Hello, I’m Susan Dunlop, founder of Blue Borage (founded 2024) and Lead Believe Create with Susan Dunlop (founded 2017). I live in Noosa, Queensland, Australia.
My work flows between leadership development and team dynamics, personal coaching and mentorship, creative advocacy and championing the sharing of stories that will make a difference. All of this is grounded in one core purpose: empowerment for every person through conscious communication.
For some, you may know me as a coach and facilitator, guiding leaders, teams, and families in changing from default reactivity to conscious communication. For others, you may know me as a lived experience expert and the host of the Conversation Cafe series we started in January 2025. The latter is me working to bring the hidden reality of sibling sexual trauma and abuse (SSTA) out of silence and stigma, and into the open where conversations can spark change.
The Work I Live Every Day
In 2011, I wrote down a personal mission: one day, I would be a voice in the silent landscape of sibling sexual abuse. Not the voice, but one of the voices. Today, that work is part of my daily schedule around coaching clients, running facilitated workshops, and managing my businesses. Through Blue Borage we create spaces where silence doesn’t dominate and where survivors and families can feel less alone.
My path hasn’t been linear. I’ve been a self-starter entrepreneur, with no certificate or degree, turned CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. When that company was sold I took off for a gap year of travel. My daughters all had already, so it was time for mum to have an adventure! I came back and became certified as a professional personal coach. I deliver life skills mentorship for teen girls to venture into safe independence. Now I’m an advisory board member of 5WAVES, a global organisation raising awareness of sibling sexual trauma.
Each chapter has shaped me and reminded me often that silence and secrecy is harmful. It is conscious, compassionate communication that heals and transforms.
Why This Matters
Cycles of harm repeat when we don’t model something different. Without self-leadership, awareness, and agency, the old patterns of fear, shame, and secrecy can echo through generations. I’ve lived both realities. And I know that change is possible. It just takes practice.
This is why I bring these conversations into schools, workplaces, and families. Prevention and healing don’t begin in theory, they begin in practice, in daily choices, in the courage to speak and to listen.
A Dedicated Space for Courageous Conversations
I’ll begin with sharing the first video clip that I created this month. This is me Reintroducing Me: Susan Dunlop | Coach, Advocate and Founder of Blue Borage.
I’ve created a dedicated space on my YouTube channel for Blue Borage content. I will start to upload presentations, some symposium sessions, event recordings that I have been a guest speaker at and lived experience advocacy talks.
The Channel was created in 2000 and a lot has changed for me since then.
It includes an extensive library of episodes from my podcast show ‘Coffee and Contemplation with Susan Dunlop’.
If you’re new to Blue Borage, I’ll reaffirm here that we never share recordings of the 90-Minute Conversation Cafe events. It feels important that we honour privacy and the vulnerability it takes to be in conversation on a tough topic.
Our November Seven Conversations on SSTA: An Online 12-Hour Symposium is now live for registration – please come and join us whether you have time for one session, three or the entire seven conversations… we’ll be there waiting for you. Registration is via Eventbrite only.
If these themes speak to you I invite you to subscribe and join me there:
👉 Blue Borage on YouTube
Because courage is contagious. When one person chooses it, others feel permission to step towards it.
Thank you for being here,
Susan