.png)
Humans Leading
Welcome to Humans Leading, the podcast for high-achieving women looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. Humans Leading is hosted by Dr. Jillian Bybee, a busy pediatric ICU physician, toddler mom, coach, and creative who uses what she's learned from recovering from burnout twice to help women craft lives and careers they don't need a vacation from.
Join Dr. Bybee and her inspiring guests as they tackle essential topics such as perfectionism, limiting beliefs, stress management, what it means to be human, and more. Each episode is packed with actionable advice to empower you to prioritize your own wellbeing and create the life you truly desire.
If you're ready to start putting yourself on your own priority list and lead a more fulfilling life, tune in to Humans Leading and take the first step toward transformation.
Humans Leading
If Lost Start Here with Claire Fitzsimmons
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
You’ve been taught that the solution to all your problems is outside of you: one more strategy, one more routine, one more expert. But what if I told you that the real solution is trusting that you already know more about your life than the “experts” you’ve been looking to for answers?
Yes. It’s true. You’re already the expert in your own life, even if you don’t believe it yet.
In today’s conversation, I’m joined by coach, writer, and well-being founder Claire Fitzsimmons for a warm, wide-ranging conversation about how to believe in your own inner wisdom, career pivots, learning to tolerate discomfort, addressing perfectionism, play, and the wonderful book that she co-wrote.
We talk about why being “the expert in your own life” doesn’t mean you can solve everything. It means you learn to tolerate discomfort, stay in the questions, and make choices that fit your capacity, your body, and your actual day.
If this resonates, subscribe for more conversations on stress management, burnout recovery, and sustainable well-being. I’d love it if you shared the episode with a friend who feels overwhelmed, and, for bonus points, please leave a rating and review so more people can find the show.
Where to find Claire:
Website: https://www.ifloststarthere.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ifloststarthere/
Substack: https://moregooddays.substack.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/claire-fitzsimmons-4130aa100
Book: https://amzn.eu/d/074nthZ5
Join me for more over on social media:
- Blog: Humans Leading | Jillian Bybee
- Instagram: Jillian Bybee, MD (@lifeandpicu)
- LinkedIn: Jillian Bybee, MD | LinkedIn
- Threads: @LifeandPICU
- Website: Contact — Jillian Bybee, MD (jillianbybeemd.com)
If you’re ready to kickstart your journey (or your team's journey) to a less stressed life, I’m ready to help you! You can get in touch about 1:1 coaching or inviting me to facilitate a workshop for your group, get in touch via my website.
Welcome And A Bold Reframe
SPEAKER_00Hello, and welcome to Humans Leading, a podcast for overwhelmed people looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. I'm Dr. Jillian Bibee, a pediatric critical care medicine physician, mom, certified stress management coach, and wellness trainer who uses my personal experience with burnout recovery to help others do the same. This podcast is for anyone who is feeling frustrated or overwhelmed with their current way of living and looking for practical ways to make an impact in their lives today. If you're looking to feel less stressed, less stuck, and more fulfilled in your life, this is your podcast. I'm glad you're here. What would your response be if I told you that you are the expert in your own life and that you already have all the answers you need? Would that feel true? Maybe it feels comfortable, uncomfortable, terrifying? Maybe you'd roll your eyes and curse me for my ridiculousness. I definitely want to hear from you if you already believe that you're the expert in your own life, because you figured out something that took me a long time to wrap my head around. And if you have any of the other responses, or even one I didn't say, you're in such good company. I'm still there sometimes too. Most of us have been conditioned to believe that the answers we're looking for are outside of us, just beyond our breach. And if we look hard enough or study enough or take enough classes, we'll one day find them. But that's bullshit. Although there are real experts out there, and unfortunately a lot of other people who claim to be experts but have no idea what they're talking about, the only person who is the expert of your life is you. And I'm the expert in mine. Don't worry if you don't believe this yet. It's just part of what today's podcast guest, Claire Fitzsimmons and I are talking about in our wide-ranging conversation. We'll also cover well-being, career pivots, learning to tolerate discomfort. I know that's uncomfortable, addressing perfectionism, play, and the wonderful book she co-wrote. This conversation felt like a warm hug for me, and I know that you'll love it too. And if you'd like more of Claire and I talking, you can find the episode I recorded with her a few months ago on her podcast linked in the show notes. Before
Meet Claire Fitzsimmons
SPEAKER_00we get into today's conversation, let me tell you a bit more about our amazing guest, Claire Fitzsimmons. Claire is an ICF associate certified coach, certified emotions coaching practitioner, and co-founder of If Lost Start Here, a well-being company that helps people find their way to a better place, sometimes literally. She's also the co-author of If Lost, Start Here, well-being for the anxious, disconnected, or uncertain. Claire hosts a wonderful weekly podcast, A Thought I Kept, where she explores the one idea that stays with guests across the worlds of well-being, creativity, psychology, and everyday life. As a writer on mental health and emotional well-being, her work has appeared in and been featured by publications including Breathe, Hapitful, The Simple Things, and Psychologies. Through her coaching practice, Claire helps women develop a healthier relationship with their emotions and navigate life's everyday challenges, including anxiety and overwhelm, grief, uncertainty, and change. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode just as much as I enjoyed recording it. I could have talked to Claire for hours, but we had to keep it short because I know you're all busy people. Here's the episode.
