How Tammy-Anne Caldwell became ‘The Mind-Brain Lady’ and turned her passion for the mind into a career

Teacher Tammy-Anne Caldwell has been captivated by the “power and potential of the human mind” since her childhood growing up in Albany. “It was perfectly normal to have discussions in my family about the power of our thoughts,” she said. “Growing up, I was always fascinated by the true, yet untapped, power and potential of our human mind.” Ms Caldwell has made this life-long passion into a profession and now uses her background as a teacher to present educational workshops on mind-brain education. “As a young teacher, I realised that there was a big gap between neuroscientists and teachers, students and parents, and that I could fill that gap and be the link between the two,” she said. “That’s really what my role as ‘The Mind-Brain Lady’ is all about — taking the incredible knowledge of our astonishing human mind-brain that neuroscientists and psychologists have, and communicating it in a way that is highly practical, memorable and understandable.” She presents holistic brain-based workshops on mind-brain education for school students from the ages of 5-18, teachers and parents and has presented at schools, organisations and conferences across Australia and New Zealand. Ms Caldwell’s achievements also include receiving two global grants from the International Brain Research Organisation in Paris, being featured in national magazines and being in an international scientific webinar alongside well-known US neuroscientist Dr Michael Merzenich. But The Mind-Brain Lady, as she is professionally known, said from an outsider’s perspective her life may have been expected to take a very different path. “I should have been disengaged at school and failed, and now be unemployed, have no qualifications, live in poor housing, with poor health and be disadvantaged for life — according to the statistics,” Ms Caldwell said. “None of these could be further from the truth, but these were my expected outcomes because I grew up in rural and regional locations around WA, with a single parent. “I attended a variety of public schools, I went through the Family Court system, and I lived below the poverty line for most of my childhood.” Raised by a single mother, Ms Caldwell and her family moved to Napier at the age of one, where she lived until she was seven, before returning for good as a teenager to complete Year 11 and 12 at Albany Senior High School. From a young age, Ms Caldwell was set on making a difference in the world. “In my diary, as young as 16, I wrote that my goal in life was to help others realise and reach their incredible true potential and expand human knowledge,” she said. It was a big goal for a young person to set, but Ms Caldwell was determined, setting her sights on either becoming a journalist or politician, with the hope of one day becoming Australia’s first woman Prime Minister. After finishing high school, she went to university, studying politics, history and journalism. At the age of 19, Ms Caldwell fell in love with teaching when she worked for the WA Parliament and Electoral Commission in a role where she would visit schools in the Great Southern and teach them about all things voting and democracy. She went on to study a Graduate Diploma in education and started teaching at OneSchool Global in Albany, then known as Woodthorpe School, with the aim of helping young people to “realise and reach their incredible true potential, regardless of their circumstances”. “I remember the feeling in my first year, of realising I was ‘the’ teacher with my own little class of students all looking up at me to create their learning experiences, and I was just so happy,” she said. “I love teaching because young people are innately curious, have so much potential and common sense, can see things from outside the box, and have such an ability to have fun and find joy in life.” Not long into her teaching career, Ms Caldwell attended a Mind-Brain Education Conference in Melbourne, after learning that the field of education blended her interest in “discovering the potential of our human mind” with her love of education. “It was perfect and fit like a glove,” Ms Caldwell said. “I researched everything about Mind-Brain Education before the conference, so when I got over there, I already knew so much of what the presenters were speaking about. “I continued researching and learning, and because it just seemed natural to me, I taught my primary students everything I learnt about their learning brain as I learnt it.” It was this interest that in 2018 prompted Ms Caldwell to make mind-brain education her focus by starting her business, Above & Beyond Education, to share her brain-based, holistic education approach. “It is a combination of teaching and learning in the classroom with psychology — our mental thoughts, our mind — and the physical brain science of what happens in our brain when we think and learn and feel emotions,” she said. Ms Caldwell runs the business with her partner in both business and life, Todd Budden, ‘The Mindful Man’ to her ‘Mind-Brain Lady’. As part of her workshops, Ms Caldwell has developed characters to help teach students some of the complex concepts covered on how the mind and brain works, learns and grows — from Amy Amygdala to Reggie Repetition and Gracie Growth-Thinker. Ms Caldwell and Mr Budden were compared to some famous Australian entertainers while presenting to online students at a school in Alice Springs. “The school site doubled as a tourism centre, and the Ghan train was in town, so sitting behind a huge glass wall watching us singing and dancing and explaining how the brain learns were all the passengers off the train,” Ms Caldwell said. “People were saying, ‘who are these guys?’, ‘they’re like the next Wiggles!’.” Ms Caldwell will share her passion for mind-brain education at the second annual TEDxKinjarling event this Saturday. Tickets: https://bit.ly/3KoIseW