It is an absolute truth that the older you get, the faster time whizzes by! This was brought home to me last weekend, which I had reserved as a rare family only occasion, for my daughter Sasha’s 18^th birthday on the Gold Coast. It was a joy to accommodate my little girl’s wish that her coming of age celebrations revolve around family. Her preference was for heirloom gifts which the women of the Van Buerle clan translated to mean bling! It was touchingly reminiscent of loved ones, some of whom we have lost, that Sasha received sentimentally invaluable pieces of jewellery belonging to her Great Great Aunt, Great Aunt, Aunt and Grandmother. All that prevented it being the perfect weekend was the absence of my son, Wayne, studying in Melbourne but we did manage to Skype him in for the gift open part of the family afternoon tea – the wonders of technology

On arrival back in Darwin on Monday it was straight down to business and pulling together the Dragons Abreast Festival final touches for this weekend. I am then shooting over to Bali next Thursday to enjoy a bit of rest and do some research for potential futures Dragon Sister Jollydays. In July I’ll be combining business with a school reunion in Beirut, provided the situation in the Lebanon is stable. Good friends and associates in the Middle East region are monitoring things and we are relying on them to make the call as to whether it will be safe to meet in Beirut. Some idle trivia: Stewart Copeland from the band The Police was at our school – wonder if he might turn up?! Worth dodging bullets if you were a fan of The Police and their dishy drummer, I’m sure!! Joking apart, those in the Lebanon and their safe-keeping have been much in our thoughts this past week or so.

I am currently tossing up personal options which I need to make a decision on by August if I am to accommodate them logistically and work load-wise for 2012. I really prefer to remain Darwin-based but the economics of having had to ‘buy out a spouse from the house’ plus shouldering the tertiary educational costs of two children, which must be reliably met, mean that I am not (like so many women in my position) free to please my preferences. The good news is that Dragon Sisters operates seamlessly with almost all its collaborators being located interstate and overseas. I am enjoying the Dragon Sisters client projects that I undertake personally and we still grow mostly by word-of-mouth with a steadily widening, diverse, client base and building numbers of contributors and participants. Our face book interface Tara continues to do a fantastic job for us and I think the page has been kept fun and informative.

With half of 2012 nearly over Dragon Sisters have reviewing the first half of the year and scheduling what commitments we can realistically undertake for the remainder of the calendar year. During our review, we also seriously considered changing some of our marketing largely because there was a minority feed-back that Dragon Sisters should be more easily main-stream identifiable. On reflection though, we felt that if we were to make these changes it would mean were we pigeon-holed and that would merely serve to limit the diversity which is our hallmark.

We have however taken up one of our coach’s suggestions for a simplified tag-line which now appears on Facebook as ‘Dragon Sisters is a personal and business development consultancy’. (Thanks Mike – it’s not only the girls’ ideas that get votes!). Frankly, this is as close to defining what Dragon Sisters does as I think we can get!

We could do with a good tenant to share our lovely Darwin offices. Recently someone complimented the Dragon Sisters premises as ‘a calm and welcoming space filled with positive energy’. So if anyone needs office or meeting space filled with a truck load of positive energy – sing out!

The one glaring fact to come out of the year’s review and forward planning is that there is going to be as much packed into the second half of 2012 as there was in the first! So whilst I will be juggling hard to keep all the balls in the air, at least I won’t be twiddling my thumbs, wondering what to do next! Just as well I’ve blocked out a little ‘me time’ to jump off from in June!! Every dragon needs some down time 🙂

Michelle