So do you think about the sorts of difficult meetings or conversations you might have to have that day, or the problems you’ve got to solve?

Everything.

I’m very good at switching off the night before, I don’t think about it at all. So once I’m awake, I’m thinking about the day and all the positive things, the challenging things that I have to face.

Then at 6am I’m on. I get up, I listen to the radio, I love the morning news, and I start getting ready for the day.

Some mornings that means going to the gym in my building and some mornings it means going to the physiotherapist because I had a horrible accident in the last two years with my knee. I’ve had it rebuilt a couple of times.

Then I usually have about an hour before I go to work. I live within walking distance of the Australian Museum, which is really wonderful.

I start doing some work. I’m sending text messages, or reading something online that I need to be prepared for. I’m at work by usually between 8.30am and 9am.

Breakfast or no breakfast?

I have breakfast. I like breakfast. I have berries and yoghurt.

Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that somehow changed the trajectory of what you were doing. It might’ve been a project that you were working on that led you in a different direction.

I had just finished 10 years working on Clean Up Australia and Clean Up the World.

I was the co-founder and deputy chair, and I had started consulting with the Discovery Channel in Australia, which had just launched here, and was asked to be involved in a big filming project, an adventure sports race called Eco-Challenge.

It was with the legendary Mark Burnett, who went on to found Survivor.

The president of Discovery Channel was impressed by the work I’d done, and he said, “Kim, why don’t you come and move to Washington and run a new division? We’ll do the Eco-Challenge and other things as well.”

I knew the next Eco-Challenge was going to be in Morocco, based out of Marrakesh, and the one after probably in Patagonia. So I knew there were some great adventures ahead.

I was in the latter part of my 30s and I threw caution to the wind and went, “Yes, I’m moving to Washington. I’m going to change up my life.”

And what did you learn from that whole experience?

If opportunities like that present themselves, take them.

It was a new industry. I was like a grand project manager. My background was in marketing and communications to start with. I knew I could do so much more than that.

I didn’t want to be a specialist. I wanted to be this grand generalist and I thought this role would give me the platform to do that.

And I’d always been attracted by nonfiction television, and this was going to put me right in the middle of that in a very big way, and meeting an extraordinary array of people.

The experiences that money can’t ever buy and getting out of my comfort zone. You get pretty comfortable as your knowledge increases in a certain way. So it was great to shake it up, to put myself in new cities, new challenges, different people learning a new industry. It was an amazing time.

What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

I’ve received a lot, because I needed a lot of advice from time to time.

The career advice I think that has meant most to me is, don’t take no for an answer.

If you really want to do something, find ways around those things and don’t be put in a box by people in that way.

Can you give me an example of a time you were told “no”, and you didn’t accept it?

When we first did the first Clean Up the Harbour Day in 1989, we wrote to the NSW government to say we’d had this idea about organising a community clean-up. The department wrote the response for the minister, and they said, “Thanks very much for the idea, but our department looks after the cleaning of Sydney Harbour.”

I turned around on my typewriter in those days and wrote a plan for how we’d clean up the harbour using volunteers.

After we got it going and announced it, the government wanted to be part of it.

I always looked at a no as one step closer to a yes.

So does being told “no” actually energise you?

I don’t see it as a negative. I see it as a challenge to get over.

What are some of the top don’ts when applying for a job, either in your experience or when you have been interviewing people?

Firstly, be yourself. Be authentic.

And practise before you come to a job interview.

Practise what exactly?

Practise the sorts of answers you might give. Think about what I would want to ask you in a job interview about your skills, about how you might react to certain situations. I always ask people, “tell me about a time when you’ve really made a difference in an organisation”.

These sorts of questions are not hard to predict when you go for an interview, so I always say to people, “prepare”.

You wouldn’t go on stage as an actor and not have practised your play or your script. You wouldn’t go and give a speech somewhere and not have practised. A job interview is a project.

If you really want that job, you’ve got to make sure that you put your best self forward for it. So look at it as a serious enterprise and undertaking and prepare well.

And what happens if people get nervous in interviews? Sometimes people aren’t naturally very good at marketing themselves. Do you mark them down for that?

No, I don’t. But I do expect people to practise. And when you practise more, you feel more comfortable. You control your nerves because you feel confident in your information.

If you are nervous, that is a normal condition. Nerves can be good, can actually lift your performance at the time.

But if you’ve practised, you’ve got the answers, you have that confidence, [and] you’ll perform well.

What was your first job?

Working in an ice cream parlour on the Manly Corso [in Sydney], making milkshakes and serving ice creams to very handsome young surfers.

I worked eight hours on a Saturday and eight hours on a Sunday. On Saturday my take-home pay was $10 and on Sunday it was $12. But I was the richest 15-year-old I knew.

Do you think you learnt something from doing that at that age?

Yes, absolutely. You go to work on time, you go to work looking clean and tidy, and you deal with customers, some of whom were difficult, some of whom were gorgeous.

And of course, I learned about money and how to budget it and spend it, and to save it.

Have you developed a lot of friends through your working life?

I certainly have, and not just my colleagues at work, but also people who are my clients or other people I’ve dealt with. I always say, “Once you’ve met me, you never get rid of me.”

It’s lovely to work with people who are your friends.

Sometimes you might not always see eye to eye, but that’s normal in life.

The key is I respect the people I work with and learn from them, and hopefully they do the same in reverse.

I think I was a pretty lousy boss when I was younger, but as you go through your working life, you do learn more. And I love working with friends.

Why were you a lousy boss in the early days?

I was probably too keen to drive things forward and get ahead, and not think about people’s feelings along the way. I could be pretty myopic in my view and focused on progress.

Sometimes other people aren’t on the same train as you’re on. I had to learn to think about the others around me in a different way.

And how did you learn that?

I learned it through making errors. Sometimes you’ve got to be told by people, who say, “Kim, you weren’t very nice to me.”

In those first five or 10 years of my career, I could have done a lot of things a lot better in terms of relationships with people.

What is the most common piece of advice that people give that is not useful?

I think I hear a lot of BS advice [given] to people [about] how to progress their careers.

Let’s [start with] networking. “Come to a networking dinner.”

What on earth is that? I don’t need to network with people, I just need to talk to people and get to know them.

There is an obsession with networking and making sure you connect with everybody.

Make sure there’s a reason you’re connecting. Be real. Be who you are.

We’re all a bit obsessed by different parts of social media.

You’re not [on social media] commenting on other people’s posts and having conversations?

Oh no, I’m not. It’s not how I like to have conversations.

I’m a natural conversationalist and I like to talk to people and I prefer that rather than just having a social media connection.

People monitor the number of “likes” they get. Goodness me.

I monitor the number of really serious, practical engagements that happen.

If we were the holiday gods and we could give you 12 months off, you could come back to your job at the end, you are unencumbered, what would you do?

I would love to have time off to go and study more. I would love to do a year of museum studies at Cambridge or Oxford or a year of sustainability studies at one of these great institutions, maybe sending me in that direction in the latter part of my life as more a specialist than a generalist.

Mostly I’d like to learn some new things for myself because I do believe in the concept of lifelong learning and the more we learn and feed ourselves, the more curious we become as people. I think curiosity is the key to success.