Burnout Sparks A Career Pivot
SPEAKER_00All right, Claire, it's so great to have you on the podcast.
SPEAKER_01It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00I was wondering if you could tell the listeners a little bit about you and the work that you do.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Um, so I'm a number of things. It's such a hard question sometimes, isn't it? Like, what do you do? But here we go. Um, I think there's like three main things that I do. I write about well-being. So I write about well-being for magazines, um, for news. And also um, I just published my first book with my co-author Amanda Sheeran. Um, and then I also have my own podcast um called A Thought I Cat that I is also kind of tangentially about well-being. It's very much about which of the ideas that are all the ideas that are out there, which of those stay with us. And the other thing that I do is coaching. So I work with women, mostly women, although increasingly men, which is interesting to me, um, about emotional everyday ailments. So that could be anything from grief or anxiety through to frustration, disappointment, disconnection. Um I say everyday emotional ailments because so much of the work around that is to see them as everyday and things that we can work with. But I think what connects a lot of my work is that I'm a curator by training. So my background is in the arts. And when I think about what I do, I think what I do is I think I connect dots. I think I'm a real connector of different things. And when I'm in my happy place, I'm able to kind of roam freely across like different disciplines, across different kinds of conversations, um, and kind of bring them together into something new. Like I really like that moment of kind of creating new things out of existing possibilities. Um, so that's so much of what I do right now. Um, I am, you can probably hear, I'm I'm British, but I spent a lot of time in America. So I lived for a very long time in San Francisco. Um, and now I'm based in southwest of England. And so I do find myself kind of going back and forth between those two places, the two ways of being, two ways of thinking as well.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's so many ways that uh we could dig into all the things that you just said, but I love where you went there, um, especially the connecting the dots piece. I think it's fun to look back and see all of those through lines through our lives of oh, this is how my own dots were connected. And so I wonder for you, you know, you started in one place, you've moved, you've done a lot of things. How did you come to be where you're at right now doing this work?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I didn't think the dots connected for a very long time. So if I thought about my story, for a while I thought that there was sort of a like part one and part two, and they were very separate. So I had, I was very clear about what I wanted to be when I grew up, and that was um, I wanted to work in museums, and I did that. Like I worked in these extraordinary international museums. Um, and that's also what brought me from London to San Francisco. Um, and I worked with these incredible artists, and I felt very lucky and very privileged, and also I got burnt out. I found myself in an environment that actually wasn't very suited to me. I'm I know now that I'm very sensitive, and I know that I'm somebody that needs a lot of time to process and to think. Um, and that environment is very fast, oddly, given that's a museum, but it was the places that I worked with, it was a new exhibition every three months, a new artist that we're working with. So it's it was very fast. Um and so I found myself kind of getting burnt out, getting really disconnected from myself and really losing the meaning from that field, which to me originally had all been about meaning. Um, and so I had been thinking about leaving, and it was really hard because I, you know, did my master's in art history, I studied, you know, curatorial practice, like I spent a long time. I did every terribly paid internship. Like I did all of the things to try and get this position and I worked my way up. So when I was starting to realize it wasn't working for me, that was really hard. But I started to realize it wasn't working for me at the moment that my mum developed a mental health condition. Um, we didn't really know what was happening with her. She started to kind of disassociate, to get very depressed, extremely anxious. She'd always had anxiety, but um, it started to be um really impacting her everyday life. And so I would find myself having these conversations in my work with artists and other curators and museum professionals that felt really disconnected from real life. And real life was that point my mom, these phone calls about psychiatry and about finding the right support for her and helping my dad, who is the primarily her carer. And so at that point, because I'd also struggled with anxiety, I started to want to help her. And as I realized that actually I couldn't help her, which was a learning in and of itself, I started to look for ways that I could try and help myself. So I didn't kind of lose my mind. That's what that was the real fear at that point. So I started to move more into the well-being space. And I was kind of doing that. So there was my day job, and there was like I did a psychotherapy foundation course, and I was like, maybe that's what I should be, a psychotherapist. Um, and it took me a while to figure out my place in this well-being world. I was like, what am I? How do I fit? And I worked with the School of Life producing their conference in San Francisco, and