What people carry, systems shape. What systems carry, people shape.

About

I'm a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Sydney, and I advise boards and executives on psychosocial risk and governance. I got here the long way, and learned most of it through experience.

I grew up near bushland in southern Sydney. Climbing trees, digging holes, building forts, with national parks and south coast beaches explored on the weekends. By my teens I was on the trails before school, shooting hoops, swimming laps, or riding my bike around the streets with no reason or place to be. I didn't have words then for what that was doing for me. It wasn't recreation. It was how my system settled.

From about twelve, I used the chalkboard in our backyard to teach the neighbourhood kids, mostly my brother's friends and mine. I'd decided information was power and they shouldn't have to rely on rumours from the playground, so I taught them what I'd worked out by trial and error, so far. How bodies work, how people think and behave, mainly. I wanted them to have the facts, complete with annotated diagrams, so the decisions stayed theirs. And give them room to get things wrong out loud, in front of others, without it costing them. I've been doing some version of that ever since.

My high school visual arts major work, in 1992, was a mixed-media triptych about ground, featuring rocks and water. In the progress diary I kept at the time, I wrote that nature looks crowded and disorganised from a distance, and that up close it's perfectly formed, placed exactly as though it had been planned. I wanted parts of the work left suggestive, so the viewer had somewhere of their own to go.

Both things are still true of how I work. What looks like disorder is usually a pattern I haven't yet got close enough to. And the meaning isn't mine to supply.

Two pathways, one pattern

In my final year of school I was on an ADFA aeronautical engineering path, came close to a BHP cadetship in environmental engineering, and landed in first-year chemical engineering, which was what I thought I needed, but maybe not what I wanted. I'd driven myself to that cadetship interview via the Royal National Park for a swim, and arrived with sand between my toes while the other two candidates wore suits and came with their parents. The optics weren't great, although my system was settled. Asked by the panel what a day in the life of an environmental engineer looked like, I said, "Isn't finding that out the purpose of the degree and the cadetship?"

While working in a mail room, and later in a traineeship with Lend Lease, I saved up for a vocational guidance assessment. One question asked whether I preferred to work indoors or outdoors. I thought it was a wasted question. Of course everyone wants to be outdoors. How would you build a career out there? I ticked indoors. The report recommended CFO, and a business degree at UTS was the pathway to it. The report wasn't entirely wrong about where I'd land. It just took a few more decades, and a couple of national parks, to work out that outdoors was a real answer too.

I have spent three decades across finance, risk and governance: with Ernst & Young in Sydney and Boston, and Macquarie Group as an Associate Director in Sydney and Hong Kong, then independent advisory and committee work continuously since 2013. Around the same time I began training as a yoga teacher, counsellor and somatic movement practitioner, seeing clients in Hong Kong from 2016 and returning to Sydney in 2020.

I didn't leave twenty-five years as a chartered accountant behind. I use it constantly, reading a nervous system or a boardroom the way I once read a balance sheet, for what's structurally sound and what's quietly under strain. Both practices are reading the same pattern, just in different rooms: what people carry, and what the system around them is shaping.

Registration with a credible peak body has mattered to me at every stage, from a traineeship through chartered accountancy to counselling. Not as a formality. As a governance framework that protects everyone involved, client and practitioner alike.

Why counselling

When I've sought support myself, what helped wasn't being told what was wrong with me, how I was broken, or what needed fixing. It was understanding my own experience, inside a therapeutic relationship with someone steady, non-judgemental, and willing to shed light on what I couldn't see myself, or what insight alone couldn't shift.

We tend to name things one at a time. Anxiety, burnout, broken sleep, losing interest in what used to matter. The help gets split the same way, and the person carrying the pattern starts again in every room. Distress is part of being human, and not everything difficult is a disorder. You don't need a diagnosis to start here, and having one doesn't decide what the work is. Where a diagnosis is useful, and it often is, I work alongside GPs, psychiatrists, psychologists and other health professionals. What I offer sits beside that, not instead of it.

That's the practice I offer. Curiosity first. An assumption that there's no single right way for a person to be, or in how they respond to what's happened to them. And an understanding that mind and body aren't separate, and that neither is separate from the relationships and conditions a person lives in. We're part of nature rather than apart from it, and an approach that ignores any of this struggles to turn insight into sustainable change.

How I work now

Under strain, a system shows what it's made of. So do people. I've spent three decades learning to read that in organisations, and a decade learning to read it in nervous systems, and neither reading is complete without the other.

What I care about, underneath both practices, is the difference between power over and power with. A lot of what gets labelled as individual failure, burnout, disengagement, conflict that won't resolve, is what happens when demand outruns the conditions available to meet it.

