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Florence Thum has crafted a portfolio career that combines psychotherapy, law education and business ownership. She began her career as a business analyst before moving into law, where she practiced and then ran her own business for 20 years. She later retrained as a psychotherapist and coach, while also working as a law educator.
I continued my interview series with Florence to understand how successful career changers tap into happendipity – the mix of happenstance and serendipity that forms a part of everyone’s career but particularly people who change career.
Here are the key takeouts from the interview about her career. Read the interview below.
Key Takeouts
- Embracing happendipity with awareness: “When things happen to me… I go, ‘Here’s a sign, here’s a signal, here’s a chance.’ If it’s appropriate and aligned with my values, I’ll say yes.”
- Finding simplicity and purpose in work: “I think life is simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. And I have crafted a career that is simple in the sense of, I know what I want out of it.”
- Staying true to personal values: “We can only ever truly belong to ourselves. Stay true to our values.”
- Recognising when change is needed: “Towards the end of careers… is the discomfort that I have felt, the satisfaction that something is not right, and being aware of that and making those changes.”
- Seeing parenthood as shaping career direction: “Saying…yes to parenthood requires me to… say no to other things, and because of that, my career has taken a certain path.”
- Curiosity about alternative life paths: “Regret is not the issue here, but more curiosity around, wow, I wonder what would have happened and I would never know.”
These takeouts show that careers are rarely linear; they are deeply intertwined with personal values, life choices, and an openness to change. Florence’s journey highlights the importance of listening to discomfort as a signal for growth, staying true to your principles, and embracing happendipity as opportunities rather than setbacks. Florence’s career story highlights that meaningful work is found not in chasing a fixed path, but in aligning our actions with who we truly are and allowing curiosity, awareness, and adaptability to help forge our path.
Read the full interview below.
Q: What is your career story? What have you done previously?
FT: I started out as a business analyst, because I’ve got the degree for it, and I spent two years there. I picked it because it sounded glamorous and it sounded interesting, and takes me all over the world, potentially but what I found out was that I wanted to be myself, an individual, and that job was very much to some extent, image driven by the organisation that I was with, and so that woke me up to a little bit of that.
The key aspect of that was also, I was interested in the human condition, very broadly, as to why people do what they do. Looking at that business aspect was something that I wasn’t particularly geared towards, and then that led me to getting admitted as a lawyer, which then essentially took 20 years of my career life,
Not too sure the human condition aspect was there, but as the work progresses, I ended up spending more time managing processes and people, more processes than people, and took me away from what I wanted to do, which was the dealing with people, the human condition, that was part of that law. It also took me away from the idealism that I had wanted to be there to help people, to make a difference to people’s lives.
That took me to a different direction. I retrained to become a psychotherapist and coach, which felt squarely in the “I’m interested in this” because I’ve always been interested in human condition. It started out as an intellectual exercise, or a lifelong learning exercise, which by the time I ended that study, there was no way that I was going to not do something with it.
So that started a different text on my career, but at the same time, I didn’t want to waste 20 years of legal knowledge and skills and experience. That also then concurrently got me into being a law educator.
I should probably backtrack and say that at the end of my legal career, towards the end of my legal career, that whole managing processes and people was also because I was running my own business, to put a business owner perspective to that.
Fast forward 20 years, psychotherapy and law education, I am where I am right now, doing those two things and at the same time running a business as well in the psychotherapy space.
Q: Why did you make the changes that you’ve made throughout your career?
FT: I felt that I wasn’t living up to my values or living according to my values in each moment in time. From business analyst to law, it was because I wanted to be me, and I was losing that identity. I was being…the word, that popped into mind is indoctrinated…but I was expected to be someone else, to put forth a persona in that job, which then, frankly, scared the hell out of me. I remember getting on a plane, and as I was walking towards my seat on the airplane, a total stranger turns around to me and said, “Ah, you are one of them”. And then identified the organisation I was working for. I was so shocked, and I looked at myself and going: was I wearing anything that identifies me? And then I realised, and so I said, “What made you say that?” And he said, “Well, you’ve got to look, you know, by what you’re wearing and how you carry yourself as such, right? You just look like one of them.” This is me literally being in in the job less than two years, and suddenly I just went: wow, I wanted to be an individual, do my thing, you know, do my thing well, and living to a certain value, which wasn’t what was called out. So that made me rethink a lot about what I wanted to do.
The whole law transition to psychotherapy was a lot to do with making a difference to someone’s life for the better, and I guess I was struggling to see that towards the end of my legal career that I was actually making a difference to someone’s life or making something positive. It seems I’m just going in circles in the commercial space and a process driven place.
Q: What role has chance or happendipity played in your career?
FT: Well, that one incident on the airplane was one, and I’m not sure it was chance, but I got to a point in my life, and when I started doing my psychotherapy study, I called it my midlife questioning learning and just getting to a point where it was like, you know, what else is out there for me? What else can I learn? I’ve always been a curious person and wanting to learn more. I knew that I have let go of that curiosity about why people do what they do.
