What if the thing your child keeps getting in trouble for at school is the exact gift that will carry them through life?
In this episode of More Than a Score, we sit down with Odette Barry, PR and media relations founder, community builder, and a self-described former professional nightmare.
Odette grew up in an affluent Melbourne community with two high-achieving older sisters and parents who valued education above almost everything and invested dearly for hers. She struggled with authority, could not sit still, and collected report cards that told her, year after year, that she was failing. She left school with an ATAR score of around 56 and a core belief that she had let everyone down.
What came next was anything but a straight line. Odette found her first real sense of worth blending drinks at Boost Juice, where the noise, the systems and the fun finally fit the way her brain worked.
She married at twenty-one, became a mum at twenty-two, worked at Westpac while raising her son, ran a fashion side-business, and started university for the first time at twenty-six after one encouraging boss told her she could.
Today she runs Odette and Co, a Byron Bay agency helping not-for-profits and social change-makers challenge the status quo, the very skill school kept trying to stamp out of her. This conversation explores non-linear career paths, using your unique gifts, ADHD and the way different brains learn, self-doubt and confidence, self-compassion, and what it takes to parent a child who is nothing like you.
Odette is honest that the damage school did was real and lasting, and just as honest about what turned it around: being seen by the right people, being given agency, and slowly learning to trust herself. For parents, it is a reminder that the kid who questions everything is not a problem to fix.
For students, it is proof that a low score is a moment, not a measure of who you are. And for anyone staring down a changing job market and the rise of AI, Odette offers a clear-eyed, generous view of the human skills that will always matter.
In this episode, you'll discover:
• Why the traits school punished, challenging authority and questioning everything, became the core of Odette's career
• How report cards that said "failed" hardened into a core belief, and how long it took to undo
• Why Boost Juice, not school, was the first place she felt she had real value
• How a mentor named Steve Browning changed her path just by listening and telling her she could do more
• The reframe from her mother-in-law about a "neurological rewiring" that lifted years of guilt
• How she rebuilt her confidence, and why she still calls the confident version of herself a mask
• Why being a young mum was the best decision she ever made, despite the judgement
• The three ideas that shaped how she parents a son who is nothing like her
• Why she now sees learning outside the classroom as a genuine life force
• What she looks for when she hires young people, and the story of the candidate who would not take no
• An honest, practical message for parents about helping kids into the workforce in the age of AI
More Than a Score: Redefining Success Beyond School is hosted by Laura Pitt and Dan Steele, a former teacher and award-winning assistant leader, on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. New episodes fortnightly. Subscribe to follow along here or at muchmorethanascore.com
