May 7, 2025 • 49 mins
Geez, I thought I'd met some bad eggs in the online dating world... Tracy Hall's experience sure takes the cake though. In 2016 she met Max Tavita online and for the next 18 months they built a seemingly solid relationship with great plans for the future. Until... she woke up one morning to a Crime Stoppers video of him being arrested.
Turns out, Max Tavita wasn’t Max Tavita at all. His real name was Hamish McLaren (or Hamish Watson, or Hamish Maxwell pending which day you spoke to him) and he was one of Australia’s most prolific con men. He’d stolen millions from multiple victims and Tracy Hall was his last. Her savings, her trust, her sense of safety, all gone in a blink.
We talk about the layers of betrayal, the grief of losing someone who didn’t really exist, the shame, the unraveling of trust - not just in others, but in herself. We unpacked shame and how it isolates us not just from the world, but from ourselves. And how, sometimes, telling the story is the only way to stop shame from tightening its grip.
This is one of those conversation that had me feeling like I was watching a movie, rather than speaking to a human about real life... But sometimes that is real life, isn't it?
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TRACY HALL
Website: tracyhall.com.au
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the Punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
custody and children, family violence and intervention orders, property settlements
and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so
reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Tracy Hall, welcome to
(00:53):
Roll with the Punches.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
How are you, mate? How's your world?
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Who? What? It's good? School holidays are finally over again.
It feels like that just constantly happening. But yeah, school
holidays are over so I can get back to get
back to normal programming. I guess you could say we
were just.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Off air having a chat about life and being a
grown up and how quick time passes. But it just
will never stop astounding me when I think of my
perception of how much there is to get done as
a grown up, and the fact that everyone else gets
it done and has children, Like, how do you even do.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
That with little sleep?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Things, you know what, things just don't happen sometimes sometimes
things just fall off the you know, they just fall
off or they fall over or not. Everything gets done.
But I do think your capacity increases as well. I
think I think your capacity expands.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Yeah, maybe priorities and yeah, ye like give give stuff
to a busy person. When I make myself busier, which
I'm killer wearing myself out a lot and burning out,
I'm real good at that fad wod practice. But when
I'm at my busiest, I am the most efficient with time.
And when I get to a point where I need
(02:17):
to remedy that terrible yeah sciritizing.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, give Like, if you've got ten things on you
to do list, you'll you'll get more done than if
you've just got one. Yeah, it's a crazy psychological hack.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I thought you was going to say, if you've got
ten things, give them to Tracy Hall. And I was like, okay,
then expect.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
An email anytime. I'll let you know. How go, What
do you.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Want to introduce yourself to my audience in terms of
who you are, what you do.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, my name is Tracy Hall. I'm these days an author,
a speaker, and an advocate for financial wellness and educating
people around intimate fraud scans and financial crime. Previously, I
spent twenty five years as a marketing executive with some
of the world's biggest tech brands, actually so eBay, Go,
(03:11):
Daddy After Paid, Block, Virgin. So that's my career background
and a sort of this thing that happened to me
has steved me onto a different direction in the last
year or so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
When did the thing that we're here about? When did
the thing take place?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
The thing happened in mid twenty seventeen, so almost eight
years ago now. But there's been a slow progression to
the career change that I'm going through right now for
many reasons, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, where should we even start?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Should we talk about that thing?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yes? There you to.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
With some people who know this story. It was It
was a very popular hit podcast called Who the Hell
Is Hamish? But in early twenty sixteen, I met a
man online. I decided to start dating. My marriage had
finished about a year earlier and I was just sort
of getting back on my feet, single parenting, working a
big job at eBay, and I decided I was ready
(04:24):
to start online dating again. And I met a man
online by the name of Max Tavita, and he was
a chief investment officer for a family office, and we
began a very much a real life intimate relationship that
lasted nearly eighteen months. And it wasn't until July twenty
(04:45):
seventeen that I woke up one morning to a crime
Stoppers video on an online news site of him being arrested.
And he was arrested for swindling fifteen victims out of
seven point six million dollars, and you know, his face
was all blurred out, but of course I knew without
a shadow of a doubt that that was my boyfriend.
(05:06):
Except his name was not Max Tavita. His name was
Hamish McLaren and he happens to be one of Australia's
most prolific common and he'd been conning people throughout the
world for the better part of thirty years and I
was his last victim. So I didn't speak to him.
(05:28):
You know, as he was arrested, he was taken away
and put in jail, and he's been in jail ever since.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
I just got goosebumps, and then again and then again.
That actually made me feel vically ill visualizing that. What
did it even feel like to But that cannot have
felt real to see that play out in the moment.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
No, it felt numb. And I think in any situation
like that, you're natural reaction is sort of disbelief and denial, because,
you know, in my world, this was a very loving boyfriend.
He's someone that i'd just been to buy and bay
with for the weekend. He came up to support me
on a work project. We were looking at properties to buy,
(06:16):
we were talking about our future. We communicated really well.
We seemingly had the same values of morals. I felt
like I'd found my person. I thought he was one
of the most solid people I'd ever met. And then
to see video footage and news articles of him being arrested,
and then the unfolding of the story about his crimes,
(06:39):
and once I knew his real name, of course I
could go deep into the Internet and find out who
he really was. Was just like living in a parallel universe.
I was so discombobulated, like I you know, and I
missed him, you know, I missed the person that I
spoke to ten times a day, you know, whether that
(07:01):
be through text or WhatsApp or phone calls or what
have you. And then I felt ridiculous because I was
missing a criminal and that made me feel sick. And
I just didn't know. I didn't know who I'd been
sleeping next to, you know, like it was just there
were so many layers of deceit and betrayal, and in
amongst all of that, I'd come to realize that he
(07:24):
had stolen my life saving So he stole three hundred
and seventeen thousand dollars from me, and I've never seen
that money again, and I've had to sort of come
to terms with that side of things as well. So
it was both a financial and emotional and then the
psychological layers of betrayal that all came crashing down very
very quickly. So yeah, I think I was numb and
(07:49):
in disbelief and shop and denial.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I always think that like relationships and intimate relationships are
such a next level when it comes to processing emotional situations,
because there you are or like you said, there's this
grief of missing someone who kind of essentially didn't exist,
(08:12):
but they had existed to you for eighteen months. That's
a long time to be in a relationship with somebody
that you believe you know.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Well, and that you believe you know the name of
you know and everything you know, every story, every every glance,
every handhold, every text message, every email, every conversation, everything
was fictitious.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
It was set up for a purpose. It was set
up to extract something at the end, or to you know,
achieve his ambition of you know, befooling me, I guess,
but yeah, it was. It was so it was so confusing,
and it did feel like grief because he was there
one minute and gone the next. But in fact, the
(09:01):
man that was there never actually existed. He was just
a fictitious character, like a figment of my imagination really,
and so I had to remove that person that seemed
so real in my mind, very very quickly and replace
him with the true person who is Hamish McLaren and
who he was and the crimes he had committed, and
(09:24):
you know what I could find out about him, and
that was that was actually very difficult. It took a
long time to figure out who the hell Hamish was,
and that's where the name of the podcast came from,
because during those months and years after he was arrested,
I received very little information. I received really vague statements
(09:48):
from the authorities like the police and the detectives. For example,
there are many victims and it's millions of dollars. That
is about all they could tell me, because of course
it was a a criminal case at this point that
went on for three years. His friends and family wouldn't
talk to me, and the authorities, you know, the banks
and institutions wouldn't talk to me either because it was
(10:09):
a criminal case. And I understand all of those things,
but in the absence of knowledge, your brain can't rest,
you know, your brain. Our brains actually don't like unfinished stories.
So we either make up the ending so that we
can put it to bed, or we live in this
state of ambiguity where our mind actually can't rest until
(10:32):
we have those answers. And that was the world that
I lived in because I couldn't make up the ending.
I couldn't make up the answers because anything that I
would have imagined just wouldn't have been true. So I
lived in this sort of state of ambiguity and unknowing
for the better part of two years really, and it
wasn't until the podcast came out and Greg bare Up
(10:54):
the journalist, did the investigative peace and started to uncover
who hell Hamish was and relaying that back to me
that all of those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle sort
of started to fall into place and my mind could rest.
