Bella Zanesco

Some people are Gold Coasters because they live on the Gold Coast. Others have always been Gold Coasters, even when they lived elsewhere, waiting for the right time to make the change.

Bella Zanesco was a high-performance athlete, a young sailor and kite surfer who found corporate success early. While she spent time on the Gold Coast training, she lived and worked elsewhere: Sydney, New York, London. She was moving fast. She just didn't know where she was headed.

Then in 2012, something unexpected happened. A hard stop. The long hours, the lack of exercise or spiritual connection, and a rough break-up sent her careening into a crisis. One day, at her lowest point, staying one bedroom over from a friend who was in the opposite situation, Bella took stock of where she'd ended up and started working out a way back.

As she puts it in her book, Smart Girls Screw Up Too, "fuelled by a desire to feel better more often, improve my overall wellbeing and sustain high performance, over a few years I became a self-experimenter and tried hundreds of different things to see what worked (and what didn't). In that process I unexpectedly became a world champion at 38, something that had eluded me of nine previous attempts."

This work inspired Bella to share what she'd learned. She surveyed thousands of women and worked one-on-one with others in high-performing roles, to understand what was lacking in their lives and careers. The statistics on happiness and fulfilment were discouraging. But Bella was sure she could figure it out, for herself and for others.

Her book's subtitle is "the no-nonsense guide to creating the life you want". When you spend any time with Bella, and you can tell she's both: no-nonsense and creating the life she wants.

Part of that creation meant finding a place that matched the life she was building.

"I'd been looking for many years around the world to where I would settle, where a healthy lifestyle matched steady ocean breezes," she says, over a salad at the HOTA Café. "I tried stints in Cape Town in South Africa, and Tulum in Mexico. I lived in Hyeres in the South of France, Genova in Northern Italy, London, New York. I'd lived all over the place, particularly when I was writing my book, to just experiment and see where I was going to land. And there was nothing that has come close to the Gold Coast."

“You know, when you land here, you are in a place that supports your high-performance.”

Bella found something in Steven Kotler's work that she recognises in the Gold Coast. Kotler writes about peak human performance and how it isn't really about grinding or pushing harder. It's shaped by quieter, less obvious forces: the ocean, the climate, a kind of spiritual pull between the people who seek this place out or never quite leave. Kotler calls it a flow state.

"There's an openness here," says Bella. "People invite you in. This represented, for me, an energy shift. But I think it's bigger than that. I think a lot of people on the Gold Coast are in a flow state, in balance, feeling the way I'm feeling in this place even if they don't have the words for it."

That energy shows up in the everyday. Bella always uses the morning dog walk as a litmus test for a place. "In some places, people walk hurriedly past you in a rush, not present, on their phone or with their AirPods in. In other places, people smile at you and say hello.” Early in her time on the Gold Coast, a retired couple approached her dog on the beach and went a step further. "They said they loved my dog and would look after it if I ever needed it. That's the feeling of this place."

"There are athletes, entrepreneurs, wellness professionals and retirees all around me. People I would never have slowed down enough to meet. One of them is Russell, who turns 80 this year. I ocean swim with him most mornings and count him as one of my closest friends."

The Gold Coast did not just give her community. It gave her back herself. Eighteen months after her burnout and her vow to live better, she returned to her childhood passion of competitive sailing after a seven-year hiatus. She won the world championship.

"It had felt so heavy, the life I was living before," she says. "Here it's light and free, it's energetic. When I'm in Sydney for work, I have to put an energetic field around myself or I will come back feeling that heaviness."

Today, Bella is a Growth and AI Advisor for the Aussie Athlete Fund and Torus Venture Capital, helping ambitious South East Queensland founders build AI-native businesses and get them funded. Alongside that, she's building the Story Bank, an independent bookshop and place to stay in a rainforest village on the outskirts of the Gold Coast.

She is grounded here, but she has not stopped thinking about what the Gold Coast could become.

Is everything perfect? Of course not. Bella would like to see richer community conversations, more creative arts and cultural immersions. But when she sums up what she believes the Gold Coast can achieve, she looks to countries that think in long time horizons.

"What do we want to be known for?" she says. "I'd say on the Gold Coast it's creating happy, healthy people who are positive, shining, sharing their skills with one another, able to live a really abundant life."