Bobbi Chegwyn — Children's Author and Social Emotional Learning Advocate
An Aussie who drove a school bus in America,
and couldn't stop thinking about what she saw.
My name is Bobbi Chegwyn. I grew up in Australia, ended up in the United States, and at some point decided the best way to understand my new community was to drive a school bus full of third and fourth graders.
What I saw on those rides stayed with me. Kids carrying weight they didn't have words for. Feelings showing up as behaviour — and behaviour getting them in trouble. Children doing their best in situations that weren't their fault.
I couldn't stop thinking about them.
Almost twenty years of helping people through the hard stuff.
Before the school bus, I spent twenty years working with people — helping them navigate the things that were holding them back, the patterns they couldn't shake, the feelings they'd never had words for.
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I worked mostly with adults. And what I kept seeing, over and over, was this: the things people were struggling with at thirty, forty, fifty — the beliefs about themselves that weren't true, the wounds they were still carrying, the moments they couldn't get past — almost all of them had roots in childhood.
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In the years when the patterns were still forming. In the window before everything got louder and harder to reach.
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That realisation changed everything about what I wanted to do next.
The window before adolescence.
And why it matters more than anything.
Children between seven and twelve have something remarkable — a window of openness that begins to close as adolescence arrives. Before the stakes feel higher. Before the emotions get harder to reach. Before the beliefs about who they are start to calcify into something much more difficult to shift.
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That window is precious. And it's short.
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A child who arrives at their teenage years already knowing how to name what they feel, sit with difficulty, and choose kindness anyway — that child has something that will serve them for the rest of their life.
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Radical Ray was written to fill that window. Not with lessons. With stories. Because children don't learn who they are from being told.
They learn from living alongside someone who's figuring it out too.
The book Bobbi Chegwyn had to write.
Those years were grounded in formal training — a Certificate IV in Life Coaching, NLP Practitioner certification, Performance Coach qualification, Time Line Practitioner training, and both Practitioner and Advanced Practitioner credentials in Coach Mastery, all earned through The Coaching Institute in 2008. The work was always the same: helping people understand what was running underneath.
I lost my mother when I was sixteen. Suddenly. Without warning.
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I was young enough that grief arrived before I had any real tools to hold it. Old enough to understand exactly what had been lost.
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For a long time I didn't have the words for what that experience was like. Not the whole of it. Not the part that stays with you — not loudly, but constantly — as you grow up and build a life and become a person your mother never got to meet.
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Book 4 — No Greater Love — is the most personal thing I've written. It was written because I believe children navigating grief deserve something honest. Something that doesn't rush toward comfort or soften the experience too much. Something that simply sits beside them in the reality of it.
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It is dedicated to my mother. There's no greater love.