So that was a really interesting part of the process
for me as well, to really understand that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
How was the nature of his your relationship in comparison
to prior relationships that with people that he had taken
money from.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
All different. So in the case that was sort of
went through the criminal courts in Australia, there were fifteen
victims and no other of those victims were in an
intimate relationship with him. So there were business relationships. So
he was a barristera to one, a barrista a barrister
(11:49):
or a barrista, a barrister to somebody. He was a
triathlete to somebody else. He was a business strategist for
somebody else. You know, he just had things different. He
was a commit like he was a shape shifter. He
was whoever you needed him to be in that moment.
For him to make a connection with you and extract
money from you. So the victims in Australia, there was
(12:11):
no one else in an intimate relationship with him. But
I did meet and here over the time different women
that were in relationships with him through the podcast. I
met his ex wife who that was a fantastic moment
for me to meet her and for us to form
a bond and a friendship where we could really talk
(12:34):
about things that I couldn't talk about to anybody else.
So it was very it was very different. And that's
that's sort of what makes these characters so good at
what they do, so good at their craft. Is it
they just become whoever you need them to be for
them to get what they want.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, And how much of this PERSONA was like was
part of his real life as well? Did you meet
his friends? Was he being the same person or was
there a complete construction of that?
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It's hard to know. I did meet some people, but
they were sort of very fleeting and very brief meetings,
So it wasn't like we spent weekends together with friends
or nights away at his you know, family's place in
canber or anything like that. And I guess that's that's
what makes these people so good as well. They like
to keep people separate. But the reality was we you know,
(13:30):
I didn't have a lot of spare time. I was
single parenting a child, and the time that we did
get was sort of all wrapped up in lots of
beautiful language from him around. You know. But I haven't
seen him for two weeks, and I just want to
spend time with you, and how about we just do
something traced like I've missed you, you know, which comes
in disguised as love and affection and all of those
(13:54):
lovely things, but in essence, when you look back, it
was all it was all part of the part of
the plan. But yeah, I did meet some friends and family,
and he seemed to be the same character. But there
was never any discussion about his name or you know,
what he did for a job or anything like that,
(14:16):
so that they were quite fleeting, fleeting interactions.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
How did you like trust? Like, what was the process
of unraveling that whole experience and trusting another person again,
Trusting people to come into your life, trusting the people
you know, and trusting yourself to make those right connections.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
The hardest thing out of all of that was learning
to trust myself again. Trusting other people has seemingly been
not too bad for me. I mean, I've done a
lot of therapy, a lot of thinking, a lot of
I definitely see the world differently. I question a lot more.
I'm a lot more skeptical, I am much more curious
(15:08):
about things that people say and what they do like.
Those things have definitely changed. But the biggest, the biggest
challenge for me, and the hardest thing for me to
reconcile within myself, is was that I had made the
biggest mistake of my life, and I had made the
(15:30):
worst decision of my life, And how could I ever
trust myself to read people again, to trust my intuition
to make good decisions because I didn't do that. And
that has been the hardest thing. It's been the most
confronting thing. It has taken the longest and are still
(15:55):
there are still days where I really question, I question
things or question myself and I have to really sort
of think about is this you know? Is this a
hangover from the experience, or is this me feeling a
weird intuitive feeling, or is this you know? Okay? So
many layers to it but the hardest thing was that
I didn't trust myself anymore. And when you don't trust yourself,
(16:19):
like where do you even start. So that's been that's
been it. That's been a big challenge for me.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I feel that to my core. What about how Because
it's such a hyper a it's such a unique thing,
it's an enormous thing, it's an intimate and confronting thing,
and then it's all over the media. What does that
do to your identity?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
For a long time, I was not prepared for anybody
to know because I was so ashamed. I was so embarrassed.
I hated myself for what happened, for the position that
I put myself in and my daughter in in terms
of my finances and my financial future. I lost everything.
(17:09):
I had nothing but my monthly income when he was arrested.
Everything was gone, and I felt so ashamed. There were
people very close to me, of course, that knew, but
it wasn't It wasn't well widely known, and in fact,
still to this day, there are people that I've known
(17:31):
through through my career and things like that, that you know.
Even when the book came out, they said, wow, this
is quite the plot twist we had no idea, you know,
so it was kept very close for a good couple
of years. And when I met Greg Barrap the story
that the journalist, he wanted to sort of launch the
story or launch launch this with my story, and that
(17:59):
was quite and fronting. I had, you know, family and
my best friends saying, don't do it, don't do it, Trace,
there's too much risk, You're too exposed. There's career and
reputational damage to think about. What why don't you just
get on with life, get over it and get on
with life. And I I thought about that, and then
(18:25):
I thought about why this happened to me, and how
uneducated I was in this in this space, I would
see news articles or see things on you know, on
the news or those current affair programs of women who
got scammed, and traditionally they present a very sensationalized view
(18:48):
of a lonely, middle aged woman with a bunch of
cats sitting in the lounge room looking for love on
the internet. You know, this is this is how these
women are presented. They're quite often presented as uneducated, and
you know, you see these stories and and you know
they transfer their life savings to their fake foreign prints
and you go, we're an idiot. And I've seen those
(19:10):
stories that was me. I never ever thought it would
be me, And there was something burning inside of me
that said, you know, why should I be ashamed of
this story? You know, I'm a well educated, well traveled
human that's had a great career, a fantastic family upbringing.
(19:32):
If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
And the longer we stay silent on these issues and
other issues in life is the longer that they go.
You know, it's just st longer that they go unreported
and undetected, unsolved. And so I kind of just had
(19:53):
this feeling that if in telling my story, I could
help one other person not go through what I've been
through and make it differ reference through my adversity or
through the challenges, whatever you want to call them, then
for me, that was going to be worth it. And
then it just took a life of its own. And
(20:14):
you know, yes, of course there are going to be
people that go, you're an idiot. How could she be
so stupid? Why did she not see all the red flags?
And the truth is, there's not anything that anybody could
say to me that I haven't already cruelly said to myself,
and so that didn't even bother me. But what was
(20:35):
incredible in those moments when the story came out and
more people came forward and the bigness of the story
kind of took on a life of its own, was
the encouragement and the sharing of the story that helped
other people open up to me, like one story, I've
got it. You know, it still makes me teary today
(20:57):
when I talk about it. But I was a dinner
with a family and the mom and I was sitting
opposite the mother. She was seventy four or seventy five
years old at the time, and her two sons were
sort of sitting either side of us. And she had
lost her entire divorce settlement when she was forty through
(21:19):
a friend actually that had deforded and scammed her, and
it was essentially the money that was going to set
her up for her the second part of her life
and you know, support her kids and what have you.
And she had never spoken about it. Very very little
words have been spoken about this experience. The kids kind
(21:39):
of knew and these are like, you know, children in
their forties listening to her recount her story to me,
and they're like, we don't know this. How do we
not know this? Mom? And she's got tears streaming down
her face and she's telling me this story about how
she lost everything, and she said, I've never told anybody,
(22:00):
and she'd sat in her shame for thirty five years.
And I thought, oh my god. And just in that
one conversation, I thought, you know what, it's worth it.
It's worth it. And that's opened up a conversation in
their family and more broadly amongst their peers. And it's
(22:23):
not anything to be ashamed of, you know. The shame
is on the perpetrator. But unfortunately that's not the way
it's perceived in the world. And that's part of what
I why I do what I do now to advocate
for that.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
I love this so much. I am such a I guess,
an advocate of that philosophy that silencing or staying silent
is a breeding ground for shame. And you know, I
started the podcast and I shared things about my life
that I've kept secret for decades and decades, and I
(23:02):
felt the effect that it had, and I realized how
sinister shame and silence is even under the surface that
you don't realize. And I love that you have the
ability to step into this and do it because the
impact on other people, like you've just experienced and explained,
is so big.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, And just as a byproduct, the impact on me
was so profound as well, because it forced me to
look so deeply at my own shame. And I never
really knew a lot about shame. It's one of those
emotions we don't really talk about very much because again
the silent secrecy, and what I've come to realize is
(23:46):
that it is the most incredibly lonely emotion. And it's
lonely because not only do you not want other people
to know something about yourself because you will feel less
than or less like or less accepted, you actually don't
even want to admit it to yourself, so you're actually
lonely from yourself. Yeah, it's just the most disgusting thing
(24:12):
to feel, because if you feel lonely from yourself, like
what else is there? And kind of coming to terms
with that and bridging that gap within myself through all
of the reflection that I've done and seeing you, like
you said, how it positively impacts other people, but how
that's positively impacted me in terms of building back my
(24:34):
strength and my feeling about myself, my trust in myself.
