How I Got Here: former UN human rights lawyer, holistic coach and intuitive, Alex Wright-Moore
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Admit it, we’ve all been there – stalking social media and LinkedIn profiles, trying desperately to figure out how the hell someone got their dream job.
It seems impossible, and yet there they are, living out your career fantasy (minus the itchy business suit). It might seem hard to believe, but once upon a time, they were also fantasising about their future career, and with some hard work, they made it.
Welcome to How I Got Here, HerCanberra’s series that reveals everything you want to know about the secrets of career success.
This week, we meet Alex Wright-Moore – former UN human rights lawyer, award-winning public servant, and now Women’s Holistic Coach (and HerCanberra writer). From navigating the Syrian refugee crisis to supporting families through life’s hardest chapters, Alex’s career has been anything but linear. Rooted in a deep legacy of resilience and driven by a mission to see women truly thrive, here she takes us through her inspiring journey, her real definition of success, and how to reconnect with your inner power.
Existential crisis time: Who are you and what do you do?
Hi, I’m Alex Wright-Moore, a former UN human rights lawyer turned award-winning public servant, now working as a women’s holistic coach, writer and intuitive.
But let’s park the ego’s definition for a moment and get a little more real…
I’m a soul who feels most at home in nature, the mother of two miracle IVF babies and two mischievous rescue cats, and the partner of an incredible human who devotes his life to easing the pain of others. With French Mauritian, English and Australian ancestry, I carry the stories of migrants, pirates and convicts – people who reached for a better life with whatever tools they had. But at the heart of it all, I’m the daughter of two wise parents who taught me that how you treat people is the truest measure of your life.
In a world where women continue to be represented by all the wrong statistics, my work as a coach helps women reconnect with their inner guidance and rediscover how powerful they are. I live and work for a future where positive change for women isn’t just possible – it’s inevitable.
Let’s go back to when you were a kid, have you always dreamed of working in this industry?
While I experienced a taste of coaching in my adolescence through representative netball and competitive debating, it was never something I imagined as a career. By contrast, growing up in south-west Sydney as a student of Australia’s public school system, I vividly remember telling my parents at sixteen that I wanted to work for the United Nations, and them gently suggesting that graduating high school might be a good place to start. I had stumbled upon Gandhi at a very impressionable age and became activated by the idea of being the change you wish to see in the world. Only later did I learn his actual words were: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Fortunately, the essence of this principle has stayed with me, shaping my values and remaining a guiding thread throughout my career, no matter how many times it has evolved.
Writing, on the other hand, is something I have been fascinated with since childhood – long before I understood why it resonated with me so deeply. In the years since, what I’ve come to know is this: the stories within us are a powerful vehicle for change. The way we tell them shapes the way we live them, and learning to tell them honestly is where change begins. That belief runs through everything I do. It’s why I write about the subjects that require us to be raw, real, and vulnerable: who we really are, what we struggle with, and how we find our way through the seasons of life.
And the intuitive part? That arrived quietly, almost stealthily, during the early Covid-19 lockdowns. While navigating the trenches of IVF, I finally committed to a daily meditation practice, and the stillness of that ritual opened something I could never have predicted –a direct, unmistakable channel to my intuition and a heightened sensitivity to the subtle energetic world that lives just beyond our five everyday senses. For years, my logical, evidence-driven lawyer mind had worked hard to explain away anything intuitive as imagination. So, when these experiences began to show up in my life in a way that was too big to ignore, for a while they sent me into fight/flight/freeze, shaking the foundations of what I believed about reality and what humans are capable of. However, over time, and with the right teachers, this intuitive capacity has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. It has also reshaped my work, allowing me to offer a deeper, more resonant level of support to those who feel called for something more.
Tell us about when you were first starting out, what set a fire in your belly to get here and how did you do it?
When I reflect on the origins of my fire for coaching, the first sparks were ignited during my time as a UN human rights lawyer working in refugee camps in the Middle East. In the face of harsh conditions and seemingly insurmountable odds, I witnessed something that both surprised and fascinated me: while most refugees struggled on every level, a handful were somehow thriving, despite living in identical circumstances.
The contrast ignited a burning curiosity within me. I wanted to understand how such a phenomenon could exist. The more time I spent in the camps, the clearer the pattern became. Those who were thriving had cultivated a strong inner world – their mindset, their sense of identity, and a discipline for daily practices that sustained their well-being. They also appeared to carry something else: an innate sense of worthiness. They believed they deserved a good life and held an unwavering conviction that they would create one, no matter what was happening around them.
