Frank Marinko.

Coach  ·  Perth, 1954  ·  Italy, now

I have spent thirty years sitting with people who are succeeding by every external measure — and quietly wondering whether any of it is pointing somewhere they actually chose.

I grew up the black sheep of a Croatian-Italian family in Western Australia. Marked from the beginning by the smell of salami and garlic and a surname nobody could pronounce. State judo champion at thirteen. Working the oilfields of Barrow Island at nineteen. The Silk Road across Asia at twenty. A decade of running from stillness until I ran far enough to understand what I was running from.

I rebuilt my life from bankruptcy at fifty. I addressed twenty years of unpaid tax, declared bankrupt, and started again — with integrity as the only asset that had survived. By 2004 I was in Melbourne, building an executive coaching practice that has lasted to this day. More than 20,000 hours of professional work across law firms, universities, forensic science organisations, executives, and individuals navigating the hardest moments of their lives.

In 2023 I was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer. A ten-centimetre tumour. Five weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Six hours of surgery. I woke in ICU and asked myself — for the first time without flinching — who I was if it ended there.

The twelve-month CT scan came back clear. I took two weeks off during my recovery. Not because I had to stop — because the work gave me purpose through the pain.

Vicki and I are building something we have been thinking about for a long time. We are finding and purchasing a historic property near Viterbo in central Italy — to renovate carefully and use for small, intensive immersions built on the framework I have spent thirty years developing.

The North Star Protocol is grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — one of the most rigorously researched psychological frameworks in the world. It exists because I know what it costs to live without direction. And I know what becomes possible when someone finds theirs.

I intend to be thoroughly used up — not depleted, but expended — helping others live deliberately and die without regret. That is the only legacy I am interested in. Italy, with Vicki, is where I want to do the rest of that work.