That that was a massive That was just massive for
me really understanding how shame operates within us.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah. I always felt like when I look back, like,
if we don't tell our story, we start to tell
a story because we live, we live life, so we
have to tell a story. So we put into picture
and then we become that picture and then life gets
a bit tough, and all of a sudden, like from
my experience, all of a sudden, you're kind of on
(25:10):
your knees and you go, oh, I need some support.
Nobody knows this version of me because I've been paying
and you're not really aware of it because you're just like,
I'm just not going to tell them this part. But
it means you show up differently.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, the impact is huge, Yeah it is. And Yeah,
how can you ever operate authentically in the world and
be the best version of yourself if there are parts
of you that you don't even want to admit to yourself,
You don't even want to reconcile within yourself, not even
the like, let alone other people yourself like, and people
(25:45):
can sniff it out. You can sniff it out a
mile away. So it's God. It's hard though, it takes. Fuck,
it's just so hard. It's so hard, but it's so
worth it. It is really worth it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, did you have an on your knees moment and
a tipping point or was it a gradual process of
dig a little, push a little, learn a little, see
what's under the hood.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Feel like I was in a deep, dark shamehold for
a good couple of years. I don't know if it
was a moment. I just like I was saying before,
like he's so lad. You know. It was personal betrayal,
it was an intimate betrayal, it was relationship betrayal, it
was financial betrayal. And then at the same time, you know,
(26:35):
while I'm processing and comprehending all of this and trying
to feel it, I had to get up and go
to work every day because I cannot lose my job.
I cannot lose my job. I was so scared. It
was the only financial lifeline I had, and I knew
if I didn't have a job, then I was really fucked.
And I have a six year old and I was
(26:55):
a single parent. I am a single parent, And I
looked at her, and I thought, who's going to get
her to school every day and her activities if I'm
curled up in the fetal position, not able to get
out of bed, and some mornings she was the only
thing getting me out of bed every morning. Like I've
got to be honest. So in a way, like those
(27:15):
two things were such like there were such blessings. But
if I'm really honest with myself, I was dragging myself
through life for a good few years and trying to
do my best and trying to you know, trying to
positively think my way out of it and do my
gratitude journal and all the things that you meant to
do on Instagram, which I've come to realize like these
(27:38):
these things are just sanitized versions of what realistically is
just trying to survive. And I think, you know, I
have this view on resilience, and it's been quite a
myth because people like there's just so many views. But
we've got to be resilient. We got to stuff and
(27:59):
we've got to like take it and all of those things.
I don't know, like everyone says to me, you're so resilient,
You're so strong, I'm like, I was just surviving for years.
For years, that's how I felt, And it might have
looked like that on the outside, but on the inside
it felt like survival and that's okay as well, like
that's fine. So yeah, a good couple of years of
(28:25):
really like just I don't know, just crying every day basically.
And then and then I think once the podcast came
out and I started to get more information and I
started to learn more and I felt stronger, then I
could start to really shift the way that I thought
(28:47):
about the experience in a more positive light. But it
has taken, you know, seven years to write a book,
seven years to be able to stand up on stage
and tell my story and use my lessons as learnings
for others. Those seven years were pretty messy. It was
(29:09):
the messy middle, and it was also the put your
head down in your bum up trace and you can
get your finances sorted because you deserve a big life
and you've got to make that happen. No one else
is going to make it happen. Sorry to tell you that,
no one's coming to save you. You're going to make
it happen. And so that's what I did. So a
lot of those seven years, which is working really really
(29:31):
hard and getting on top of my finances. Sorry, that
was a very long answer.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
No, it was my favorite, right, and I've been deep
on that topic myself, the idea of resilience and hard
and like, I like to fight back against the David
Goggins style of do the hard thing, just do hard things,
just keep doing hard things, because just like you, I'm like,
dissociation looks like resilience. I looked like I was resilient
(30:02):
in the boxing ring. I couldn't feel the punches, mate.
It was it was that I was called to that
boxing ring because it resonated and it did the same
thing to me that evoked a fight or flight response,
and so I couldn't feel in there. That's not resilient.
That's just dissociation. And it's cool for a boxing flight
for three minutes. But if you don't know you're doing it,
don't cheer me on for it.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
It's survival exactly. It's survival, and in whatever way that
survival looks like for you, and for some people it's
you know, it's less effective strategies like drugs and alcohol
or other addictions. For me, I never went there but
I can see how people do one hundred percent, like
(30:48):
totally see how people go there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, it's it's long and it's arduous, and people like
answers and people like like like you said, I went
on at some point the shame journey of going, well,
how do I remember three or four years ago having
Peter Croan on the show and talking shame? I love
him right so at that that was a few years
(31:12):
ago now, and only late last year I went to
the Himalayas and we had this experience and we did
this letting go ritual, and I took shame to the
mountain and burned it and left it there, and it
had this massively visceral experience. And I came away thinking,
so did I get rid of shame in a moment
(31:33):
or over a decade or over my whole life? Like what?
Like what is it? Is it? The fucking memes on Instagram?
That is it?
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
The visions?
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
The fucking gratitude journaling? Like what? And we never know?
It's such a process and everyone's process is different.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
It's so individualized, and you know, Instagram would have us
believe that this happens very quickly because quite often what
we see as peoples kind of you know, the rise
and the rebuild and the new life and all the
lessons and the learnings and whilst that can be inspiring
if you are working your way through your own private health,
(32:13):
I know I found those things inspiring from time to time.
It's actually unfair and unrealistic to present that as the
healing journey. But no one's going to put up a
real of you know, day forty seven, still in my
ug boots and want to marry this pizza, like no
one's going to out, Like no one's going to you know,
and like it's it's true. And I think, yeah, we're
(32:38):
presented this idea that resilience looks a certain way and
it takes a certain amount of time, and the reality
is it's none of those things. It's whatever you need
it to be. And yeah, it's it's so individual, it's
so individual, and it is so it can look like disassociation,
(33:00):
for sure. I think that's I think a lot of
my time post Hamish being arrested was very disassociated. You know.
I would go to work and I would turn on
the marketing executive hat and I would run a team
of sixteen people and spend ten million bucks and you know,
do all the things that I needed to do, and
looked like success. It looked like I had a handle
(33:22):
on it. It looked like I was all over it. But
what was great about going to work was that for
eight or ten hours a day I didn't have to
think about the fact that I'd lost every last cent
of my twenty two year career, you know, superinnuation and savings.
You know, I could completely compartmentalize my life. When I
was mum, I was you know, it's a lot like
(33:44):
you just you destructed and you're you're full on. And
it wasn't until you know, I went to bed at
night or I woke up in the morning. Quite often
i'd wake up in the morning and strangely, I wasn't
sleeping very well at this time in my life. I
mean that, yeah, and I'd wake up and just for
(34:05):
a moment i'd remember when it happened. I'd wake up,
and then reality would kick in a couple of seconds later,
and I just have that feeling of like, my god,
I've got to get through a whole nother day. This
is my life now. And yeah, it was just it's
just such a such a challenging, such a challenging time,
(34:30):
And some days it was just enough to go to
work and get my kid to school and make sure
she had clean underwear. Like that's enough. Some days you
don't have to do you know, the gratitude journal and
the exercise and the cacao ceremony or before six am,
and you know all the things. Like if you're making
your way through life one step at a time and
(34:54):
moving forward, that's enough.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
People want to do hard things so that hard things
are easy, but forget that. Once a hard thing becomes easy,
it's not hard anymore. And it's actually not about doing
hard things. It's about doing usually things we don't want
to do.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
So uncomfortable things.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah, like opage a ring and fighting was hard once,
And then when I dug a little deeper and realized
there was a lot of underlying work and there was
a new me that I was seeing underneath the persona
hard was doing that work. Not stepping in the ring
it's hard, was stepping out of the ropes and going, well,
(35:37):
what I've learned in here, I'm going to put to
work and step into actual hard. You know, sometimes hard
is not doing it's stopping.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
And letting go. I'm just being honest with yourself, taking
a really good I remember my parents, take a good,
hard look at yourself, taking a really good heart look
at yourself, and being really honest about who you are
as a person, what your vulnerabilities are, what you think
about yourself, what you think about the world, accepting those
(36:11):
parts of yourself that you've probably buried for a while.