Encountering humans who could find ways to thrive in the face of such adversity led me to believe that perhaps anyone could. This idea lit me up more than anything ever had, and I developed an insatiable appetite to learn how. I went on to study behavioural science, human development, neurolinguistic programming, coaching, and somatic, intuitive, and holistic modalities of human transformation.
Somewhere along the way, I realised there are three essential ingredients required to change your life:
- The willingness to examine the stories and programs you’re consciously and unconsciously running about the world, your place in it, and what you’re giving life to in your mind, body and energy field.
- The capacity to recalibrate your internal world – to regulate your nervous system and release the blocks that keep you from becoming a match for what you want.
- The bravery to take small, consistent, aligned steps toward your vision until you reach coherence.
I invested in great coaches, walked the path myself, and now I help others walk theirs.
Recall a time when you wanted to chuck it all in; what did you tell yourself when it got too hard?
Having experienced multiple miscarriages and seven rounds of IVF, there were many moments throughout this journey when I felt overwhelmed, grief-stricken, and hollow with defeat. Whenever I found myself in that place, my internal monologue sounded like this…
Alex, you know your brain is programmed to give momentum to whatever thoughts and stimuli you feed it. So, what you look for in this world you will find – and it will find you. If you look for reasons to give up in this moment, you will discover them everywhere. If you look for evidence that the world is unfair, that it’s hard, that you’re not enough, that it’s not possible, that you’re unworthy, you’ll find it with surprising ease.
Your work in conflict zones and human rights has shown you the very worst of what humans can do to each other when fear takes the reins. But you have also glimpsed the very best of humankind in places you believed held little capacity for light. You’ve witnessed humans helping each other against all the odds – giving life to generosity, joy, and hope in a daily existence on the cutting edge of uncertainty, loss, grief, and death. You’ve learned that life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility and that everything has its counterbalance.
So, what if this darkness you’re in now is actually a space of becoming? What if you are in the womb of the universe –being invited to rebirth parts of yourself you’ve outgrown, so you can step into your next potential and give life to something new?
Right now, gratitude or joy may feel out of reach. So instead, reach for a softer place to land while you let yourself feel all the big feelings and move them through your system. In time, clarity and hope will return, and the weight of this experience won’t feel so acute and all-consuming. But since it does now, reach for what feels more accessible from this place. Reach for simple physical comforts. Reach for emotional nurture and compassion. Reach for connection with those you love. Reach for soul nourishment in the ways that are meaningful to you. Each step you take in this direction will gently bring you closer to where you want to be… a place where everything once again feels possible and you feel in alignment with what you wish for.
What was your biggest break?
Countless opportunities have shaped my path to where I am today.
To honour some of the biggest ones:
In my early twenties, I earned scholarships from the University of Technology Sydney to study international relations, politics and law in France and Denmark. Both experiences completely transformed my inner world, giving me firsthand insight into different languages, cultures, peoples, histories, and ways of life. I returned home changed, and that shift propelled me towards a career in human rights instead of politics.
My work for the United Nations in the Middle East was another defining chapter. It taught me about human nature, political and social systems, and the kind of life force I wanted to be in the world. When I returned to Australia, that experience paved the way for a near decade-long career in the public service, working at the executive level across federal, state and territory agencies – mostly managing human rights-based programs and coaching – while I navigated my journey to motherhood.
However, truthfully, my biggest breakthroughs have often come from my biggest breakdowns. As Taylor Swift sings in Labyrinth: “Break up, break free, break through, break down….” If I had to summarise how I got here in eight words, those would be the most apt since they capture the cycle of contraction and expansion I’ve lived through whenever something life-changing has been on the horizon.
Of all those cycles, my journey to motherhood has been the most transformative. It’s forced me to walk through the fire of infertility, recurrent miscarriage, chronic pain, severe endometriosis and IVF, and led me deeper into understanding what human beings are truly capable of. It has also been an experience where I’ve felt myself evolve my entire way of being in the world and opened doors to dreams I didn’t know existed.
