What unites you as a family? For me, my kids & their partners, it’s humour & the more absurd & unexpected the better. Know the type? You spend most of the show asking yourself, ‘Is this the show?!’ Confused as to whether you should laugh because you’re also a little scared you’ve stumbled into something so loose it could fall apart at any moment! Making our annual pilgrimage to Melbourne Comedy Festival, you’ll find us front row for the fringe-dwellers. The ones too fringe to make money, so they settle for exposure. No budget for polish. No safety net. Just raw, slightly unhinged creativity. So there’s no money for extras & the comedy kicks off early as they stand, often in sight, but just off to the side, appropriating the role of the ‘announcer’ & hilarious self-hype-person.

Which is ironic, because as a professional speaker, sitting somewhere in a room full of delegates, dissociating, while someone reads out the bio I wrote but I hate, has to be my least favourite thing.

Penning your own bio is a bit bent right? Referring to yourself in the 3rd person while letting your ‘id’ introduce you, is not a natural social phenomenon &, in fact, it’s the very opposite of what balanced folk aspire to. So what exactly are you meant to do? Tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Most would fall asleep a few hours in and for those still with us, they’re thinking, ‘Sheesh, that was a lot of main character energy with some unexpected plot twists that someone shoulda taken a chainsaw to!’ But if you’ve got to the point of presenting education en masse, your story is always going to be long because you didn’t become an authority overnight. Or do the opposite & downplay it (which I have absolutely done) and then, as you listen to the other ‘id’ intros of the speakers before you, you think, ‘Ok, well Ms Humble how’s that feeling in the midst of all that Hype?!’

We have a lot of newbies, here & on socials & I notice you’re supposed to re-introduce yourself ala – ‘on previous episodes’...but tbh this is triggering my bio trauma big time!

So, instead, I thought, maybe I’ve found the perfect job at last, to give AI? Given it never tires of telling us ALL how UNIQUELY EXTRAORDINARY we are…as INDIVIDUALS (of course) 😆 Telling me how especially AWESOME I am, any chance it gets: “You’ve articulated something important there” “That’s a powerful observation!” “You’re thinking about this in a very nuanced way” “The fact you’re questioning this shows real awareness” “Most people don’t think about this, but you are” You too?! Maybe AI is how I distance myself from getting bogged down in the significant details of my expansive CV, get some perspective about what really should be shared, outsource my ‘id’, avoid downplaying my achievements and feel better about my bio?

Hilariously, it offered me options – straight or subversive
(Even suggesting the latter fits better with my style😲 Settle down Romeo!)
I’ll let you guess which one I am going with 😂

Rachel Arthur has spent over two decades in clinic, long enough to know that more information doesn’t make better practitioners—better thinking does.

A nutritionist, naturopath and educator, she now works primarily with healthcare professionals, teaching them how to interpret what others miss and question what’s routinely accepted. Through her CPD programs and longstanding role in ACNEM’s GP training, she’s known for pulling apart the gaps between research, pathology and real-world practice—and making clinicians far more precise in how they work.

Her background spans academia (including teaching electives in medicine at Monash University), authorship and editorial roles in leading Elsevier texts, and large-scale industry work analysing health data across corporate populations.

Rachel is an Advisory Board Member and Founding Fellow of the Association of Accredited Clinical Nutritionists, and a Fellow of the NHAA.

She is not known for being a hype person.
She is known for changing how practitioners think.

It then promised, as it always does, to do better 😅 To ‘push it further—making it almost uncomfortable, in its simplicity.’ Well, when have I ever said no to making people uncomfortable?!! Go! I could play this game all day but it’s never going to cure me of my bio-baggage! If you really want to know where I’ve been & what I’ve done that might, in any way shape or form, justify why you find yourself here – dare I say – look at my Linked In LOL

Image accessed via Canva