And that is hard, that is it's so especially if
you're an unemotional person. I'm not a particularly emotional person,
you know, I'm just it's just in my wiring. I'm
not so actually looking at these things and getting really
emotional is actually really hard for me. It's not natural.
(36:35):
It's not natural at all for me. So that they
are the hard things. Not yet, like you said, I mean,
I've never boxed. But I know what you're going. Where
you're going with the analogy.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah, what what in terms of your I guess your
perspective or like, what mattered to you before and what
matters to you now and has it changed or has
it intensified.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I think at the time what mattered to me because
I was, you know, I was navigating a divorce at
this point. When I met Hamish, and what mattered to
me at the time was building a relationship with somebody
who felt like my equal, who felt like I was
like part of the team, and you know, someone who
had similar values and interesting me, someone who could imagine
(37:22):
growing old with. And obviously my career mattered, my daughter mattered.
Those were the things I was really focused on. And
after sort of navigating quite an acrimonious divorce, was Okay,
I'm forty now, you know I'm forty one. I had
(37:44):
the whole second half of my life to rewrite. I
can be anything I want to be, I can do
anything I want to do. I'm not being held back
by anything now and so that felt really empowering me.
So that was the feeling that I went into this
relationship with, and I expressed those things. We had very,
(38:08):
very deep conversations. He was a great conversationalist, he was
very what seemed emotionally intelligent. So we had this level
of sort of intimacy and depth to our relationship that
I'd never felt, or I hadn't felt for a long time.
And essentially what he did was he mirrored that back
to me, and I thought that's what we were building,
(38:31):
and even though it was fake, even though it was
all just designed for him to extract money from me.
I guess what it showed me was that I was
really clear for the first time in my life what
I wanted and how I wanted my life to roll out,
and that I was in charge of that. I had
the power to create that. And unfortunately I was targeted
(38:56):
by the wrong person. But those things really solidified. And
then post Hamish and all of the discovery and all
of the work that I've done, I've really had to
I've really had to unpick who I am as a person,
where my biases come from, why I think the way
(39:18):
that I do, why I've chosen the people to bring
into my life that I have. And it's very easy
to sit there and say, you know, he was a professional,
he targeted me. You know, he'd been doing this for
thirty years. I was just unlucky to meet him. And
all of those things are true. But I played a role.
You know, my energy played a role. What I wanted
(39:40):
for myself for my life played a role, and you know,
my vulnerabilities played a role. And so I think since him,
even though I sort of had this vision of what
I wanted my second half of my life to look like.
This experience taught me to go deeper into myself because
it always put other things than other people first. And
(40:02):
this was really about understanding Tracy and coming to terms
with you know, some of the parts of myself that
I didn't want to admit were there. So I have
a deeper understanding of myself now and I get to
rewrite the second half of my life again now. So
(40:22):
that's been weird because I get I've had I've gotten
to do it twice now.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, I love that. I love listening to you. Help
if you were to make an assumption of where this gets,
so you look at your story and go, I was
this person and then this happened. And then when it
all like in a story book, then I got to
hear how close to here and grateful and strong and like,
(40:53):
how close to that kind of hero's journey pinnacle. Do
you feel like you might be now or do you
think that's just an ever of in process we go through.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
I think it's ever evolving. I think mine has sped
up because of this experience. I've been gifted this opportunity,
if you could call it that, I've been gifted this
opportunity to use my experience and my voice to help others,
and for me, this is the first iteration. So this
(41:25):
is the story about how it happened, and how I
lost my money and how I fell in love and
you know, scams and fraud and financial crime and what
all the platforms should be doing, and all of the
richness of those conversations, which which are great. I love them.
But there's more, you know, there's so much more about
(41:47):
this journey that I can express that I'm just I haven't.
I haven't yet, because I think that's an iteration. You know,
it could be you know again, And I don't like
the terms rezilts an adversity and things like that, but
you know, what do you learn from these things? And
I am not some like Olympic athlete that has some
(42:09):
big story to tell with profile. I am just an
ordinary human that has experienced things that a lot of
people will experience, and not just Hamish. But before I
ever met Hamish, there was a lot that happened before
I'd even turned forty two. You know, I've lost a parent,
I've watched my other parent go through through cancer, just
as became a mother myself. I've suffered a miscarriage, my
(42:33):
brother has challenges with addiction and mental health issues, my
marriage ended. You know, like that has been a lot,
and with all of those things comes a level of
reflection and just reflection on how ordinary people endure some really,
(42:58):
really fucking hard things. And you know, we don't always
need to see the Olympian up on stage talking about
their journey from you know, Olympic goal to whatever their
challenge has been, because those don't seem that realistic in
the same way that Instagram doesn't always seem realistic in
the way that post traumatic growth is expressed. So I
(43:21):
think there's a space where there's a more realistic, real
voice that can express these things in a way that
resonates with other people. So that's that's future tracing. But
right now where you know where we're starting, we're starting
that journey.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Love it. When I first started the show and I
was talking to people, obviously Roll with the Punches that's
the theme, and it's let's talk to people because we're
in the we're in the middle of the pandemic. At
that time, it was like, oh, let's talk to people
that can that have got into stories about stuff they've overcome,
and let's learn from them, because that's really uplifting. And
then quite quickly I was like, also, let's talk to
(44:03):
people who have done amazing things, ultra endurance athletes, people
that have done things that other people could only dream of.
And I quickly realized, same conversations. We're having the same conversations.
It's just kind of what flavor title they want to
put on the book cover of their life. And that
(44:25):
you know, like as you were just listing off all
of the things that came before this before, it's that
layering of like everybody is just in this life and
we have this silly belief that, well, I've just got
to get over this one thing and then life will
be good and we always be good, and we never
think of the reality that, well, there's more shit coming
(44:47):
as well as good stuff, and there's every chance that
this day today, as I sit here with you, maybe
this is the best day, this is the pinnacle of
my life, and then I'm going to have faced a
really big challenge and life's going to shift.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
We never think of that, no, because you never I
mean a bit like being scammed. You never think these
things are going to happen to you. But the reality is,
if you asked a room full of people who have
been affected by all of those things and more, everyone
would hold the handle. So adversity doesn't discriminate. It's you know,
(45:24):
it's going to hit all of us, and I'm not
naive enough to sit here and go you know, this
is not the last thing that's going to happen to me,
that it's going to be really tough. I guess what
I like to express is that is all these things
that we go through in life that create a sense
of whether it's strength or knowledge or intuitive power, that
(45:47):
you you are going to be okay, because you know,
if someone had said to me, these are all the
things are going to happen to you before you've even
hit forty two, would I've said I'm done. I'm out
for me, you know, But the human spirit has incredible
capacity to endure. And you don't have to be a
hardened Olympic athlete or someone famous. These are just everyday
(46:11):
ordinary people that are making their way through life quietly
with you know, with a reserved strength. And you know
it doesn't look quite hardcore resilience. It does just look
like survival. But they're inspirational and amazing in their own way.
And I think if you can draw from that knowing
that if you are going to go through a really
tough time, that you're going to get through it. And
(46:33):
sometimes that's all you need is just that little bit
of hope to know that it's going to be okay.
It's not going to be okay today, and it's not
going to be okay by Friday, but it's going to
be okay. And I think there's just something really reassuring
in that, at least that's time. That's what I tell myself.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
I think you're right. I find so much power in
your realness. You're like, there's there's got no magic pill.
I'm just going to tell you it's a little bit shit,
and it's also a little bit okay, and we're all
in it.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, everyone's everyone's got their stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, what's next for you?
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Oh? More more of this? You know. I left corporate
last year this time last year when I was launching
my book. I left my corporate career to do this
full time. And so as long as this continues and
people want to listen and want to learn, and that
(47:33):
I can advocate and create change, and be able to
pay the mortgage and the school fees. And I'll keep
doing it, so more of more of this, and I
think they will be over time and evolution of where
I get to my thinking and my writing and the
(47:54):
messages that I want to share with the world.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Congratulations, Thanks you, leap best Black. I feel like I'm
going to stay. I'm going to remain in your sphere
and watch from watch from the sidelines and cheer you on.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and
sharing so much of yourself so vulnerably. It's really powerful.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Thank you, Thank you for having me. It's been a
great chat.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
You're welcome. Would you like to send anyone anywhere to
buy your book or follow your socials or access anything
you'd like?
