The Human Story Behind the Business & Brand - Sonya Boloski

This podcast partnership with Women Making it Work aligns with but slightly deviates from my The Human Behind the Career Brand podcast series. The Human Story Behind the Business and Brand delves into those poignant moments, experiences and life lessons that shaped these high-performing professional women into who they are today. It discusses their fates, flaws, feats, fears and all the other fabulous human elements that have driven them to perform so well in their professional and personal lives. As has been encapsulated in the Women Making it Work celebratory anthology entitled Beyond the Business – Stories of Women Who Dared.My next guest is Sonya Boloski. One of the authors and storytellers in Women Making it Work’s Beyond the Business anthology, representing those women who have who rebuilt their lives after divorce and relationship breakdown, and other personal hardships, creating businesses and legacies while navigating single motherhood and proving that blooming is possible even after the hardest seasons.Sonya originates from Christchurch in NZ, has lived in Melbourne for 25+ years, and is the owner of Lakeside Building Consultants. Sonya left school at 16.5 years to pursue a career as an air traffic controller, which didn’t come to fruition due to her needing to her eyesight. So she pivoted to joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force at 18 years, where she remained for just over 5 years, and where she met her now ex-husband. Sonya has experienced several losses and life challenges that have strengthened her resilience when it comes to living in line with her childhood-cultivated values of being kind and helping others, underpinned by trust and respect. In addition to losing both her father and her older brother to Motor Neurone Disease or MND, her marriage crumbled in the mid-1990s when her three children were still young. Sonya highlights how she felt a sense of both devastation as well as relief when her husband asked her and their daughters to move out of their air force base home, because he had been physically and emotionally absent for quite some time. And it was his brother, who Sonya still remains good friends with, who sparked the idea of her and the children relocating, which is how they arrived in Melbourne. Sonya has been girl guides leader for over 30 years and volunteers for St Vincent De Paul’s soup van, in addition to being a building consultant and a licensed pool inspector. Sonya values and continues to strive to deepen connections in her life, both personally and professionally.