Episode 6: Mia Preston from Pod Central

Mia Preston recently opened her latest business venture Pod Central, a Japanese style compact hotel in the heart of St Leonards. Pod central provides high quality overnight accommodation at a budget cost with energy saving technology making it a more sustainable hotel model.Mia has had a fascinating career which has balanced a sharp intellect and keen thirst for understanding ‘how things work’ with a big heart and a desire to care for and help those who are less fortunate than her.She started with an engineering degree following her love of making and building things, where she found she was the only female on the course. Thereafter she became a design and technology teacher which she enjoyed immensely. When she started to have a family she changed career direction to find something that could fit around the demands of a busy family life and became a clinical aromatherapist which she worked as for many years working with hospitals and as a private therapist.More recently she completed a Masters degree in Attachment Studies before embarking on her latest project, Pod central.In this episode we talk about having an innate love of learning and enjoying new experiences but getting bored of sameness quickly and how our brains thrives on new experiences and information. We discuss how engineering combines science and art, two subjects she excelled at and how that there is great creativity within building a bridge or a road. We dig into the dogma of infrastructure and how things change but the bigger picture often stays the same, our brains like predictability.We talk about what it is like to literally step into somebody else’s shoes and when Mia spent a day in a wheelchair where she was deprived of her senses in order to really understand the experience of the people that she would be caring for and this helped to create a great sense of empathy.I found out that we all have behavioural adaptations in our life developed in childhood and that these play out in our adult life whether we are aware of it or not and how Mia explored this while doing her Masters in Attachment Studies.Finally exploring spirituality and doing a 10 day vipassana (silent retreat) and confronting hidden parts of yourself and understanding where we fit within the world and how attending Catholic school helped to nurture her ability to understand another.Plus a helluva lot more!!