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Yeah, LinkedIn. I post lots of stuff on LinkedIn, Instagram.
Tracy Lee Hall for my website, Tracyhall dot com, dot
A you amazing.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Thanks Tracy, Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the Punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
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reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Tracy Hall, welcome to
(00:53):
Roll with the Punches.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
How are you, mate? How's your world?
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Who? What? It's good? School holidays are finally over again.
It feels like that just constantly happening. But yeah, school
holidays are over so I can get back to get
back to normal programming. I guess you could say we
were just.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Off air having a chat about life and being a
grown up and how quick time passes. But it just
will never stop astounding me when I think of my
perception of how much there is to get done as
a grown up, and the fact that everyone else gets
it done and has children, Like, how do you even do.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
That with little sleep?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Things, you know what, things just don't happen sometimes sometimes
things just fall off the you know, they just fall
off or they fall over or not. Everything gets done.
But I do think your capacity increases as well. I
think I think your capacity expands.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Yeah, maybe priorities and yeah, ye like give give stuff
to a busy person. When I make myself busier, which
I'm killer wearing myself out a lot and burning out,
I'm real good at that fad wod practice. But when
I'm at my busiest, I am the most efficient with time.
And when I get to a point where I need
(02:17):
to remedy that terrible yeah sciritizing.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, give Like, if you've got ten things on you
to do list, you'll you'll get more done than if
you've just got one. Yeah, it's a crazy psychological hack.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I thought you was going to say, if you've got
ten things, give them to Tracy Hall. And I was like, okay,
then expect.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
An email anytime. I'll let you know. How go, What
do you.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Want to introduce yourself to my audience in terms of
who you are, what you do.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, my name is Tracy Hall. I'm these days an author,
a speaker, and an advocate for financial wellness and educating
people around intimate fraud scans and financial crime. Previously, I
spent twenty five years as a marketing executive with some
of the world's biggest tech brands, actually so eBay, Go,
(03:11):
Daddy After Paid, Block, Virgin. So that's my career background
and a sort of this thing that happened to me
has steved me onto a different direction in the last
year or so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
When did the thing that we're here about? When did
the thing take place?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
The thing happened in mid twenty seventeen, so almost eight
years ago now. But there's been a slow progression to
the career change that I'm going through right now for
many reasons, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, where should we even start?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Should we talk about that thing?
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yes? There you to.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
With some people who know this story. It was It
was a very popular hit podcast called Who the Hell
Is Hamish? But in early twenty sixteen, I met a
man online. I decided to start dating. My marriage had
finished about a year earlier and I was just sort
of getting back on my feet, single parenting, working a
big job at eBay, and I decided I was ready
(04:24):
to start online dating again. And I met a man
online by the name of Max Tavita, and he was
a chief investment officer for a family office, and we
began a very much a real life intimate relationship that
lasted nearly eighteen months. And it wasn't until July twenty
(04:45):
seventeen that I woke up one morning to a crime
Stoppers video on an online news site of him being arrested.
And he was arrested for swindling fifteen victims out of
seven point six million dollars, and you know, his face
was all blurred out, but of course I knew without
a shadow of a doubt that that was my boyfriend.
(05:06):
Except his name was not Max Tavita. His name was
Hamish McLaren and he happens to be one of Australia's
most prolific common and he'd been conning people throughout the
world for the better part of thirty years and I
was his last victim. So I didn't speak to him.
(05:28):
You know, as he was arrested, he was taken away
and put in jail, and he's been in jail ever since.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
I just got goosebumps, and then again and then again.
That actually made me feel vically ill visualizing that. What
did it even feel like to But that cannot have
felt real to see that play out in the moment.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
No, it felt numb. And I think in any situation
like that, you're natural reaction is sort of disbelief and denial, because,
you know, in my world, this was a very loving boyfriend.
He's someone that i'd just been to buy and bay
with for the weekend. He came up to support me
on a work project. We were looking at properties to buy,
(06:16):
we were talking about our future. We communicated really well.
We seemingly had the same values of morals. I felt
like I'd found my person. I thought he was one
of the most solid people I'd ever met. And then
to see video footage and news articles of him being arrested,
and then the unfolding of the story about his crimes,
(06:39):
and once I knew his real name, of course I
could go deep into the Internet and find out who
he really was. Was just like living in a parallel universe.
I was so discombobulated, like I you know, and I
missed him, you know, I missed the person that I
spoke to ten times a day, you know, whether that
(07:01):
be through text or WhatsApp or phone calls or what
have you. And then I felt ridiculous because I was
missing a criminal and that made me feel sick. And
I just didn't know. I didn't know who I'd been
sleeping next to, you know, like it was just there
were so many layers of deceit and betrayal, and in
amongst all of that, I'd come to realize that he
(07:24):
had stolen my life saving So he stole three hundred
and seventeen thousand dollars from me, and I've never seen
that money again, and I've had to sort of come
to terms with that side of things as well. So
it was both a financial and emotional and then the
psychological layers of betrayal that all came crashing down very
very quickly. So yeah, I think I was numb and
(07:49):
in disbelief and shop and denial.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I always think that like relationships and intimate relationships are
such a next level when it comes to processing emotional situations,
because there you are or like you said, there's this
grief of missing someone who kind of essentially didn't exist,
(08:12):
but they had existed to you for eighteen months. That's
a long time to be in a relationship with somebody
that you believe you know.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Well, and that you believe you know the name of
you know and everything you know, every story, every every glance,
every handhold, every text message, every email, every conversation, everything
was fictitious.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
It was set up for a purpose. It was set
up to extract something at the end, or to you know,
achieve his ambition of you know, befooling me, I guess,
but yeah, it was. It was so it was so confusing,
and it did feel like grief because he was there
one minute and gone the next. But in fact, the
(09:01):
man that was there never actually existed. He was just
a fictitious character, like a figment of my imagination really,
and so I had to remove that person that seemed
so real in my mind, very very quickly and replace
him with the true person who is Hamish McLaren and
who he was and the crimes he had committed, and
(09:24):
you know what I could find out about him, and
that was that was actually very difficult. It took a
long time to figure out who the hell Hamish was,
and that's where the name of the podcast came from,
because during those months and years after he was arrested,
I received very little information. I received really vague statements
(09:48):
from the authorities like the police and the detectives. For example,
there are many victims and it's millions of dollars. That
is about all they could tell me, because of course
it was a a criminal case at this point that
went on for three years. His friends and family wouldn't
talk to me, and the authorities, you know, the banks
and institutions wouldn't talk to me either because it was
(10:09):
a criminal case. And I understand all of those things,
but in the absence of knowledge, your brain can't rest,
you know, your brain. Our brains actually don't like unfinished stories.
So we either make up the ending so that we
can put it to bed, or we live in this
state of ambiguity where our mind actually can't rest until
(10:32):
we have those answers. And that was the world that
I lived in because I couldn't make up the ending.
I couldn't make up the answers because anything that I
would have imagined just wouldn't have been true. So I
lived in this sort of state of ambiguity and unknowing
for the better part of two years really, and it
wasn't until the podcast came out and Greg bare Up
(10:54):
the journalist, did the investigative peace and started to uncover
who hell Hamish was and relaying that back to me
that all of those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle sort
of started to fall into place and my mind could rest.
So that was a really interesting part of the process
for me as well, to really understand that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
How was the nature of his your relationship in comparison
to prior relationships that with people that he had taken
money from.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
All different. So in the case that was sort of
went through the criminal courts in Australia, there were fifteen
victims and no other of those victims were in an
intimate relationship with him. So there were business relationships. So
he was a barristera to one, a barrista a barrister
(11:49):
or a barrista, a barrister to somebody. He was a
triathlete to somebody else. He was a business strategist for
somebody else. You know, he just had things different. He
was a commit like he was a shape shifter. He
was whoever you needed him to be in that moment.