The science of matrescence explains why so many women experience profound physiological and neurological metamorphosis through motherhood, so I know I’m not alone. But for me, the breakdown came when a trusted medical expert told me it was very unlikely I could have biological children due to the severity of my endometriosis. The breakthrough? Discovering that magic is real, accessible to everyone, and activated by belief and that only you can decide what is possible for your life. Two miracle IVF babies later, I’m living the reality I always felt was meant for me.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
You were born worthy. You don’t need to earn it, prove it, or perform for it. You are literal stardust – and when you begin to live from this place, everything in your life will shift.
Once you let go of the story that struggle must be built in before you can achieve what you want, a world of possibility will emerge unlike anything you’ve known before. Surviving an arduous journey doesn’t make you any more deserving of what you want. Can struggle deepen your lived experience? Yes. Can it serve as a vehicle for gratitude, learning lessons, and gaining wisdom? Absolutely. But it is only essential if you believe it is.
The sense of happiness and purpose you crave? It’s possible.
That dream job you want? It’s already in your energy field.
The babies you yearn for? They are in your field too.
The partner you dream about? The inner peace you crave? The business you want to generate? The life you imagine? All available – and your desire for them is not accidental.
But for them to come to life for you, you have to get out of your own way. You have to stop unconsciously self-sabotaging and be willing to do the invisible inner work to clear the obstacles (the limiting beliefs, trapped emotions, and conflicting values) you’ve put there. You have to create space for what you want to birth into existence – energetically, physically and mentally. You have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone and be open to new ways of doing, so you can rewrite the stories and neurolinguistic programs you hardwired into your system when you were first learning how to be human. It requires a readiness to meet your shadow and work with your whole energetic being. If you’re willing to do that – and change the habits that keep feeding your old ways of thinking – everything you want becomes possible.
Ask yourself: What would your life feel like if you assumed you were a magnet for what you desire? If you trusted your intuition as your superpower? What would your nervous system feel like if ease and flow were built into your everyday reality? Cultivate an existence where you take responsibility for the energy you bring to the world. It will do more for your quality of life and everyday happiness than any level of external validation or material success. It will light your soul on fire.
… And so I did. And so it was.
What is it about your industry that you love and what makes you want to pull your hair out?
I became a holistic coach after growing increasingly frustrated with the limitations I experienced working as an executive coach in formal, bureaucratic settings. As part of my former work, I’d be engaged to build the capacity of managers or frontline staff, but it never took long to realise that the real human pain points – the ones ripe for genuine transformation – weren’t career-related at all. They lived in the shadow self, in personal relationships outside of the office, in family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, health challenges, unregulated nervous systems, and an absence of purpose or well-being in life. With traditional approaches to executive coaching, in my experience, these areas are almost always “off limits” to meaningfully dive into.
One of my biggest frustrations with the coaching industry is exactly this: so many traditional frameworks are blind to the role of somatic and holistic modalities in helping people make real progress. I often see leaders thriving professionally yet feeling deeply unfulfilled personally. In the face of this, the conventional models simply aren’t equipped to help them break through and they certainly don’t hold space for leaders to break down, recalibrate their nervous systems, or do the deep shadow work required for true transformation.
What I love is that transformational life coaching can do this – but it requires finding a coach with the right experience who is the right fit for you. It also requires an openness to doing the internal work and heavy lifting in this space.
My other frustration is the coaches who build their business models on the proposition that you require something outside of yourself to fix you. They position themselves as the solution and charge people and organisations extraordinary amounts of money on the premise that they are the expert who can fix what’s not working. The less marketable truth is this: the only person who can change you or your organisation is you. The work starts and ends with you, and you already have everything you need inside of you to create the change you’re seeking.
A good coach can offer tools, resources, new ideas, accountability, and unwavering support, but they cannot fix you. That part is yours. And the right coach? They will walk with you through the fire of your breakdown to your becoming. They will mirror to you what’s in your blind spots, ask you countless difficult questions, hold space for your pain, and sit with you when things get hard. When you want to give up, they’ll help you to own your patterns, remind you why you started, and shine a light on the paths available ahead. They won’t make decisions for you, but they’ll help you reconnect with your intuition and the answers already within you.
The right coach becomes your greatest ally – the one who celebrates you the loudest when you achieve the thing you thought impossible, and the bridge that helps you change your life for the better.
Tell us how you ‘stay in the know’, what media do you consume?
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become far more intentional about the media I allow into my life, as I’ve learned that every piece of content feeds me energetically, emotionally, and mentally. A few years ago, after watching Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma (2020), my husband and I removed social media apps from our phones. It freed us from carrying a portable stream of content in our pockets, competing for our attention around the clock, and it remains one of the best decisions we’ve made for our quality of life.
