Welcome to our blog series profiling the winners of the 2021-2022 Beautiful You Coaching Academy Awards. The awards aim to uplift and honour our worldwide community of coaches and the incredible work they are doing through their coaching, events, programs, books, products, podcasts and more. Get ready to have your mind and heart blown wide open and be inspired by an incredible round-up of coaches.

Today we’d love to introduce you to our 2021-2022 Event/Program of the Year Award winner, delsi Moleta.

delsi is a proud queer woman and the Founding Director of Unicorns. Over the last 10+ years she has been working to uplift, support and celebrate members of the LGBTQIA+ community through the creation of events, fitness groups, peer support sessions and dating events. delsi is also a qualified teacher, trainer, coach and celebrant who merges her work within the LGBTQIA+ community with her love of education to deliver workshops on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. Her work also spans across the LGBTQIA+ youth sector. She was the creator of the queer youth radio show, Unicorn Youth and previously worked for queer youth orgnsaition including: Minus18, Rainbow Network, Joy94.9 and Safe Schools. delsi was a Finalist for the GLOBE LGBTI Person of the Year Award and was named as one of the Top 50 LGBTI Leaders in Australia according to Google. 

What made you decide to become a Beautiful You coach?

I had received coaching on and off for years and had loved the experience. 

I also found myself kind of ‘coaching’ my friends in various ways over the years. I would make reflection worksheets for friends to fill out and set them goal setting tasks in our group chats. 

One time I went on a dramatically long road trip to a queer festival called Tropical Fruits with 3 of my friends. To help the trip go faster I designed and printed out a reflection booklet for everyone that was filled with reflection and goal setting questions. I then facilitated a group sharing session where we processed our year, gave each other feedback and supported each other to set goals for the following year. 

When Melbourne lock down hit, I found myself doing this even more often – as I felt it was my way to support and try and uplift my friends throughout this difficult time. I was also looking for ways to continue to support my queer community and had started facilitting peer support groups where I worked with community to hold space and offer resources through this difficult time.

It was also around this time that I had lost all my work due to the pandemic. As a Queer Event Producer who worked solely for myself I found myself unable to work and concerened about event production as a feasible occupation with the state of the industry so up in the air. I had wanted to study Life Coaching for many years and this difficult time in history actually opened up the perfect opportunity for me to take the leap and sign up for the Beautiful You Life Coaching Academy.

How did ‘Happiness Hacks’ first come to be? Share the journey of its development with us! 

Happiness Hacks grew out of my desire to find new ways to support the LGBTQIA+ community during the pandemic.

I couldn’t run my usual Unicorns parties due to covid and Melbourne’s lockdown and I knew the community was struggling. I also knew therapists were booked up and it was really hard to get mental health support during this time.

I had been listening to the Laurie Santos podcast ‘The Happiness Lab’ every morning and had been practicing the techniques she had been discussing. I noticed how much these science back strategies were helping me. 

So I started plotting how I could combine my teaching skills, community building background and new coaching techniques to support people to make meaningful change within their life and really lift their spirits during this difficult time.

I first wrote a mini version of the workshop that went for 75 minutes. I took people through 5 different ‘Happiness Hacks’ I had discovered through some research and accompanied them with activities to prompt people to explore how they could integrate these into their lives. I offered these mini workshops for free throughout lockdown and I had about 200 people attend over a few weeks.

So I just put it out there and told people to get in touch if they would like to be part of a 6 week series and when the emails started floating in, I realised this needed to happen. Writing the workshop and facilitating it actually really helped me during Melbournes long ass lockdown. I would practice the strategies as I wrote them into the course work and I found that my mood dramatically improved during this time. This was a really affirming process and really cememented the desire for me to put this workshop series out into the world. 

What excited you most about creating this program? 

Seeing people come back each week and reflect on how their new learnings have impacted their lives was such a beautiful experience. 

I was also excited to see the data! 

Every week people scored their overall happiness out of 10 and it was so exciting to watch these numbers grow over the weeks! Some people reported that they were at a steady 2 – 3 prior to attending the workshop series and then found themselves floating around at an 8 & 9 by the end – what could be more rewarding to hear than that!

What has been some of the feedback you have received from participants of ‘Happiness Hacks’?

One person told me their mood lifted so much at one point they felt a bit manic!

Another person said their happiness was routinely sitting at a 2 or 3 out of 10 and by the end was up in the 8 and 9’s. What could be better than hearing that!

What words of wisdom would you pass on to other coaches who are creating an online course or program? 

There is no better time than now. I kept putting it off as I didn’t feel like I was ready or good enough yet. But my coaching buddy Melissa pushed me to get tickets on sale and without that push I probably would have kept putting it off.

Also, don’t be afraid to market yourself. Find ways to connect with new audiences so people can find out what wonderful things you are offering to the world.

What’s in store for delsi Moleta and your business ahead?

I’m excited to start focusing more on developing and delivering more LGBTQIA+ inclusion training to organisations! 

I absolutely love supporting businesses to create safer and more inclusive spaces for the queer people within their networks

I am particularly interested in working with people within educational spaces, counseling and the beauty industry to improve access and inclusion – as I know a lot of queer people have had difficult experiences within these spaces.

I want to help create more inclusive spaces within the world so queer people can be safe in not just party spaces but all spaces within our sparkly world!

I would also like to have a baby! I want to be a beautiful, queer preganant lady standing on stage at Unicorns in a latex two piece reminding everyone that it is f*cking fantastic to be queer! 

Find out more about delsi’s work at delsi Moleta

Photographer: Jacinta Oaten Photography