For him to make a connection with you and extract
money from you. So the victims in Australia, there was
(12:11):
no one else in an intimate relationship with him. But
I did meet and here over the time different women
that were in relationships with him through the podcast. I
met his ex wife who that was a fantastic moment
for me to meet her and for us to form
a bond and a friendship where we could really talk
(12:34):
about things that I couldn't talk about to anybody else.
So it was very it was very different. And that's
that's sort of what makes these characters so good at
what they do, so good at their craft. Is it
they just become whoever you need them to be for
them to get what they want.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, And how much of this PERSONA was like was
part of his real life as well? Did you meet
his friends? Was he being the same person or was
there a complete construction of that?
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It's hard to know. I did meet some people, but
they were sort of very fleeting and very brief meetings,
So it wasn't like we spent weekends together with friends
or nights away at his you know, family's place in
canber or anything like that. And I guess that's that's
what makes these people so good as well. They like
to keep people separate. But the reality was we you know,
(13:30):
I didn't have a lot of spare time. I was
single parenting a child, and the time that we did
get was sort of all wrapped up in lots of
beautiful language from him around. You know. But I haven't
seen him for two weeks, and I just want to
spend time with you, and how about we just do
something traced like I've missed you, you know, which comes
in disguised as love and affection and all of those
(13:54):
lovely things, but in essence, when you look back, it
was all it was all part of the part of
the plan. But yeah, I did meet some friends and family,
and he seemed to be the same character. But there
was never any discussion about his name or you know,
what he did for a job or anything like that,
(14:16):
so that they were quite fleeting, fleeting interactions.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
How did you like trust? Like, what was the process
of unraveling that whole experience and trusting another person again,
Trusting people to come into your life, trusting the people
you know, and trusting yourself to make those right connections.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
The hardest thing out of all of that was learning
to trust myself again. Trusting other people has seemingly been
not too bad for me. I mean, I've done a
lot of therapy, a lot of thinking, a lot of
I definitely see the world differently. I question a lot more.
I'm a lot more skeptical, I am much more curious
(15:08):
about things that people say and what they do like.
Those things have definitely changed. But the biggest, the biggest
challenge for me, and the hardest thing for me to
reconcile within myself, is was that I had made the
biggest mistake of my life, and I had made the
(15:30):
worst decision of my life, And how could I ever
trust myself to read people again, to trust my intuition
to make good decisions because I didn't do that. And
that has been the hardest thing. It's been the most
confronting thing. It has taken the longest and are still
(15:55):
there are still days where I really question, I question
things or question myself and I have to really sort
of think about is this you know? Is this a
hangover from the experience, or is this me feeling a
weird intuitive feeling, or is this you know? Okay? So
many layers to it but the hardest thing was that
I didn't trust myself anymore. And when you don't trust yourself,
(16:19):
like where do you even start. So that's been that's
been it. That's been a big challenge for me.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I feel that to my core. What about how Because
it's such a hyper a it's such a unique thing,
it's an enormous thing, it's an intimate and confronting thing,
and then it's all over the media. What does that
do to your identity?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
For a long time, I was not prepared for anybody
to know because I was so ashamed. I was so embarrassed.
I hated myself for what happened, for the position that
I put myself in and my daughter in in terms
of my finances and my financial future. I lost everything.
(17:09):
I had nothing but my monthly income when he was arrested.
Everything was gone, and I felt so ashamed. There were
people very close to me, of course, that knew, but
it wasn't It wasn't well widely known, and in fact,
still to this day, there are people that I've known
(17:31):
through through my career and things like that, that you know.
Even when the book came out, they said, wow, this
is quite the plot twist we had no idea, you know,
so it was kept very close for a good couple
of years. And when I met Greg Barrap the story
that the journalist, he wanted to sort of launch the
story or launch launch this with my story, and that
(17:59):
was quite and fronting. I had, you know, family and
my best friends saying, don't do it, don't do it, Trace,
there's too much risk, You're too exposed. There's career and
reputational damage to think about. What why don't you just
get on with life, get over it and get on
with life. And I I thought about that, and then
(18:25):
I thought about why this happened to me, and how
uneducated I was in this in this space, I would
see news articles or see things on you know, on
the news or those current affair programs of women who
got scammed, and traditionally they present a very sensationalized view
(18:48):
of a lonely, middle aged woman with a bunch of
cats sitting in the lounge room looking for love on
the internet. You know, this is this is how these
women are presented. They're quite often presented as uneducated, and
you know, you see these stories and and you know
they transfer their life savings to their fake foreign prints
and you go, we're an idiot. And I've seen those
(19:10):
stories that was me. I never ever thought it would
be me, And there was something burning inside of me
that said, you know, why should I be ashamed of
this story? You know, I'm a well educated, well traveled
human that's had a great career, a fantastic family upbringing.
(19:32):
If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
And the longer we stay silent on these issues and
other issues in life is the longer that they go.
You know, it's just st longer that they go unreported
and undetected, unsolved. And so I kind of just had
(19:53):
this feeling that if in telling my story, I could
help one other person not go through what I've been
through and make it differ reference through my adversity or
through the challenges, whatever you want to call them, then
for me, that was going to be worth it. And
then it just took a life of its own. And
(20:14):
you know, yes, of course there are going to be
people that go, you're an idiot. How could she be
so stupid? Why did she not see all the red flags?
And the truth is, there's not anything that anybody could
say to me that I haven't already cruelly said to myself,
and so that didn't even bother me. But what was
(20:35):
incredible in those moments when the story came out and
more people came forward and the bigness of the story
kind of took on a life of its own, was
the encouragement and the sharing of the story that helped
other people open up to me, like one story, I've
got it. You know, it still makes me teary today
(20:57):
when I talk about it. But I was a dinner
with a family and the mom and I was sitting
opposite the mother. She was seventy four or seventy five
years old at the time, and her two sons were
sort of sitting either side of us. And she had
lost her entire divorce settlement when she was forty through
(21:19):
a friend actually that had deforded and scammed her, and
it was essentially the money that was going to set
her up for her the second part of her life
and you know, support her kids and what have you.
And she had never spoken about it. Very very little
words have been spoken about this experience. The kids kind
(21:39):
of knew and these are like, you know, children in
their forties listening to her recount her story to me,
and they're like, we don't know this. How do we
not know this? Mom? And she's got tears streaming down
her face and she's telling me this story about how
she lost everything, and she said, I've never told anybody,
(22:00):
and she'd sat in her shame for thirty five years.
And I thought, oh my god. And just in that
one conversation, I thought, you know what, it's worth it.
It's worth it. And that's opened up a conversation in
their family and more broadly amongst their peers. And it's
(22:23):
not anything to be ashamed of, you know. The shame
is on the perpetrator. But unfortunately that's not the way
it's perceived in the world. And that's part of what
I why I do what I do now to advocate
for that.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
I love this so much. I am such a I guess,
an advocate of that philosophy that silencing or staying silent
is a breeding ground for shame. And you know, I
started the podcast and I shared things about my life
that I've kept secret for decades and decades, and I
(23:02):
felt the effect that it had, and I realized how
sinister shame and silence is even under the surface that
you don't realize. And I love that you have the
ability to step into this and do it because the
impact on other people, like you've just experienced and explained,
is so big.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, And just as a byproduct, the impact on me
was so profound as well, because it forced me to
look so deeply at my own shame. And I never
really knew a lot about shame. It's one of those
emotions we don't really talk about very much because again
the silent secrecy, and what I've come to realize is
(23:46):
that it is the most incredibly lonely emotion. And it's
lonely because not only do you not want other people
to know something about yourself because you will feel less
than or less like or less accepted, you actually don't
even want to admit it to yourself, so you're actually
lonely from yourself. Yeah, it's just the most disgusting thing
(24:12):
to feel, because if you feel lonely from yourself, like
what else is there? And kind of coming to terms
with that and bridging that gap within myself through all
of the reflection that I've done and seeing you, like
you said, how it positively impacts other people, but how
that's positively impacted me in terms of building back my
(24:34):
strength and my feeling about myself, my trust in myself.
That that was a massive That was just massive for
me really understanding how shame operates within us.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah. I always felt like when I look back, like,
if we don't tell our story, we start to tell
a story because we live, we live life, so we
have to tell a story. So we put into picture
and then we become that picture and then life gets
a bit tough, and all of a sudden, like from
my experience, all of a sudden, you're kind of on
(25:10):
your knees and you go, oh, I need some support.