I was like, oh, it's around ideas. That's kind of still where I very much fit. So Amanda and I started the company, um, which was about kind of bringing together places that could better support us. That's kind of where it started because I was still really interested in in spaces and where we would go for support. Um, but then the pandemic happened and the those places just weren't half there anymore. And we had more and more people come to us asking about like what do I do and feeling lost and feeling disconnected, what do I do? And I was like, well, I have all these ideas, but I don't have the qualification to support you, which is when I certified as a coach. And I was like, okay, now I want to be the best coach I can be because I didn't want to be ethical and practice this well. So I trained as a coach. And so that's when kind of I really figured out what I was doing, which was like navigating everyday wellness ideas and also supporting people through their own individual situations. But where before I was like this part one and a part two, I was like, oh, actually, what I'm really doing is coming back to my work as a curator, because what I really loved about that practice, and I think why I went into it, it is all about how to be a person. It's all about how to navigate everyday life, where to find meaning, how to relate to one another, how to show up in a really confusing world, how to tease out the themes of our lives, and really how to both do that as individuals. That's why I get really interested. How we can do this one-on-one. I think there's so much magic that happens in that, but also how we can do that in the context of a wider world. So, what does it look like when we come together? What does it look like collectively to self-care? Um, and so that's that's where I think I am with that now. I think
You Are The Expert In You
SPEAKER_01a lot of my practices and also my writing and also the podcast, like it all kind of does come together, is really about those two things. Like, how do we go internally and self-connect and really understand ourselves, but how do we not get stuck there? And then how do we kind of connect with the broader environments in which we find ourselves?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's so important. The especially, you know, the balance of connecting with yourself, getting to know who you are, what you like, what you do, because I think a lot of people who listen probably to your podcast and mine, um, have gone to that place where you're like, who am I? What am I doing? What do I like? And I think what I hear from a lot of my coaching clients, and I'm curious about you, is they don't have a clue who they really are and they feel very disconnected from themselves.
SPEAKER_01Oh my God, absolutely. And I think the well-being environment does that to us as well. Like there's a lot of reasons that happens to us. And there's a lot of reasons we kind of fall out of our own story, we fall out of our own lives. Um, and that, and you know, and that's part of the practice, isn't it? It's working out where you do show up and where you're really not showing up and what happened. But I also think well-being itself can be really confusing because it can be saying to you, like, you should try this, you must do this, you ought to do this. And all these things will help you find yourself, they'll help you feel better. But actually, I think we need to kind of go back a couple of steps and be like, okay, how do how do I stay connected to myself and filter out all the noise and all the things and all the must-dos and really stay with who I am right now? So I think there's a lot of things that contribute to that sense of kind of being lost and losing ourselves. But I do find that really common that people arrive in my practice having kind of lost contact with something that's really fundamental to who they are and who they believe themselves to be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree with that. I think a lot of people who come to me, both in the organization I work with and outside, feel the same way. And also, like you're saying, they're used to a society that frames it like the answers out there. You know, somebody else has the answer. And I can hear the coach in you who's like, no, you're the expert in your own life, person who's come to me. Um, and that's actually, we'll get into the book, but that's one of the things I really enjoy is the reframing of no, the answer's not out there. People have their own ways, they have tactics that work. This audience really loves data because many of them are healthcare workers, but um, you can use all that, but it doesn't matter at all unless it is applicable to you and unless you try it on in your own life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I didn't come to that easily that I did that the answer is in you. Like it wasn't like one I remember in my training hearing that and being like, no, no, no, no, no. Somebody has the answer. And if I just find the right person, that person will give me the right answer. And I also really needed to believe that when I was trying to kind of solve for what was solve for what was happening with my mom. Like I was a real, you know, my default is how do I fix something? There has to be a solution here. And being in that kind of questioning stage was really deeply uncomfortable to me. Like it, it's not a, it wasn't at that point like a happy place to kind of explore in. And I really believed if I could find the right answer, she would get better. And she didn't get better. And she didn't get better for so many different reasons. Um, and as I was exploring for myself, what I then