We design systems as though we are separate from each other and from the rest of nature, then ask people to settle in conditions that offer little of what a body needs to do it.

Nature is still the thing I return to when I need to find steady ground. It shows up in how I work with clients, and in how I think about what a workplace actually needs to function well.

The mark

The mark is built on the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is made from the two before it. The pattern shows up throughout the plant world. It emerges as a plant grows, each new part placed by the ones before it. Patterns in families and organisations form in a similar way, shaped by what came before and what the ground can hold. Change the conditions, and the pattern can change too.

Credentials

Registered Clinical Counsellor, PACFA Reg. Clinical 25708. Approved Counsellor, NSW Victims Support Scheme. ISMETA Associate Somatic Movement Professional. Yoga Australia Registered Teacher. Outdoor Health Australia Member. NSW Working With Children Check 2083798E. Master of Counselling, Monash University. Graduate Certificate in Educational Research, Monash University.

Advisory

Independent adviser to boards and executive teams.

Where this sits now

Psychosocial hazards are now regulated in every Australian jurisdiction. Victoria's Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, which commenced on 1 December 2025, completed that coverage. Victoria sets its own version of the hierarchy of controls: information, instruction and training can't be the main control unless higher-order measures aren't reasonably practicable.

NSW has tightened its framework in stages. Section 55C of the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 requires psychosocial risks to be controlled using the hierarchy of controls. Higher-order controls, meaning changes to how work is designed and managed, come before training, policies and support services. The other harmonised jurisdictions, including Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT, the Northern Territory and the Commonwealth, apply the same logic.

Since 1 July 2026, section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) has made approved codes of practice, including the psychosocial hazards code, a duty in their own right. A business must follow the code or show it manages the risk to an equivalent or higher standard. Departing from the code without that standard can be a breach on its own, whether or not anyone has been harmed. Queensland has worked this way since 2018.

Two other developments this year sharpen the point. A Healthcare and Social Assistance Industry Code of Practice commenced in NSW on 20 February 2026. As an approved code it sits inside the same section 26A duty, with sector-specific guidance for hospitals, aged care and disability services. And the NSW Industrial Relations Commission largely upheld improvement notices against the Department of Education, finding that the way a misconduct investigation was run (its length, the lack of communication, the alternative duties) exposed an employee to psychosocial risk. One complaint was enough to support notices reaching across the department. The decision is Secretary, New South Wales Department of Education v SafeWork NSW (No 2) [2026] NSWIRComm 1014.

Still to come is the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 (NSW), which adds a duty for work allocated through algorithms, AI, automation and online platforms, including the workloads, metrics and surveillance that come with them. It passed in February 2026. Apart from the provisions for SafeWork NSW's guidelines, it commences on dates yet to be announced.

Underneath the compliance question sits a simpler one. Power over treats strain as a personal failing. Power with treats it as a design question. Coping is not a control. Changing the conditions is.

Culture, in control terms

Culture usually gets discussed as atmosphere. Under the hierarchy of controls it's something more specific: the evidence of whether a control actually operates. A complaint pathway that exists on paper and nobody uses is not a control. Neither is a policy people have learned to route around. When a board asks whether its controls are working, culture is where the answer is.

It's also where the cost sits. Safe Work Australia's 2025 statistics put mental health conditions at 12 per cent of serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24, on provisional data, up 14.7 per cent in a year and 161 per cent over a decade, the largest increase of any injury category. In 2022-23 the median time lost on those claims was 35.7 working weeks against 7.4 across all serious claims, and the median compensation paid was $67,400 against $16,300.

The causes point back to design. Safe Work Australia counts those causes under a separate measure. Of the serious claims where the mechanism was mental stress, harassment and workplace bullying accounted for 33.2 per cent, work pressure for 24.2 per cent, and exposure to violence and harassment for 15.7 per cent. Health care and social assistance carries more serious claims than any other industry, and public administration and safety is fourth.

None of this is an argument that better culture pays for itself. It's that the exposure already sits in the claims and premium line, and it accrues whether or not anyone has named it.

How I read an organisation

People respond to the conditions they work in, often before they can put it into words. When those conditions keep signalling that something isn't safe (unclear expectations, change that arrives without warning, a complaint that goes nowhere), it shows up as behaviour: conflict, sick leave, problems nobody raises, silent resignation. Those are signals about how the work is designed, and the people showing them are often the earliest warning.

I read those signals the way a risk or audit team tests controls. A policy, a complaint pathway or a workload model can look sound on paper. What matters is whether it holds up in the way the work actually gets done, and whether it changes the conditions or only helps people cope with them.