Nobody knows this version of me because I've been paying
and you're not really aware of it because you're just like,
I'm just not going to tell them this part. But
it means you show up differently.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, the impact is huge, Yeah it is. And Yeah,
how can you ever operate authentically in the world and
be the best version of yourself if there are parts
of you that you don't even want to admit to yourself,
You don't even want to reconcile within yourself, not even
the like, let alone other people yourself like, and people
(25:45):
can sniff it out. You can sniff it out a
mile away. So it's God. It's hard though, it takes. Fuck,
it's just so hard. It's so hard, but it's so
worth it. It is really worth it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, did you have an on your knees moment and
a tipping point or was it a gradual process of
dig a little, push a little, learn a little, see
what's under the hood.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Feel like I was in a deep, dark shamehold for
a good couple of years. I don't know if it
was a moment. I just like I was saying before,
like he's so lad. You know. It was personal betrayal,
it was an intimate betrayal, it was relationship betrayal, it
was financial betrayal. And then at the same time, you know,
(26:35):
while I'm processing and comprehending all of this and trying
to feel it, I had to get up and go
to work every day because I cannot lose my job.
I cannot lose my job. I was so scared. It
was the only financial lifeline I had, and I knew
if I didn't have a job, then I was really fucked.
And I have a six year old and I was
(26:55):
a single parent. I am a single parent, And I
looked at her, and I thought, who's going to get
her to school every day and her activities if I'm
curled up in the fetal position, not able to get
out of bed, and some mornings she was the only
thing getting me out of bed every morning. Like I've
got to be honest. So in a way, like those
(27:15):
two things were such like there were such blessings. But
if I'm really honest with myself, I was dragging myself
through life for a good few years and trying to
do my best and trying to you know, trying to
positively think my way out of it and do my
gratitude journal and all the things that you meant to
do on Instagram, which I've come to realize like these
(27:38):
these things are just sanitized versions of what realistically is
just trying to survive. And I think, you know, I
have this view on resilience, and it's been quite a
myth because people like there's just so many views. But
we've got to be resilient. We got to stuff and
(27:59):
we've got to like take it and all of those things.
I don't know, like everyone says to me, you're so resilient,
You're so strong, I'm like, I was just surviving for years.
For years, that's how I felt, And it might have
looked like that on the outside, but on the inside
it felt like survival and that's okay as well, like
that's fine. So yeah, a good couple of years of
(28:25):
really like just I don't know, just crying every day basically.
And then and then I think once the podcast came
out and I started to get more information and I
started to learn more and I felt stronger, then I
could start to really shift the way that I thought
(28:47):
about the experience in a more positive light. But it
has taken, you know, seven years to write a book,
seven years to be able to stand up on stage
and tell my story and use my lessons as learnings
for others. Those seven years were pretty messy. It was
(29:09):
the messy middle, and it was also the put your
head down in your bum up trace and you can
get your finances sorted because you deserve a big life
and you've got to make that happen. No one else
is going to make it happen. Sorry to tell you that,
no one's coming to save you. You're going to make
it happen. And so that's what I did. So a
lot of those seven years, which is working really really
(29:31):
hard and getting on top of my finances. Sorry, that
was a very long answer.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
No, it was my favorite, right, and I've been deep
on that topic myself, the idea of resilience and hard
and like, I like to fight back against the David
Goggins style of do the hard thing, just do hard things,
just keep doing hard things, because just like you, I'm like,
dissociation looks like resilience. I looked like I was resilient
(30:02):
in the boxing ring. I couldn't feel the punches, mate.
It was it was that I was called to that
boxing ring because it resonated and it did the same
thing to me that evoked a fight or flight response,
and so I couldn't feel in there. That's not resilient.
That's just dissociation. And it's cool for a boxing flight
for three minutes. But if you don't know you're doing it,
don't cheer me on for it.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
It's survival exactly. It's survival, and in whatever way that
survival looks like for you, and for some people it's
you know, it's less effective strategies like drugs and alcohol
or other addictions. For me, I never went there but
I can see how people do one hundred percent, like
(30:48):
totally see how people go there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, it's it's long and it's arduous, and people like
answers and people like like like you said, I went
on at some point the shame journey of going, well,
how do I remember three or four years ago having
Peter Croan on the show and talking shame? I love
him right so at that that was a few years
(31:12):
ago now, and only late last year I went to
the Himalayas and we had this experience and we did
this letting go ritual, and I took shame to the
mountain and burned it and left it there, and it
had this massively visceral experience. And I came away thinking,
so did I get rid of shame in a moment
(31:33):
or over a decade or over my whole life? Like what?
Like what is it? Is it? The fucking memes on Instagram?
That is it?
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
The visions?
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
The fucking gratitude journaling? Like what? And we never know?
It's such a process and everyone's process is different.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
It's so individualized, and you know, Instagram would have us
believe that this happens very quickly because quite often what
we see as peoples kind of you know, the rise
and the rebuild and the new life and all the
lessons and the learnings and whilst that can be inspiring
if you are working your way through your own private health,
(32:13):
I know I found those things inspiring from time to time.
It's actually unfair and unrealistic to present that as the
healing journey. But no one's going to put up a
real of you know, day forty seven, still in my
ug boots and want to marry this pizza, like no
one's going to out, Like no one's going to you know,
and like it's it's true. And I think, yeah, we're
(32:38):
presented this idea that resilience looks a certain way and
it takes a certain amount of time, and the reality
is it's none of those things. It's whatever you need
it to be. And yeah, it's it's so individual, it's
so individual, and it is so it can look like disassociation,
(33:00):
for sure. I think that's I think a lot of
my time post Hamish being arrested was very disassociated. You know.
I would go to work and I would turn on
the marketing executive hat and I would run a team
of sixteen people and spend ten million bucks and you know,
do all the things that I needed to do, and
looked like success. It looked like I had a handle
(33:22):
on it. It looked like I was all over it. But
what was great about going to work was that for
eight or ten hours a day I didn't have to
think about the fact that I'd lost every last cent
of my twenty two year career, you know, superinnuation and savings.
You know, I could completely compartmentalize my life. When I
was mum, I was you know, it's a lot like
(33:44):
you just you destructed and you're you're full on. And
it wasn't until you know, I went to bed at
night or I woke up in the morning. Quite often
i'd wake up in the morning and strangely, I wasn't
sleeping very well at this time in my life. I
mean that, yeah, and I'd wake up and just for
(34:05):
a moment i'd remember when it happened. I'd wake up,
and then reality would kick in a couple of seconds later,
and I just have that feeling of like, my god,
I've got to get through a whole nother day. This
is my life now. And yeah, it was just it's
just such a such a challenging, such a challenging time,
(34:30):
And some days it was just enough to go to
work and get my kid to school and make sure
she had clean underwear. Like that's enough. Some days you
don't have to do you know, the gratitude journal and
the exercise and the cacao ceremony or before six am,
and you know all the things. Like if you're making
your way through life one step at a time and
(34:54):
moving forward, that's enough.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
People want to do hard things so that hard things
are easy, but forget that. Once a hard thing becomes easy,
it's not hard anymore. And it's actually not about doing
hard things. It's about doing usually things we don't want
to do.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
So uncomfortable things.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah, like opage a ring and fighting was hard once,
And then when I dug a little deeper and realized
there was a lot of underlying work and there was
a new me that I was seeing underneath the persona
hard was doing that work. Not stepping in the ring
it's hard, was stepping out of the ropes and going, well,
(35:37):
what I've learned in here, I'm going to put to
work and step into actual hard. You know, sometimes hard
is not doing it's stopping.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
And letting go. I'm just being honest with yourself, taking
a really good I remember my parents, take a good,
hard look at yourself, taking a really good heart look
at yourself, and being really honest about who you are
as a person, what your vulnerabilities are, what you think
about yourself, what you think about the world, accepting those
(36:11):
parts of yourself that you've probably buried for a while.
And that is hard, that is it's so especially if
you're an unemotional person. I'm not a particularly emotional person,
you know, I'm just it's just in my wiring. I'm
not so actually looking at these things and getting really
emotional is actually really hard for me. It's not natural.