did come to understand is that you know, and it's such a cliche, but the life's work is staying in those questions. Like it is, like I will always be the in the question of will at some point what happened to my mum happened to me. Like I will not solve for that question. I will just always be in relationship to that. And going back to the idea about like us being the experts of ourselves, there is something in that that I think can feel quite confronting to people because it does mean that we do really have to assess our capacity, our energy, our feelings, our experiences, the environments that we're in. There's like a lot of work to do to figure out how you're even approaching this. It's not an easy situation of being like, well, I guess I'm the expert and off we go. It's like there's a lot of kind of really taking on some sometimes quite difficult things. So, you know, in my situation when I was figuring out, like, okay, well, if I'm the expert of me, then I have to accept that my brain doesn't work the way that other people's maybe normal brains do. You know, there's possibly some neurodivergence there. There is something about um like my energy issues, like going through a period of chronic fatigue. There was a lot that was like, okay, in order for me to figure out my stuff, I have to figure out where I really am located and what to then do with that.
SPEAKER_00I think listening to that last part, you know, that just speaks to the fact that a lot of times, as you've said, what we think of as being the expert is having the solution and being able to fix a problem because that's what we're often promised. And as a person who works in the pediatric intensive care, I didn't go into my career to not have answers. I went into my career to be able to solve things for patients. And what I've learned in the 10 years since I graduated, my training is oh, so often, unfortunately, in medicine, because medicine involves people's lives, there isn't a perfect answer. And I can't solve it. And just like with your mom and this question that you'll be living in relationship to, it's human nature to want to solve it and to feel like you need to be driven to the answer. Um, but all I've learned in these 10 years is how to get more comfortable being uncomfortable and how to live in those questions and then not knowing, which, as you're saying, is not easy. And is some days outside the hospital um is not easy either. But I think it's one of the important things as we learn and grow is being able to navigate that, or you end up, you know, consumed by trying to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I like and there there is something in that too. I think about when we see some of those messages. So, like
Making Wellness Advice Fit Real Life
SPEAKER_01part of the reason for writing the book was that I realized that there were experts saying things like, um, you know, if you just, if you just do this one thing, you'll feel better. If you just, you know, um have a creative practice, getting to nature, like the different pathways that we cover, everything will be okay for you. And I was like, but we already have our own assumptions about those things. So if I was to think about, you know, if I just get into nature, I'll feel better. I already know that if I was to walk, if I was to go for a walk on my own down a trail, which I'm being told by the experts will make me feel better because it's like open vistas and all those sorts of things, I will probably feel highly anxious because I'm worried I'm gonna get murdered. Because the messaging when I was growing up is that as women, we don't go out into nature on our own. It's not safe. And if I was thinking about, you know, being more creative, then I'm somebody that now feels very creative, but I have had to deal with messages of I'm not an artist, I'm not a writer, creativity is fluffy, you know. And so I think part of that is like there is what the expert says and the science says, you know, the data says we should connect more, the data says we should do this. And so much the book is saying, like, these are the messages, this is the data. How do you really feel about that? Like, what do you feel about that? What are you bringing to that? What are your assumptions? What are your expectations? What do you want this to be? And now figure out what that is for you. And so for me, nature isn't about hiking trails, it's about planting alliums in my garden and something that's closer and tinier and more private, or creativity is like, you know, the 10 minutes of the morning I get to do an artist page or something like that. Like it's like, how do you make it work for you? Because you understand what you're bringing to those issues.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you're, you know, hitting on those two of the 10 things that you write about in the book. And um, one of them actually, as I was going through, I was like, oh, creativity is such a uh trigger, um, probably for this audience. And it was for me at some point in my life too, because of I think what you write about, which is the I'm not a creative person or creativity is for artists, or I think for me personally, it was more the uh perfectionism around creativity. And so, you know, knowing what you know from researching for the book and also just in your own life, you know, how is creativity helpful for us for well-being, but also um, how can we get past that, you know, I have to be perfect at the thing that I'm making, or I have to, even in the garden, I have to plant the perfect plants and they have to flower and they have to do the things. Um, not that I would have ever felt like that if my tomatoes don't succeed.
