About Shari Elle
Shari Elle is a CNVC Certified Trainer, leadership facilitator and the creator of The Living Work, based in Sydney and working with leaders, organisations and families across Australia and internationally.
I have spent thirty years in the rooms where the most is at stake for people: executive teams under pressure, founders handing over what they built, families deciding what happens to everything they have made together.
If you are reading this, one of those rooms is probably yours. My work is helping you get to the heart of what's really going on in it, and giving you a practice you keep for life.
Who I work with
I work with two kinds of people, and you may be both, in different rooms.
If you lead, you are probably good at it, and you can feel the cost of what isn't being said around you: the meetings that circle, the feedback that never quite lands, capable people quietly managing rather than leading.
If yours is a family of significant wealth, you are navigating business building with family, succession, inheritance, and legacy, and the conversation that matters most is likely the one you have avoided the longest.
And if you have ever driven home depleted, been short with the people you love most, and wondered why the skills that built your success don't seem to work at your own table, you are exactly who this work is for.
Who you are at work and at home is one person.
The business I built for other women, and what it taught me
Before this work found me, I built a company designed to prove something. When my second son was three months old, I started an outsourced sales force company to represent products to architects and interior designers, with the aim of securing specifications for the top 20% of architectural projects in New South Wales. I structured it around extraordinary women who wanted to raise their children and pour themselves and their skills into work that mattered.
We structured our systems to be seamless, so that if a child woke up sick, the mother could stay with them and our team knew exactly what every client needed. We didn't miss a beat! Clients kept requesting my salespeople, never knowing they worked part-time. Everyone in our workplace knew what we were achieving together and had each other's back. It was remarkable.
And every time the business grew, the extra labour came from me. It was common for me to be in the office at 2 am finishing a training and be back in the office at 7 am. Everyone had a great work-life balance except me. My body paid for it, and I still didn't stop until my four-year-old son became unwell and would not recover.
One day, I sat by the water at Watsons Bay, wondering whether to continue, and I cried. I chose my son, and I closed the doors.
That season left me with a conviction I have never let go of: what we build must be sustainable and nourishing for everyone in the system, including the owner. Otherwise it cannot continue to exist. It also left me with a question I couldn't yet answer: how had I built something so good for everyone else, and missed myself?
If you are building something right now on the same quiet arrangement, everyone thriving except you, I want you to know I wrote this page with you in mind. I know that 2 am office. I also know the way out of it, which is what the next part of the story is about.
The weekend that changed everything
In 2000, I attended a weekend workshop in Nonviolent Communication on a free ticket, certain I didn't need communication training. You might recognise that certainty; most capable people carry it.
I was wrong in a way that changed my life. I meditated, I did yoga, and I discovered I had no language for my inner world. I had about four feeling words: mad, sad, glad, bad. I saw how much of my life force I had spent arranging the outer world to get my needs met, and I experienced what it is to speak from inner alignment, an inner resonance that people can hear because it is true.
I booked a nine-day intensive with Dr Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, on a snow-covered mountain in Switzerland, and I came home and began to teach.
I became one of the four original trainers to bring NVC to Australia. Over the past 25 years, I have taught more than 10,000 people, run trainings in every Australian state and internationally, and mentored many of the trainers now working across the country.
How The Living Work goes beyond where it began
The Living Work stands on those NVC foundations and has grown well beyond them. Marshall was reluctant to take the work into organisations. I took it there deliberately, and spent two decades making it fit the real conditions of leadership: hierarchy, deadlines, performance, money, succession. In an organisation, the primary focus isn't connection for its own sake. It is connection enough to achieve what you are there to achieve together.
The facts
what actually happened, stripped of judgment
The internal signal
what you actually feel, because we are sentient beings, even in the workplace
What matters
the human needs underneath, which is where people stop being opponents
The forward step
a clear request or action, because insight without action changes nothing
But the four steps are not the point. The shift in you is.