(36:35):
It's not natural at all for me. So that they
are the hard things. Not yet, like you said, I mean,
I've never boxed. But I know what you're going. Where
you're going with the analogy.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah, what what in terms of your I guess your
perspective or like, what mattered to you before and what
matters to you now and has it changed or has
it intensified.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I think at the time what mattered to me because
I was, you know, I was navigating a divorce at
this point. When I met Hamish, and what mattered to
me at the time was building a relationship with somebody
who felt like my equal, who felt like I was
like part of the team, and you know, someone who
had similar values and interesting me, someone who could imagine
(37:22):
growing old with. And obviously my career mattered, my daughter mattered.
Those were the things I was really focused on. And
after sort of navigating quite an acrimonious divorce, was Okay,
I'm forty now, you know I'm forty one. I had
(37:44):
the whole second half of my life to rewrite. I
can be anything I want to be, I can do
anything I want to do. I'm not being held back
by anything now and so that felt really empowering me.
So that was the feeling that I went into this
relationship with, and I expressed those things. We had very,
(38:08):
very deep conversations. He was a great conversationalist, he was
very what seemed emotionally intelligent. So we had this level
of sort of intimacy and depth to our relationship that
I'd never felt, or I hadn't felt for a long time.
And essentially what he did was he mirrored that back
to me, and I thought that's what we were building,
(38:31):
and even though it was fake, even though it was
all just designed for him to extract money from me.
I guess what it showed me was that I was
really clear for the first time in my life what
I wanted and how I wanted my life to roll out,
and that I was in charge of that. I had
the power to create that. And unfortunately I was targeted
(38:56):
by the wrong person. But those things really solidified. And
then post Hamish and all of the discovery and all
of the work that I've done, I've really had to
I've really had to unpick who I am as a person,
where my biases come from, why I think the way
(39:18):
that I do, why I've chosen the people to bring
into my life that I have. And it's very easy
to sit there and say, you know, he was a professional,
he targeted me. You know, he'd been doing this for
thirty years. I was just unlucky to meet him. And
all of those things are true. But I played a role.
You know, my energy played a role. What I wanted
(39:40):
for myself for my life played a role, and you know,
my vulnerabilities played a role. And so I think since him,
even though I sort of had this vision of what
I wanted my second half of my life to look like.
This experience taught me to go deeper into myself because
it always put other things than other people first. And
(40:02):
this was really about understanding Tracy and coming to terms
with you know, some of the parts of myself that
I didn't want to admit were there. So I have
a deeper understanding of myself now and I get to
rewrite the second half of my life again now. So
(40:22):
that's been weird because I get I've had I've gotten
to do it twice now.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, I love that. I love listening to you. Help
if you were to make an assumption of where this gets,
so you look at your story and go, I was
this person and then this happened. And then when it
all like in a story book, then I got to
hear how close to here and grateful and strong and like,
(40:53):
how close to that kind of hero's journey pinnacle. Do
you feel like you might be now or do you
think that's just an ever of in process we go through.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
I think it's ever evolving. I think mine has sped
up because of this experience. I've been gifted this opportunity,
if you could call it that, I've been gifted this
opportunity to use my experience and my voice to help others,
and for me, this is the first iteration. So this
(41:25):
is the story about how it happened, and how I
lost my money and how I fell in love and
you know, scams and fraud and financial crime and what
all the platforms should be doing, and all of the
richness of those conversations, which which are great. I love them.
But there's more, you know, there's so much more about
(41:47):
this journey that I can express that I'm just I haven't.
I haven't yet, because I think that's an iteration. You know,
it could be you know again, And I don't like
the terms rezilts an adversity and things like that, but
you know, what do you learn from these things? And
I am not some like Olympic athlete that has some
(42:09):
big story to tell with profile. I am just an
ordinary human that has experienced things that a lot of
people will experience, and not just Hamish. But before I
ever met Hamish, there was a lot that happened before
I'd even turned forty two. You know, I've lost a parent,
I've watched my other parent go through through cancer, just
as became a mother myself. I've suffered a miscarriage, my
(42:33):
brother has challenges with addiction and mental health issues, my
marriage ended. You know, like that has been a lot,
and with all of those things comes a level of
reflection and just reflection on how ordinary people endure some really,
(42:58):
really fucking hard things. And you know, we don't always
need to see the Olympian up on stage talking about
their journey from you know, Olympic goal to whatever their
challenge has been, because those don't seem that realistic in
the same way that Instagram doesn't always seem realistic in
the way that post traumatic growth is expressed. So I
(43:21):
think there's a space where there's a more realistic, real
voice that can express these things in a way that
resonates with other people. So that's that's future tracing. But
right now where you know where we're starting, we're starting
that journey.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Love it. When I first started the show and I
was talking to people, obviously Roll with the Punches that's
the theme, and it's let's talk to people because we're
in the we're in the middle of the pandemic. At
that time, it was like, oh, let's talk to people
that can that have got into stories about stuff they've overcome,
and let's learn from them, because that's really uplifting. And
then quite quickly I was like, also, let's talk to
(44:03):
people who have done amazing things, ultra endurance athletes, people
that have done things that other people could only dream of.
And I quickly realized, same conversations. We're having the same conversations.
It's just kind of what flavor title they want to
put on the book cover of their life. And that
(44:25):
you know, like as you were just listing off all
of the things that came before this before, it's that
layering of like everybody is just in this life and
we have this silly belief that, well, I've just got
to get over this one thing and then life will
be good and we always be good, and we never
think of the reality that, well, there's more shit coming
(44:47):
as well as good stuff, and there's every chance that
this day today, as I sit here with you, maybe
this is the best day, this is the pinnacle of
my life, and then I'm going to have faced a
really big challenge and life's going to shift.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
We never think of that, no, because you never I
mean a bit like being scammed. You never think these
things are going to happen to you. But the reality is,
if you asked a room full of people who have
been affected by all of those things and more, everyone
would hold the handle. So adversity doesn't discriminate. It's you know,
(45:24):
it's going to hit all of us, and I'm not
naive enough to sit here and go you know, this
is not the last thing that's going to happen to me,
that it's going to be really tough. I guess what
I like to express is that is all these things
that we go through in life that create a sense
of whether it's strength or knowledge or intuitive power, that
(45:47):
you you are going to be okay, because you know,
if someone had said to me, these are all the
things are going to happen to you before you've even
hit forty two, would I've said I'm done. I'm out
for me, you know, But the human spirit has incredible
capacity to endure. And you don't have to be a
hardened Olympic athlete or someone famous. These are just everyday
(46:11):
ordinary people that are making their way through life quietly
with you know, with a reserved strength. And you know
it doesn't look quite hardcore resilience. It does just look
like survival. But they're inspirational and amazing in their own way.
And I think if you can draw from that knowing
that if you are going to go through a really
tough time, that you're going to get through it. And
(46:33):
sometimes that's all you need is just that little bit
of hope to know that it's going to be okay.
It's not going to be okay today, and it's not
going to be okay by Friday, but it's going to
be okay. And I think there's just something really reassuring
in that, at least that's time. That's what I tell myself.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
I think you're right. I find so much power in
your realness. You're like, there's there's got no magic pill.
I'm just going to tell you it's a little bit shit,
and it's also a little bit okay, and we're all
in it.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, everyone's everyone's got their stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, what's next for you?
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Oh? More more of this? You know. I left corporate
last year this time last year when I was launching
my book. I left my corporate career to do this
full time. And so as long as this continues and
people want to listen and want to learn, and that
(47:33):
I can advocate and create change, and be able to
pay the mortgage and the school fees. And I'll keep
doing it, so more of more of this, and I
think they will be over time and evolution of where
I get to my thinking and my writing and the
(47:54):
messages that I want to share with the world.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Congratulations, Thanks you, leap best Black. I feel like I'm
going to stay. I'm going to remain in your sphere
and watch from watch from the sidelines and cheer you on.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and
sharing so much of yourself so vulnerably. It's really powerful.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Thank you, Thank you for having me. It's been a
great chat.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
You're welcome. Would you like to send anyone anywhere to
buy your book or follow your socials or access anything
you'd like?
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Yeah, LinkedIn. I post lots of stuff on LinkedIn, Instagram.
Tracy Lee Hall for my website, Tracyhall dot com, dot
A you amazing.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Thanks Tracy, Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
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