SPEAKER_01I think I've got I've got so much better at playing and experimenting and getting curious. And I think if we could bring that frame to absolutely anything, I think I've really come to believe this. It there's possibility again, and it feels so much more expansive. So if you think about creativity, creativity feels like um, I know the first time I was really kind of practicing some of these things because I was, you know, reading that I should be creative and that would help me feel better and that would help with anxiety. And I remember going to um, I think I went to a workshop about making a cushion. It was so stupid, Jillian. It was about making a cushion. And I walked in and there were all these people and there was a table of different fabrics, and I had that paralysis of like, what if I choose the wrong fabric? And already I'm stuck, right? I'm not feeling calm, I'm feeling highly anxious, I'm hyper concerned about my choices at that point. And there is something I think that I realized that um kind of coming out of that, but like ever since, there is something about just playing, just trying, just seeing what happens, and kind of again being in that question, like I wonder what would happen if I were just to allow myself to get this wrong. Like so when my cushion doesn't match very well, like the seams isn't they're not sewn brilliantly. The woman next to me has a way better cushion, but I was so proud of that cushion at the end of it. Like I still have it. I like I've shipped it across the world. I don't know why. Um, but I think it reminds me of this it's okay to practice and just to play. And I think that applies to so many of the different things, is just like like even with the alliums, like my first year, they didn't grow. Like they didn't, they they just I love them, they're my favorite flower. And it was trying. And then the next year they did, and now there is this beautiful plot of alliance. And I think I think we hold ourselves to such high standards, and we have so Many beliefs about how something should be and how it should look. But when we think about it's still quite fun planting the bulbs, even if it doesn't happen, it's still quite fun choosing the fabric, even if it's not perfect. Like there are aspects of that that can still give us something. And I think we overlook that. We overlook the process of things so often. And I like try. I think living in try for me offers so much more than living in like perfect or you know, the end results of something.
SPEAKER_00I think that's so beautiful, the living in try or you know, being I through my coaching training and just through having a son in my late 30s and life. Um it's more like the process is the goal rather than the end point is the goal for me because so often, as we saw before we started recording, where you have a plan and then it gets interrupted by your mom or life calling you to say something else has come up, you don't often get to reach the exact goal that you want in the timeline that you had set out in your life. And so it takes so much of the pressure off just to be like, well, here we go. We're plotting away at it. And you know, not plotting in a way that's working, but that bringing this play and fun like you're talking about, because um, that's something that's so often gone from us. I think our lives get flattened a lot. Um, and we don't have fun anymore because we're putting so much pressure on ourselves because society puts a lot of pressure on us. And um, you know, you said that you had to get better at letting yourself play. And I'm curious how you did that because a lot of the people who listen to this podcast and who come to me in coaching can't remember the last time they were playing, or don't know what that looks like anymore, other than maybe related to their children if they happen to have them.