Most organisations already have the information to see this. The code of practice points to it: what workers say when they're consulted, injury and absence records, turnover. Read together, as patterns rather than as judgements about individuals, they show where risk is building before anyone is harmed.

What I do

Independent advisory work with boards, executive teams, and for-purpose organisations across Australia, on governance, risk, and the work design, systems and relationships that shape how people contribute.

Engagements are fixed scope and fixed fee, typically six to eight weeks, delivered to the board, a risk, audit or people committee, or the executive team. A board gets an independent view of whether its controls operate and what the quality of its evidence actually is. An executive team gets the design questions underneath that, and where to start changing the conditions. Current focus:

Officer due diligence

What evidence the board is actually holding against the code.

Psychosocial risk in the risk register

Carried inside the operational risk register rather than run parallel to it.

Complaint and escalation pathways

Tested against the case where the respondent is a director, a chief executive, or an elected member.

Investigation and stand-down processes

Assessed as a psychosocial hazard in their own right, not only as an HR procedure.

Exposure to traumatic material

Treated as a hazard with designable controls rather than a wellbeing matter.

Work redesign

Upstream of individual coping.

The work is anchored in the WHS and OHS laws and codes of practice that apply to you, and maps to ISO 45003 for organisations already running an ISO 45001 system. I don't certify against it.

What you hold at the end

A written finding you can act on. It sets out where the evidence against the code is thin, which controls exist on paper but don't operate in practice, and what higher-order changes would close the gap. Depending on scope, that can arrive as a board paper, risk register wording, a controls matrix, or a prioritised set of changes.

For directors it's also a record of what the board asked, what it was told and what it decided, which helps the board show due diligence.

What happens next is yours to decide.

What makes this different

I have nothing downstream to sell you. Where a provider also supplies the remedy, an EAP, a survey platform, a training package, an investigation panel, it's hard for them to tell a board that a pathway doesn't function or that the training isn't the control. I don't run investigations, don't supply a program, and I'm not on a panel. The finding is the product.

This is a one-person practice, deliberately. There is no delivery arm to feed and no consultant bench to keep busy, which is what makes the absence of anything to sell you structural rather than a claim you have to take on trust.

Where I'm most useful

Exposure to traumatic material. A named hazard, rarely controlled properly. The standard response is a debrief and a support line, both lower-order controls. Designing the actual control means looking at caseload composition, exposure rotation, and recovery time built into how work is allocated rather than offered afterwards.

Domestic and family violence as a work health and safety matter. Most organisations treat this as a leave entitlement. The safety questions are different: safety at work for people experiencing violence, use of workplace systems and resources by people perpetrating it, and the way it presents as a performance problem rather than as a hazard. The same logic that keeps a pattern running in a family keeps it running in an organisation. New people rotate through, the structure doesn't change, and it produces the same outcome regardless of who currently occupies the roles.

Failure, and what happens to it. A culture that punishes failure doesn't prevent it. It pushes it underground, where it surfaces later as a bigger problem. A board that wants early warning of psychosocial risk needs a culture that can surface a problem while it's still small. That's a structural question about what happens to the person who raises it, not a training question about courage.

Work design for cognitive and sensory difference. Individual adjustments matter, and they can be legally required. But when the same adjustment keeps being needed, one worker at a time, that's a signal about how the work is designed. Redesign doesn't replace the adjustment. It reduces how often someone has to ask. Diversity is load-bearing, not accommodated.

Who this suits

Australian organisations large enough to carry board-level exposure and small enough that a director can be reached directly. A smaller for-purpose organisation with an active board can be just as good a fit. This work is Australia-based, reflecting the jurisdiction the regulatory framework and the practice are built on.

Most relevant in health and social assistance (which now has its own NSW industry code), public administration and safety, member-governed bodies and charities, and education and training.

Engaged directly by boards and executives, or as a specialist to firms delivering larger programs.

What I don't do

No individual therapeutic work inside an advisory engagement. No wellbeing sessions with staff, no observations about named employees, nothing that could be read as clinical assessment. Systems, roles, exposure patterns and design.

No investigations. I'll review how an investigation system is designed, but I won't run an investigation or advise on a live matter. No legal advice.

No general psychosocial or WHS compliance work, which sits with the WHS consultancies and law firms already doing it well.

Background

Three decades across finance, risk and governance: with Ernst & Young from 1996 in Sydney and Boston, and Macquarie Group as an Associate Director in Sydney and Hong Kong, then independent advisory and committee work continuously since 2013.

A counselling practice running alongside it since 2016 informs the work through pattern recognition, language for entrapment and fragmentation, and disciplined attention to safety, dignity and context.

