Lisa Barker is the Executive Director of LivWeal Foundation, activating hearts to live wealthy. Lisa brings more than 20 years of inquiry, science and award winning artistry to her role of Executive Director. She has also fully immersed herself in, and specifically benefited from the work, process and practice of LivWeal Institute for the last three years.

Lisa is both an award winning global movement artist, teacher and adjudicator (Highland Dance), and a recognized chemical engineer and operations leader having worked with multinational companies such as BetzDearborn, Hercules and Kimberly-Clark. She is a celebrated community builder and entrepreneur within ‘Highland Together’ Global Summits, The Pivot, Ardlair and her own The Elemental Dancer community.

In all of Lisa’s career accomplishments, it has been her commitment to integrating external data (science) with internal knowing (intuition), which has been the difference maker for both her and her students and colleagues. Her life has been an exploration of the value of high achievement, and the active deconstruction of the belief that external progress, opportunity and success defines inner wealth and self-worth. Her unique blend of experiences have given Lisa a deep understanding and insight into the importance of a person’s inner sense of value and how much they matter, and how much this relates to external achievement, success and personal contentment.

Lisa’s lifetime of study and work in dance, leadership, and the sciences, along with her passion for sustainable high achievement and mastery came together when she created The Matters Experiment, a process and method of inquiry for individuals and organizations who are ready to place genuine priority and focus on themselves, or their people, as their most important asset. It is this development which aligns her work with Jennifer Love’s LivWeal Institute.

As an inquirer, Lisa ultimately is a space holder, working alongside world visionaries and leaders who are in the process of actively reimagining wealth. She gathers data as an intuitive artist while measuring the results as a researcher and scientist. As the Executive Director of the LivWeal Foundation, Lisa is committed to bringing the art and science of true wealth to the world leaders of tomorrow. Lisa lives in Mount Gambier in South Australia with her husband Adam, and their family.

As a dancer, at nine years old growing up in a regional town more than 10,000 miles from the homeland of the dance form she had embraced, Lisa won her first state Highland Dancing state championship. Within three years she became the title holder of the Australian Commonwealth Championship, the Grand Australasian Championship, and then the Champion of Champions of Australia as the top national dancer in her age group in the country.

In her early adult years Lisa miraculously survived a high speed car crash, flipping and rolling her car six times. Having spent her youth as a high achieving dancer whose identity was directly connected to her ability to move, this accident and her rehabilitation journey changed her life and in later years, her approach to teaching dance and also more broadly, her connection with people.

At 21 Lisa began her professional, and non-arts related career with a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical) with Honors from the University of Melbourne. She started in technical sales and customer relations within the Pulp and Paper industry, growing a $700,000 chemical supply account to $6.5 million in just three years. She worked with high caliber mentors such as Robyn Dittrich and Tom Zaiser, and then moved globally, networking in Singapore and Nice with BetzDearborn and Hercules.

Still dancing, at age 22 she arrived on the Scottish shores for the first time to dance in the home of the traditional Highland Dance form, where she was selected to dance at the invitation of the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II. From this experience Lisa performed at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, for the Sultan of Oman at the Oman National Day celebrations in the Middle East, on mainland Europe, as well as throughout all states of Australia

At 26, Lisa joined the manufacturing world when she was employed as a Process Engineer by Kimberly-Clark. She was quickly promoted to become the youngest and first female person appointed to a Machine Superintendent’s role in the 60 year history of the facility. By 29, she had been moved into special projects and was one of only 50 people in the world who had access and experiential knowledge of a technical development in facial tissue making. This start-up position saw Lisa in her element, she was in balance with both her intuition and her engineering and problem solving skills.

As Lisa’s personal pursuit of mastery continued, her commitment to dance saw her earn nine professional teaching and fellowship qualifications including acceptance to the Royal Scottish Official Board of Highland Dancing World-wide Judge’s Panel, the British Association of Teachers of Dancing – Highland and Scottish National Fellowship and Members Certificates. She has also been an invited guest judge at international events in the United Kingdom, North America, South Africa, and across all states and territories in Australia and New Zealand. These have included the World Championships of Highland Dancing held in Scotland, the Canadian Open and Closed National Championships, the New Zealand Championships, the Australian Champion of Champions and International Championships of Australia, and the Diamond Rush Championships, a marquee event which opened the International Highland Dancing Conference hosted in South Africa.

Lisa’s professional career continued to flourish when she became the Operations Team Leader for Kimberly-Clark, a senior management position responsible for 180 people of which only two were women. At the time, being only one of two felt like a familiar path of personal challenge and an achievement worth fighting for, but she realized this pursuit of external power came at the expense of her internal contentment.

It is with this seed of understanding that Lisa began her own personal journey of untangling her sense of value from her capability and external achievements. At 34 years of age, she made a dramatic shift away from a six figure career as a chemical engineer and decided to be guided by her intuition and the discipline of deep exploration of her own values and desires to discover her greater purpose in life.

During her hiatus from her professional career, Lisa’s love of dance and personal pursuit of sustainability and mind/body integration took Lisa down a new road of teaching, lecturing and speaking about ‘dance done differently’ and how to support and nurture the whole dancer. Inside competitive achievement and incredibly high standards and expectations is a person who has their own desires, dreams, goals, capabilities and limitations.

Lisa’s work and experiences came together when she began living Jennifer Love’s Living Wealthy process. What had seemed like a life of polarity as artist vs. analyst, empath vs. director, and high-achiever vs. intuitive receiver, evolved into an acceptance of her true gift of space-holding which is both the analyst, researcher and scientist, held with love, patience and soulful expression. It is from this place that Lisa’s creation of The Matters Experiment was born. As a dancer, engineer, teacher, and leader, Lisa has been creating spaces intuitively her whole life.

She is thrilled to be working with Jennifer Love in the role of Executive Director of LivWeal Foundation where she gets to have conversations with people who are creating and giving wealth from a place of feeling valued, enough and knowing that they matter.

‘When we work from a place of knowing we matter, we have all we need to change our world.” ~ Lisa Barker