About
Anya Duggan
Australian executive, adviser and coach. She brings the same intelligence, structure and warmth to her clients' love lives that she has brought to boardrooms for three decades.
Anya is trained in law and finance, holds an MBA and is certified in performance neuroscience coaching. She has spent more than twenty five years in senior executive and advisory roles, leading major transactions for some of Australia's largest organisations. Three decades of helping boards and executives make high stakes decisions under uncertainty turns out to be a reasonable description of dating as well.
Date 96 is her first book as the storyteller of her own life. After a demanding career and more than a decade in the wrong relationship, she designed the hundred date experiment described in its pages. One hundred intentional, in person dates in a single year, no apps. She met her husband on Date 96 and has been happily married ever since.
She now coaches professionals on dating and relationship performance, using the Intentional Dating Blueprint, the six stage framework that took her from readiness through to commitment. The work is not about heroic courage. It is about teaspoons of it, daily, and about refusing to leave the most important search of your life entirely to chance.
Anya lives in Australia with her husband and their two dogs, all of whom appear throughout the book.
“Go gently. Go bravely. Go.”
Closing lines, Date 96
Credentials at a glance
- Australian executive, adviser and coach, trained in law and finance, with an MBA.
- Certified in performance neuroscience coaching, through the Flow Research Collective founded by Steven Kotler.
- More than twenty five years in senior executive and advisory roles, leading major transactions for some of Australia's largest organisations.
- Author of Date 96, her first book as the storyteller of her own life.
- Creator of the Intentional Dating Blueprint, the six stage framework at the heart of Date 96.
- Host of the Date 96 podcast and creator of the Readiness Scorecard.
Why she coaches
Anya works with people who have built amazing lives for themselves but are quietly tired of hoping love will simply happen. Her coaching combines performance science, structured experimentation and considerable warmth. Clients learn to regulate the anxiety that sabotages connection, to build the micro bravery that creates opportunity, to read their own data honestly, and to date from groundedness rather than fear.
The approach is intelligent, kind and unapologetically practical, and it treats the desire for partnership as a valid, grown up goal that deserves the same rigour as any career ambition.
What clients work on with Anya
Readiness and self worth
So you stop dating from fear and fatigue.
Nervous system regulation and flow triggers
So first dates feel like conversations rather than auditions.
Micro bravery and real world strategy
Teaspoons of courage, daily, so opportunity stops depending on an algorithm.
Discernment
Using the green, amber and red flag system, so good on paper stops beating good for you.
Decision making
So relationships progress on purpose rather than by drift.
Anya is a coach, not a therapist or psychologist. Coaching is not a substitute for mental health care.