For my work as a holistic coach, Mindvalley and Gaia are my anchors. Each offers a rich volume of resources on the latest developments in science, personal development, human consciousness, and vitality. When I want to stay informed about global affairs, Al Jazeera and Politico are my go-to outlets – though over time I’ve developed firm boundaries around what I consume, when and how much. For local stories and perspectives, Women’s Agenda and HerCanberra always offer what I’m looking for. The Barefoot Investor remains my favourite weekly column, and the podcast currently lighting up my world is Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This? hosted by Emily Fletcher.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
After welcoming our second child, my husband and I recently moved from Bungendore to Canberra and found ourselves in our dream home in Gordon. It sits along a reserve, right on nature’s doorstep, with a private studio overlooking the beautiful southern ranges, an edible cottage garden, and sunrises that take my breath away. It carries a spaciousness and serenity I have been craving for more than two decades and offers a lifestyle we didn’t always believe would be accessible at this stage of our lives.
If you’d asked me even five months ago where I hoped to be in five years, I would have described exactly this: doing meaningful work that puts a fire in my belly, living close to nature in a property that affords room to breathe, and watching my children and family thrive in all the ways that matter. To have arrived here so soon feels like a gift. It has made anything feel possible, and I’m excited to stay open to whatever this next chapter brings.
With my husband hailing from New Zealand’s gorgeous South Island, we do plan to relocate there eventually. But for now, I am exactly where I am meant to be and satisfied to stay present and soak up the joy of this season.
Why should people follow in your footsteps?
Long before modern life pulled us away from ourselves, our ancestors lived in intimate relationship with nature, with seasons, cycles, plants, dreams and ritual. They deeply listened to their bodies and trusted quiet forms of knowing that lived beyond the rational mind – ways that were felt, practiced and honoured. They understood that the body is not simply something to be measured, but our bridge to possibility. Following our intuition doesn’t require abandoning reason. You can still be discerning, think critically, and trust what you feel. You can still value evidence and make space for mystery to appear in your life. You can stay grounded and invite magic into your everyday existence. You don’t have to choose. These things are not mutually exclusive, and your ability to integrate both will be the gift that keeps on giving in your life. My path is my own, but the power of living a deeper, more intuitive life has always been accessible to all of us. We simply need to remember and reconnect to ways of accessing it in our everyday lives.
What advice would you give your past self?
Sweet young Alex,
We live in a culture that worships what it can measure and dismisses what it cannot. But as you grow, your intuition isn’t something to shrink, soften or disguise so others feel comfortable. It is your superpower –the quiet force that will carry you through every impossible moment – and the reason you will defy the odds in every area of your life, despite constant external messaging that your dreams are impossible, unlikely or unrealistic.
None of what you achieve will be luck. It will be the result of years spent tending to your inner world, refining your energy and calibrating your way of being until it becomes the only way you know how to move through life.
Someone’s inability to understand how you work, or truly see who you are, says nothing about your worth. Your deep knowing is the oldest intelligence you hold. And teaching women how to access their own inner wisdom – how to clear what’s in the way, regulate their nervous systems, and trust the answers inside of themselves – will become the most meaningful human-rights work you ever offer.
The internal shifts these women make will transform their lives:
- In the big dreams that come to life because they’ve resolved their blocks,
- in the presence they bring to the moments that matter because their nervous systems are regulated,
- in the grace they embody when things don’t go to plan because they’ve learned how to surrender,
- and in the permission they give themselves to rest, savour, and breathe despite an endless to-do list, because they no longer doubt their worth.
These energetic changes will ripple outward, and this is how the world truly changes: by one woman at a time taking radical responsibility for how she shows up and choosing to show up differently. The way she shows up becomes the atmosphere her children grow within – and it will be an atmosphere of infinite potential.
So, my dearest love, keep following the path, keep expanding, keep learning, and keep cultivating coherence. Your wildest dreams are not only possible – they will arrive, in perfect time, when you’re ready. Have fun and don’t take life too seriously. Your unlimited capacity for joy is the very best of you.
With love,
Older, wiser, and ever-learning Alex.
You can find out more about Alex’s holistic coaching services, studio sessions, luxury health and wellness retreats, and women’s circles here.
