Thirty years.
Many lives lived.
One through line.

At nineteen, Annabelle Drumm was Head Trainer at the top Apple computer dealer in New Zealand — responsible for thirty courses, a team of trainers, and a client list that included Saatchi & Saatchi, Air New Zealand, Nokia, and the BNZ. She had started in reception six months earlier. She got there by learning faster than anyone else in the room, and by understanding something that most trainers miss: that the goal is never to teach software. It's to make a person feel capable.

That insight — that confidence and capability are inseparable — has run through everything she has done in the four decades since.

Annabelle spent fifteen years as a professional performer — dancer, actor, television presenter, and opera company performer. She co-founded the Ipanema Dance Company, performing nationally and internationally. She worked on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules as an actor and choreographer. She performed over 150 shows a year at peak, for clients including Coca Cola, Air New Zealand, Fisher & Paykel, and Carlton United.

This is not incidental to her coaching. She knows what performing under pressure feels like from the inside — the creative vulnerability, the public exposure, the discipline required to deliver at a high level consistently, and the specific loneliness of a creative career that most coaches have only read about.

She also learned something that would prove central to her later coaching work: that the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it is almost never a skills problem. It is almost always a confidence problem, a belief problem, or a mental obstacle problem.

In 1995, Annabelle co-founded Talent-on-Line Entertainment Network — one of Australia's first internet booking agencies, promoting performing artists from five cities around Australia and New Zealand to a global clientele. At its peak, the agency managed a talent pool of around 300 acts, sending performers to Europe, the UAE, and Asia.

She doubled turnover four years in a row. She sealed over 600 contracts annually. She managed staff, performers, and the full operational complexity of a live entertainment business — while working school hours and raising young children.

She achieved this not by working harder, but by doing something she would later teach to every operational coaching client: refining internal processes to ultimate efficiency. She mapped every workflow, eliminated every redundant step, and built systems that made speed the natural outcome rather than a constant effort. Her conversion rate exceeded 75% — not because of aggressive sales tactics, but because she responded faster and more clearly than any competitor.

From 2009 to 2016, Annabelle ran Kitegirl Coach — a business coaching practice serving owners and senior professionals in creative industries: media, entertainment, event management, design, advertising, and entrepreneurship.

The results were real. A creative director achieved 400% income growth in six months — through a combination of positioning clarity, operational restructuring, and the dismantling of mental obstacles that had been limiting him for years. A creative studio founder achieved 600% company growth in twelve months, largely through a confidence shift that led to expansion decisions he'd been deferring.

She also produced a suite of 26 iPhone apps for freelance creative professionals — coordinating outsourced talent across six countries — with the first app featured by Apple as "What's Hot" in Australia, Russia, and New Zealand. She produced and marketed an online training course attended by more than 800 students. She was selected for Brendon Burchard's elite global programme — one of only two Australians accepted in that intake.

She is a past member of the International Coach Federation, a graduate of the Neuroleadership Institute in neuro coaching, team coaching, and business coaching, and a graduate of the Thought Leaders Million Dollar Expert Immersion Programme.

From 2014 to 2021, Annabelle was a presenter, broadcaster, and producer at Fine Music 102.5 FM in Sydney. For seven years she held the Breakfast show — the top presenting slot in any radio station — as well as hosting monthly specials including At the Opera and Saturday Matinee, and serving as anchor host for live broadcasts of "Live at the Joan" from the Joan Sutherland Entertainment Centre.

She also delivered musicology pre-concert talks for the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs at the Sydney Opera House and the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra at The Concourse, Chatswood — and served as theatre critic for Sydney Arts Guide.

These years deepened a capability that was already central to her coaching work: the ability to communicate with clarity, warmth, and authority to an audience she cannot see, on topics that matter deeply to the people listening.

Annabelle is relaunching Kitegirl Coach with a clarity about her work that only comes from having stepped away from it for a time, rebuilt her perspective, and returned with fresh eyes.

She works with creative business owners, performing artists, entertainment and media professionals, advertising creatives, and anyone who runs a creative operation and finds that the standard business coaching playbook simply does not fit their world.

She brings to every client relationship the full weight of what she has lived — not as a credential to display, but as a genuine resource. She has been where most of her clients are going. She has made the mistakes. She has found the way through. And she coaches with the particular honesty that comes from someone who has no interest in managing your dependence — only in helping you fly.