I went back to wanting to look at learning something. Psychotherapy was it with no intention whatsoever. The fact that beyond the learning was also a lot of the internship that I had to do, which put me, one on one, with people. And while it was somewhat emotionally draining, as I was learning to do it, it was also stimulating. It was purposeful. It was worthwhile, and because of that, the learning itself, then I’m there was no way I wasn’t going to do that, you know?
I’m not sure that a lot of my career choices were by chance. It was more I knew what works for me. There was certain purpose about making a difference, about having it to be meaningful work. I didn’t chart a road, but I had a vision of what it ought to be, and I guess is that degree of intentionality.
Q: Are you someone who embraces or rejects chance or happendipity?
FT: I like to think that I am a mindful person, and that comes from a lot of self awareness, self realisation, growth, stuff that I’ve been doing on myself. I would say that I accepted but also eyes wide open, so I am just paying attention. When things happen to me, or things happen around me, I kind of go, “Oh, I wonder if, if this is possible, or, wow, here’s a sign, here’s a signal, here’s a chance”. If it’s appropriate and aligned with my values, I’ll say: Yes.
Q: Can you think of a chance event or events that have changed your career?
Parenthood is one. By virtue of saying yes to parenthood, it definitely has changed my career. I guess you can call it chance. Yes to parenthood requires me to, at the time saying no to other things. Opportunities, in terms of overseas opportunities, working in the UN, secondment to other countries. I have had to say no to those things, because I was saying yes to other things, and because of that, my career has taken a certain path.
Q: Is saying yes to parenthood something you regret?
FT: Not regret, but I’m curious. I’m very aware, you know, parallel lives, that may sound cuckoo, but parallel lives, and I couldn’t say for sure that that life would have been better or not. Regret is not the issue here, but more curiosity around, Wow, I wonder what would have happened and I would never know.
So I did my masters in law and focused on international law and I knew where I was going, and I’m one of those determined people. I actually was looking for jobs with the UN or in international law, when I discovered that I was pregnant, and that kind of a choice had to be made. Frankly, it wasn’t too difficult of a choice that by saying yes to parenthood, then I wasn’t about to leave the country go elsewhere. And that might speak to a certain conservatism. But my husband, at the time, had a job right here in Australia, and so did I. We saw no reason to kind of leave everything.
Q: What have you learned about the process of changing careers?
It’s really hard to see my career as a single lane, because it kind of integrated with my personal life. We can only ever truly belong to ourselves, and staying true to ourselves and to our values is important. Towards the end of careers – before the so called change – is the discomfort that I have felt, the satisfaction that something is not right, and being aware of that and and making those changes despite, it would have been easier to not do the change but staying true to one’s values is important. It’s kind of interesting. I think life is simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. And I think we ought to find what our simple is. And I have crafted a career that is simple in the sense of, I know what I want out of it. I know what I go there to do, what I want to see my objectives are or purpose is. And that’s very clear.
Q: What advice would you give to someone else who’s faced happendipity or faced with a good reflection on their values that could change their career?
FT: I said before, we can only ever truly belong to ourselves. Stay true to our values. This quote from one of David White’s poem, “Anything or anyone that is or that does not bring you alive is too small for you”. Is that constant awareness? I think it’s really important for us to be self aware and to also achieve a certain self realisation, so that we can embody all that we are, and to know that we are enough and to pursue a purpose, whatever that may be. Yeah.
I haven’t actually seen my career as a career in its own narrow lane where I have charted, from one step to the other, to the other, to the next and to the next and so on. It has always been pulling me and a life in which there is the career and there is the parenthood and self and interest, etc, all together.
For me, let’s call it, examining life continuously, or being mindful of what’s happening.
One of the key things in my head that has guided me is this saying by Socrates: to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. Which is basically what I have set out to do. And in that process of knowing myself is then all the values and how I wish my life to be, and I have crafted it in a way where, I’m doing the things that I enjoy with a specific purpose, and it’s value aligned. It’s not perfect, and there are definitely times when I fall short of that, but it has always been a degree of awareness and attention and intentionally around it.
The word chance suggests something happened by chance, as in, I did notice it. But for me it, they are external events or things that have happened, things that people have said to me, what I have observed, and for me to go I see those, let’s call it opportunities, or serendipitous events, and paying attention. What I do with my life is intentional, but the information for it comes in my observations and and noticing and paying attention to what’s happening around me.
My life is a constant moving in a good way. In fact, if you ask me, what I’m chasing, I’m not chasing anything, but I’m moving with what’s happening, you know? A key skill is what people call adaptability, but that’s way more than just doing, it’s an awareness around what’s happening around and noticing them and paying attention and then moving on it.
Check out my previous interviews on happendipity with:
- Agathé Kerr: an IT consultant turned pastry chef
- Sonia Singh: science communicator to Tree Change Dolls creator to speech pathologist
- Amit Turkenitz: software developer -> business owner and photographer -> entrepreneur and product creator -> UX consultant -> product manager -> data engineer
- Stephanie Ifrah: architect to founder of the brand The Rose
- Bianca Havas: film production assistant -> environmental advocacy campaigner -> leadership consultant
- Holly Trueman: scientist <-> science TV producer -> CEO
- Evan Thornley: management consultant -> politician -> 14 x co-founder <->CEO
If you are interested in career storytelling coaching, find out more here.
Images: The Photo Studio Glebe