The Author
Shanée was born and educated in South Africa, graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1993 with a Bachelor of Business Science Honours degree in the special field of clinical psychology. After university she pursued a high-pressure career in the corporate world. Her first role was as a planner for a leading retailer, followed by a year working in London. She then changed job and industry in 1999 to join a research firm, eventually heading up a Global Centre of Excellence, and sitting on the board of directors of a global consultancy which was owned by a large multi-national company. Her primary role was to head up a team, manage large-scale projects for some of the world’s most valuable brands, and provide training and consulting to a network of partners and clients in approximately 100 countries across 5 continents. This allowed Shanée to focus on something she is passionate about – coaching and training others in the pursuit of excellence – and created a foundation of invaluable skills and strategies which are transferrable to the high school context.
In 2011 Shanée moved to Sydney with her husband and two small children. While helping her husband run the business side of his medical practice, she was fortunately able to focus on supporting her kids in their educational journeys through to the end of HSC. She has always been passionate about helping people, in recent years volunteering as a high school mentor, working with teens in secondary schools through Raise Foundation – a not-for-profit youth mentoring organisation providing support for teenagers across Australia. Through her experience with Raise, and her own children, she is acutely aware of the challenges young people face today, not the least of which is academic pressure at school. Along the way she recognised that things were sometimes harder than they needed to be and wished for a manual that would signpost the road to academic success, with lessons beyond the classroom. In the absence of such a resource, she decided to use her own family’s experience to create one for others. With the benefit of her experience as a parent, a mentor, and a corporate executive, she has written this book in the hope that the skills and strategies shared will benefit other students and parents, smoothing their path to success and helping them achieve their highest academic aspirations.