Play Without Performing
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So it's almost what was the book like that's about children? All the fun, not all the play and no fun. There's something like that that's about how we are creating environments for our children to play and have fun, and we're not having fun and we're not playing. Yeah. And there's a real disconnect between how we prioritize that for them and the way that we view that for ourselves. And you said something about flattening. And I think I think there is this collective flattening that's happening right now for us and the way that we are supposed to show up in very similar and expected ways. And I think play for me, I mean, I again, I don't find play easy. Like there are different pathways in the book. I think play is one of them. Play is something that my partner, my business partner and my best friend, Amanda, she can go to play much more naturally than I can. Like she's funny and quirky and has this sense of play being allowed. Like it's not even, I don't think it's a question for her whether it's allowed. It's just like in her life, and that's what she does, and she's amused by squirrels and it's all really wonderful. For me, I have to do quite a lot of fun picking. Like some of you, your listeners and your audience, like I have to do the like, okay, play isn't a waste of time. Like I know that, but I had to really know that and understand that. Like it's not a waste of time. And I also feel better. I know I feel better when I play. So if I think about play for me, it's kind of curious actually. So I think if I was to think about assumptions about play, I might think about it's about being silly, or it's about um, you know, uh, I'm kind of picturing like somebody at a table making a mess. That's not how I play. It's like I I I'm not very silly, but I love whimsy. Like I love things that are whimsic, whimsical. Um and I was to actually I was just packing up some books for when I'm going away for um the next couple of weeks. And one of the books was a kind of a romance novel. And I would never pick up romance, like I would never do that. And I went to a bookshop in Wales recently that was only romance novels. And the reason I say this is because I think I play with ideas and I think I play with genre, and I think I play with where I allow my brain and my time to go. So play for me is allowing myself of my three books I'm taking away, allowing myself to have one be a romance novel. Or play for me is like I love being out in the world. So I have this habit on a Saturday morning when everybody's sleeping, of finding somewhere new in the world, like somewhere I haven't been before. And it could just be like a bakery or a cafe or a museum or a different street that I've never walked down before. And that is play to me. It's like anything that feels like expansive or anything where I'm just pushing out of my comfort zone and allowing myself to get lost. Because I think that's part of it too. I think it's okay to get lost. Um, but that feels kind of playful for me. So I think I just I've really had to like reframe what that is to me, but it's there now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not just games or, you know, especially not organized sporting events is play. It's more like what you're describing, which is the loss of the sense of time or the the loss of the sense of you know, seriousness and buttoned-upness, and have to like force everything because I think so much of life feels like that. And I completely relate to the thing where you're like, this takes some work for me because I am not naturally that person. I think I maybe was, I don't know, but I think I always was sort of a like serious, reflective, more quiet person. And so um, I think some of the ways that we think of play in the culture is like loud, extroverted ways of playing and allowing yourself to see that you know, picking up something that you wouldn't normally do or going to a cafe you wouldn't usually go to. Um, I don't know if you're familiar with the she writes on Substack, but also writes in the world. Um, Caroline Donahue, she lives in Germany now. Um, she set up a scavenger hunt. Um, so she made a bingo card uh for the summer and she put it out to her readers, and she's publishing less during this time of the year because, like many of us, she's taking a break. Um, but I was like, yes, bingo card, how fun. And so there's all these little silly things that are like go to a writer's event or go see something new, or one of them was um read a genre you wouldn't usually read, or read a book that's been translated from a language you've never read before. And I was like, oh yeah, this feels like play to me because it's just something new and kind of silly, but also, you know, relates to things that I like to do anyway.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm so pleased you said that. We have one on our website, a scavenger hunt. And because the reason because that is play to me, like exploring and getting out in the world and finding things. Um, and I noticed there's all these scavenger hunt for children, particularly around summertime, particularly around this moment of like they get to go and explore. And we so so much, actually, it's interesting to what we're talking about about play. One of the reasons for the branding of If Lost was because we notice in the well-being space there's so little play. Like the branding is often heavy or serious. And we're like, where is the play in well-being? Like, where is that? Um, and so that's kind of informed a lot of the book. It informed a lot of our branding. And also that's kind of like where products like so we have a scavenger hunt. We also have these, I don't think they're available right now. There are these like conversation cards around um emotions. So you can play with ideas and feelings. But I think that kind of bringing that in somehow to how we talk about well-being and how we position ourselves, I think it's really, really important because it's so serious in ways that are not helpful. And I think you said something else too about like there's an awareness of, you know, like, oh, we're not playful people. And so then we can start braiding ourselves and being like, oh, you know, I failed at this pathway because I'm not a playful person. And actually, like there's something about saying, like, oh, I'm quieter and less performative. And it's just really finding out, like, you know, someone said to me recently about people pleasing, how much it's a behavior. And I was like, oh, I've been telling myself off of people pleasing for a while. And it was like, actually, you don't need to tell yourself off because you're not playful. You don't need to tell yourself off because you're not people pleasing. Like, it's very much about saying, like, I see that as a possibility for myself, and I also see how I operate and I see what that needs to be for me. And it's so much more kinder to ourselves and more sustainable.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's getting back to the part where we can take ownership of ourselves as experts, where it's the claiming of these things and then not having to perform into some version of something that somebody else says is play for us. And I think that's where this book is so helpful because it asks you those questions. You know, it
Journaling Prompts And Timers That Work
SPEAKER_00has journaling prompts, and that's something often that um I hear from people they think is just sort of a frivolous thing, or you know, it's for a different type of person. And so I was curious. I think I know why you put the prompts in, but you know, what were you thinking about in terms of offering this as a journal and a reflective practice for people?