Courage isn't the missing ingredient. Conditions are.

Current member of PACFA's Governance Committee and Risk Sub-Committee, and a local government bushland management advisory committee.

Scope and availability: enquiries@melissashadforth.com

Counselling

Registered Clinical Counsellor, PACFA Reg. Clinical 25708

Who I work with

I work with clients navigating neurodivergence, trauma, and domestic, family and sexual violence, along with the cost that accumulates in high-demand environments across home, school, university, work and community.

Neurodivergence, trauma and violence often arrive together. Much of what brings someone into this work is a pattern that repeats down generations and through relationships, until something interrupts it. So the question at the heart of the work is often this: what conditions allow a person to live with a felt sense of safety, belonging, integrity and meaning?

How I work

I'm interested in how people develop intelligent adaptations to what they've lived through, and what becomes possible when those patterns are met with curiosity rather than treated as something broken to be fixed.

Sessions are shaped around what you bring rather than a fixed protocol. That might mean talking, working with what shows up in the body, or being outdoors in nature, moving or still, depending on what's workable and safe enough for you at the time. Bodies settle through rhythm, daylight, movement and safe enough people, and a session can draw on any of those.

Uncertainty, discomfort and change aren't avoidable, and the aim isn't to get rid of them. The work builds the capacity to recover from stress, so it isn't carried forward until an elevated baseline starts to feel normal.

This isn't only about surviving what you've lived through. It's about finding a way of relating, to yourself, to the people around you, to the systems you move through and the nature you're part of, that runs on power with rather than power over. A more integrated way of being.

Nature-based practice

Nature is not a backdrop. For some people it's the condition that makes the work accessible at all. The sensory cues of an open landscape, moving water, or the quality of light through a canopy communicate something a person receives long before they can articulate it.

Not every natural setting is neutral, and not every person finds outdoor contexts regulating. Consent is structural, titration matters, and the relational container is foundational. Place is a resource, not a prescription.

Outdoor sessions are planned rather than improvised. We begin online or indoors, so I understand what you're hoping for and we can work out together whether outdoor sessions suit you. That includes the practical side: mobility, sensory needs, weather, privacy, and what feels manageable. Nature-based work has its own consent form rather than being folded into the general one. For anyone under 18, a parent or guardian consents as well where it's safe to do so, and we stay in accessible places rather than remote ones. This work follows Outdoor Health Australia's Quality Framework: Ethical Principles and Practice Standards.

Practical detail

I work with adults and young people from 14. I'll sometimes see someone younger, depending on the circumstances and the referral. Sessions are offered in person in Sydney, outdoors in bushland and near water where that's appropriate, and online. Online sessions outside Australia depend on your location and on legal, professional and insurance requirements, and aren't available in the United States or Canada.

For clients under 18, a parent or guardian consents to counselling as well, where it's safe to do so.

This is a private counselling practice, not a crisis or emergency service. I don't provide diagnosis, psychiatric care, court reports or medico-legal assessments, and counselling here isn't Medicare-rebatable. Where it's useful and you consent, I work alongside your GP, psychiatrist, psychologist, school or university.

I am an Approved Counsellor under the NSW Victims Support Scheme. Counselling under the scheme is funded by Victims Services for people it assesses as eligible. If you're receiving counselling through the scheme, I can prepare a Certificate of Injury at your request. It goes to you, and what happens with it is yours to decide.

I practised in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2019 and have been in Sydney since 2020.

Not currently taking new private clients. Get in touch and I'll let you know when that changes.

This practice is held separately from my governance and psychosocial risk advisory work. An advisory client is never a counselling client, and that line does not move.

Background

Registered Clinical Counsellor with PACFA. Master of Counselling, Monash University. Graduate Certificate in Educational Research, Monash University. Associate Somatic Movement Professional with ISMETA. Registered teacher with Yoga Australia. Member of Outdoor Health Australia.

Three decades across finance, risk and governance sit alongside the therapeutic work. My path hasn't been linear, and that's where the depth comes from.

Referrals and enquiries: counselling@melissashadforth.com

Writing

I write about the same pattern both practices are built on. I read it in a counselling room and a boardroom, and the writing is where I translate it. Sometimes that's a workplace. Sometimes it's a family. Sometimes it's just one person, trying to find steady ground.

Pieces will appear here as they're published, alongside anything placed elsewhere.

FAQs

Contact

Counselling

For referrals and enquiries: counselling@melissashadforth.com

Advisory

For scope and availability: enquiries@melissashadforth.com

Everything else

hello@melissashadforth.com

This is a private practice, not a crisis service. Email is checked during business hours and usually responded to within one to two working days.