the soul, as they call it in that book, Eat, Pray Love, where within one week I left my husband because I was deeply unhappy with myself and the relationship. And in that same week, my dear mother had an accident. Now, I say accident because it wasn't planned. However, after a lifetime of mental health challenges, including suicide ideation and attempts and severe alcoholism, it also wasn't a shock that she had such a severe accident. And the accident landed her in intensive care for a couple of months before she eventually passed. Now I spent a lot of time sitting next to her bed in intensive care, asking myself what matters, what is important in life. I've lived this life up until this point thinking that my career and my achievements and being successful and independent is what mattered to me. And all of a sudden it didn't. So I called on some work that I'd recently done, some values work in this wonderful women's leadership program called compass. And I started to ask myself, sarah, what do you want? What do you want? Reminds me of that scene in the Notebook, what do you want? And I really started to say, what do I want? If it was me who passed away, what would my children be saying about me? I know they were too young, they were two and one at the time, but it was really, really confronting when I realized they would likely say something like, mum's not really present. Mom can be fun, but most of the time she's distracted by her phone or her BlackBerry as it was back then. She cares more about work than us. And for me, I just wasn't happy. I wasn't adventurous and playful and fun and spontaneous like I used to be, like I wanted to be. I knew things had to shift so that I could be the mother that I wanted to be. But I also knew things had to shift so I could be the woman that I wanted to be. So I walked away from my career 15 years, which was not just a job to me, it was a safety net. I was now a single mom, mother with two young kids, so it was a financial safety net. But it was also the place where I felt most loved and most accepted ever in my life. And I had to do the work. I went into intensive therapy and started working with a psychologist who deeply helped me to understand what was happening both in the breakdown of my marriage and in the process of grieving and mourning the loss of my mom and. And in navigating who the hell is Sarah anyway? And so what I did was I left my career. And I just thought to myself, I need the space. I need space to even start working out what the questions are, let alone what are the answers to these questions that I have. And as soon as I left my job and I sold my investment properties with which frankly the bank owned anyway, and I bought this little cottage on the lake for me and my two young children and we spent a couple of weeks just bike riding and just, you know, being present. Now, no surprise for me as an ADHD woman that things moved fairly quickly from there. I decided to sign up to become a personal trainer. Now, the story behind that is in this space I went, I joined this fitness program and I just met this group of people who were incredibly supportive. And I realized that for my healing, fitness and community were so important. I started to realize the importance of this biopsychosocial lens of health. If we have our biology, our body healthy and moving and thriving, and we also have our psycho so our mental health, our mind thriving, and we have social out social connections thriving, that is where women thrive. That is where we are at our best. And as I created the space to create that for myself, things started to fall into place for me. My values started to become clearer and I went and became a personal trainer. I wasn't sure at the time why I started pt, but as I was going through the requirements to get registered, I had to work with people. And so I called on a few women that I knew from my life and asked them if they'd let me run a program for them. So these eight women would come and meet at my house at 5 o' clock in the mornings and allow me to practice my personal training skills on them. But I had one condition. I would do this for them for free if they allowed me to trial another part of the program. So what if we could combine mind and body in these sessions? It was like everybody already knew they needed fitness, but people, women didn't know that they needed mindfulness as well. So these women would come to my house at five o' clock in the morning and we would sit around a heater in my garage while my small children slept inside. And we would do mindfulness. So I would introduce topics such as gratitude, appreciation, vulnerability, self talk. And I created this 10 week course where we would spend half an hour doing the mindfulness and then an hour working out with each other. And one thing I noticed was a lot of women are really intimidated working out. But once they've done this mindfulness together and they've been really vulnerable with each other, we created safety. And then the workouts were just so much more fun and so much more connected and we got so much more out of them. So I just went with it. And we called this group the W Tribe. Which was kind of like the women's tribe. Very quickly people heard about it and wanted to join. So Whilst my first 10 weeks was an introduction for these eight women at 5 o' clock in the morning, the next 10 weeks I had three groups, a morning group, an afternoon group and a 9:30 in the morning group. And after that, essentially the results just spoke for themselves. These women were just showing up and loving life in such a different way that I opened a women's wellness center. And for the next five years or so we created this movement of women on the Central coast where you would come and you would work out, all women were welcome, all bodies were welcome. And it was a place where there was absolutely no judgment. You could have a high flying CEO, executive of the corporate world working out next to a stay at home mom and they felt connected. You could have a cleaner working out next to a hospitality worker, working out next to a lawyer and they felt connected and that was so powerful. And while I was running this women's wellness center, I just got so passionate about supporting women to thrive. And one of the things that felt similar in all of the stories at the women's Wellness center and my experiences with women in the corporate world was that you can have the most brilliant women, the smartest, kindest, most compassionate women, but they will still not be thriving if there's something in here, in their minds holding them back. And often that would come from childhood, it would come from their parents, it would come from social expectations on women. And that's when I went and started studying psychology because I was like, I feel like if we can get this right, the biopsychosocial and help women to truly thrive as women, then we're going to really change lives and women are really going to start to feel the difference within themselves. So that's what I did at this stage. I had met my now husband Rob and we had had another child, Maddie, she was one at the time. And I went back to uni. I did uni for five years, started in my mid-30s and by the time I was 40 I became a psychologist. Now that just went straight over it, as if it was easy. It was not easy. Studying with four children in my mid to late 30s, running a business, being a mum, being a wife, navigating all of that was so difficult and there were so many moments when I thought I could not do it and so many moments where I thought, why have I started so late? I should have known that I wanted to do this when I was younger. But whilst it was hard. It was so aligned with me and my purpose and what I'm here for in this world that I just kept going. And when those moments got hard, I asked for help, I asked for support, and I moved through it because it just lit something up inside of me. And every time I'd learn something, I'd go and apply it and try it at the Women's Wellness center. And it was just incredible. So as I was studying, we also decided to move house. We moved a couple of hours north into the Hunter Valley to this property that had a couple of cabins on it. And my initial thought was, what if I could take what we do here on a daily basis at W Tribe and create like weekends or weeks where women actually come away and immerse themselves into the safety of women who support and connect with each other and learn tools to support both their body and mind. And so Glenn, Glen Eden Estate was born, which went on to becoming one of, you know, New South Wales most successful and most popular retreat venues. So I did sell Glenedin Estate a couple of months ago, which has really brought me to here. And probably why I have a bit more time and capacity to start a podcast, because again, it was a real values alignment decision. I was running retreats, but it became so popular that other people were running retreats there as well. So my time and energy in running that was really taking me away from working with my clients or creating podcasts or programs where I could really focus on my purpose of supporting and helping women in this mind, body space. So here we are. I am now working as a psychologist. I work one on one with clients, but I also run intensives and retreats. I am creating online programs and memberships. And I am finding balance between my life as a psychologist with this deep, beautiful purpose of helping women and my life as a mother and a wife. And I don't always get it right, you know, I'm living in alignment most of the time, but it's fucking messy and it's hard and it's difficult. And I share a lot of that on Instagram and social media, where even when we've got the tools, even though we know what we should be doing, we are human. We are human beings, we are women and we are been a struggle with certain things, but the struggle is part of the fun of it. That is part of the whole experience of being human. So that is why I'm here and that is why I've created this podcast to get on here and share the raw, real, relatable information. To help you to live more authentic life. It.