Around ninety per cent of clear communication is self-connection: being grounded in your body and your own inner alignment before you speak or listen.
From that place, your honesty cuts through rather than wounding. You can hear hard things without armouring. You find there is room for more than one reality in the room, which changes every argument you are currently having. You stop trying to change the people around you, and they, curiously, start seeing you freshly, sometimes for the first time in years. Energy trumps words, every time: when the place you are coming from is aligned, it almost doesn't matter which words you use.
This is not therapy, and it is not self-help. It works in the present; it builds a skill set you keep; and it never requires anyone to be wrong for you to be heard.
What it changed at my own table
I didn't just teach this work. It rebuilt my home. I grew up with an "I'm in charge" model of parenting, and this practice replaced it with honest, real conversations.
When my oldest son was about fourteen, he said to me: "Mum, I have never felt judged by you." It still brings tears to my eyes. My other son runs a very successful business and credits our conversations for much of it. I don't take the credit, but I treasure what it says about the closeness between us.
I am telling you this because it is the same promise I make to you. Everything I bring to a boardroom or a family business or estate, I have lived in my own family first, and whatever you and I build together will be something you live at your own table, not something you perform at work.
Credentials and experience
CNVC Certified Trainer (Centre for Nonviolent Communication), trained directly by Dr Marshall Rosenberg.
One of the four original trainers to bring Nonviolent Communication to Australia.
Practising since 2000: twenty-five years of continuous training, facilitation and coaching.
More than ten thousand people taught, across every Australian state and internationally.
Mentor to many of Australia's current NVC trainers.
Deep work with teams and leaders inside CommBank, CSIRO, PwC, Sydney Water, the NSW Department of Housing and Bridgestone Australia.
Creator of The Living Work and The Leadership Council, and facilitator of private engagements with multi-generational family businesses and estates.
The workplace impact of this way of working has been studied at Merck Pharmaceuticals, where 100% of participants reported efficiency gains, and the time to resolve issues fell by an estimated 67–90%.
Where I work
I am based in Sydney and the Sunshine Coast and work nationally and internationally. Leading with Connection runs in person in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Coaching runs via Zoom wherever you are, and I regularly support leaders and families in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as across Australia.
If you find yourself somewhere in this list, you are in the right place.
In your organisation:
You lead well, and you can still feel it: something is just off, and you can't quite name it.
There is an important conversation you are avoiding or keeping around because you can't see how it could go well.
The real conversations are happening in the corridor, not the room. That is as true of teams as it is of boards.
Conflict within the team is undermining performance. Energy goes to complaint or silent resistance instead of can-do, and the collaboration you need has stopped happening.
You are not hitting the mark as a team, and you can't work out what's missing. Underneath it, trust and cohesion have thinned, and you don't know what to do about that.
You catch yourself blaming your people for not being good enough, and a quieter voice asks whether you have actually given them every chance to excel.
Or nothing is wrong at all. You simply want your team sharper: backing each other, honest in the room, generative together.
In your family business:
You're supposed to be a close family, but business or estate issues are causing conflict and resentment.
Issues between family members or people who married into the family sit just under the surface and are never resolved or addressed.
Succession is straining the generations, and you may be the founder or the next generation.
Old history sits underneath every agenda item.
There is a sibling you no longer really talk to.
And the quiet one: you go home exhausted, bringing the stress and tension with you, permanently in reaction rather than leading from presence and alignment, running on empty and not available to the people you love.
Where to start
If you lead, start with Leading with Connection, my two-day foundation intensive.
Leading with Connection →If your situation is a family one, start with a confidential exploratory conversation through the Family Businesses & Estates page.
Family Businesses & Estates →And if you want to go deeper as a leader, read about The Leadership Council.
The Leadership Council →
Shari Elle works with a small number of business families and cohorts each year, so the honest first step is simply to begin.
Whichever of these pathways is yours, the honest first step is simply to begin. The promise is the same one on the front of this site: we will get to the heart of things, together.