SPEAKER_01Yes, we I we thought a lot about what this book was going to be. I've always wanted to write a book, and this has taken different iterations. At one point, it was just a very kind of heavier nonfiction book. Like there is a version of this book that is says, When you when you do these things, this will help in this way, and then off you go. Like that's you know, there are these different ways of being and figuring out your well-being practice. And every time I would edit that, think about that, it seemed to lack this spaciousness that I really like. And also in my mind, there was always this reader that would be that would be saying, but wait, or what about this, or like, hang on a minute. And those, but wait, hang on a minute. I think of the general prompts, which at the moment that says, like, really, what is nature to you? Like, if I say to you, like, okay, let's let's think about nature, what comes to mind? You might be somebody, and Amanda is like this, she's somebody that it's oceans, it's her with her family, it is exciting, it's comfortable, it's safe. Um, and so already she's leaning into that pathway. But for me, that's not where my brain went. Like, that's I go somewhere else. So already you're saying to somebody, like, okay, what is this to you? And every single pathway we ask that question, like, what is this to you? What does it mean to you? What do you need this to be for you? And I think as we develop this from this like nonfiction book to this like journal, my hope was that it would give that spaciousness. And so that's what the general prompts are there for. And I know general link, it again, a lot of, I think we've talked about this before too, so much of well-being we can start to even the things that work for us that are like scientifically bad, we can start to get a bit tired with, right? So gratitude journaling is an obvious one, or gratitude practices, we're all we all start rolling our eyes a bit about it. Journaling, I think, is becoming one of those things where we're like, oh, I guess we're all journaling now. Okay, I guess I'll have to journal. Um but I do think I don't have a daily journaling practice. I'm not somebody that journals every day. And I find it extraordinarily helpful to journal when I journal. And I in the book, one of the reasons that we kind of divided it into these kind of 12 chapters was like, how do we make this easy for people? So for journaling, yeah, there are those people that do it every day. That's great. But this book is like loosely arranged, I guess, around a year. So if you wanted to explore nature for a month or in tethering for a month or creativity for a month, you could like do a week of journaling, but it could only just be a week of journaling. And then you're into like practicing that pathway and trying on a mindset in that pathway and kind of having fun with that pathway. So it's not, it doesn't have to just stay in journaling for you, but it is offered to you as a place that you might want to drop into sometimes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's so helpful because I get a lot when I talk about journaling to people, and I have not a daily journaling practice, but a reasonably regular writing reflection, contemplation practice. Um, they roll their eyes or they, you know, they just have they have hangups about it, which I often am like, oh, well, why do you have these hangups? You could write about that because I think so much of it is the um fact that it's hard to pause to like we were talking about before we recorded, to admit that you're in a place that feels stuck or burnt out. Like it's not easy to admit those things out loud. And so so I think some of these responses, in addition to the stories that we have carried for a long time, are the avoidance tactics for facing the thing that we're currently facing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's really hard to do that. And you know, it makes me think about um, we host these workshops around journaling, um, where it is, you know, a room full of people who have very different ways into this practice. You'll have people who do, like you said, journal every day, and some people who haven't written anything for decades. Um, and they come and you'll find that there's a moment that somebody has given a prompt, and often like we start with something, you know, kind of really easy, really playful to kind of ease them into it. But it takes there's a moment of getting over that, like there is a blank page and there is me, and I just have to write something. And like creativity, we can have assumptions about writing, like what is the perfect sentence? What's the right way to do this? That comes up a lot actually with journaling. What is the right way to journal? Like, what is the right, what are you expecting of me in this moment that I am filling in this book or I'm sitting in this workshop? Like, what are you expecting me to say? And so you do, I see it, I see the moment of like, oh, what do I do with this? And there's always a timer. So I find this really helpful actually. If you're you if you have questions about journaling, um, set a timer for three, five, ten minutes. Just it's a tiny amount of time. And just, you know, open a page in the book or find a journaling prompt online, or, you know, even just free write about one word. You can just pick any word. That's always quite fun. And just see what happens. And what you'll find, I see it with people who are in these workshops, even after three, five, or ten minutes, you will start to become aware of something you didn't know before. It's quite it's kind of extraordinary. And it's not about reading it back, and it's not about having a purpose for this content. I think so often we do writing as content, but it's just about like something may have come into your awareness. It could be a feeling, it could be a sensation, it could be a surprise, but there is always something. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you saying the one-word thing makes me think of I took a memoir writing course in the fall, and the professor um went around with post-its on one of our breaks and put a post-it with a random word on our spot and then you know had us free write for five, 10 minutes or whatever. And mine was popcorn, and it was crazy to see when you just were like, okay, I'm gonna, you know, work my way into this and see what happens and just let yourself play with it. I was like, oh, I got to a story I hadn't thought about in a long time. Um, and I never would have gotten there. And it was only adjacent to popcorn, but that didn't really matter, and that was fun. Um, but you said something else in there about doing things the right way, and it kind of made me laugh because I think um, A, I'm a person who tried to do things the right way for a long time, but B, um sometimes when I teach, you know, breath practices or other things. Um, one time I had someone almost hyperventilate with a box breathing practice I was teaching because she was so focused on whether she was breathing correctly. And I thought, oh, we um, well, maybe this isn't the strategy for you. Um, and so I she can use a different one. Um, but then I thought it'd be interesting for you to, you know, to unpick that. Like, where does that come from? How does it show up in your life in other ways? Um, and to my knowledge, she has not done that for herself yet. But I think there are always these offerings in our lives to wonder with curiosity and to live those questions like you were talking about earlier of why is that happening for me? Or, you know, what could be getting in the way here? So lots of different ways in.
SPEAKER_01And that's so much kinder than what's wrong with me. Like you you mentioned about people not wanting to confront something or sit down with something. And the reason we often don't want to do that is because we're worried about finding the thing, you know, the thing that tells us this is what's wrong with us, this is where we're getting life wrong. And there is, you know, sometimes there is like an avoidant tactic or a hiding tactic in that, isn't there? About like I don't want to see that thing. But I think when it's when it's offered as an opportunity to get curious, find something out, um, be more expansive. I think it's just more generative than what's wrong. It's it's more like I wonder what would happen if, like I wonder what would happen if I I were to pick up a different pajama. I wonder what would happen if I tried box breathing. Like I, you know, I wonder what would happen if I think there's so much more there than I have to confront something or I must do it a certain way. You know, I think there's something that feels more gracious. And I think we're I think we're yearning for something that feels a bit more gracious right now, just so much more kinder to ourselves.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that gets to the you know, expansive versus contracted. And I think, you know, when you say those words like, oh, I have to, I should, I just need to, why can't I? What's wrong with me? Like it feels if you allow yourself to feel it very constricting and like drudgery, and it's not good. And these other ways of being allow you to feel less flattened, more open, more expansive. And I think sometimes that's what we're missing in our day-to-day lives is you can have those feelings and not really change a lot of the actions that you're doing day to day, but you can have more of the feeling that you're looking for without having to completely blow your life up. And I think sometimes that blows my clients' minds because like you don't really need to change that much. A lot of what is asking to be changed is in here.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and it yes, and I'm I'm so pleased you said that because actually I think what we are being taught right now is that well-being is like it's not burn your house down, but it's like transformation, transformation, transformation, right? It's like the big shifts, the big transformation, the big changes. And sometimes those incremental, tiny, small, they have big impacts too in ways that you can't possibly expect. They're really important. And I think they offer so much more than we think they do. And there was something else I think you said about I was thinking about this expansiveness. I started to write about this this week. I think there are moments that I definitely have this. There's moments that I do feel expansive. Like there's moments that I do feel like my energy, my capacity is in such a place that I want my world to expand. And also coming back to the self-awareness piece, there are moments that I do feel more protective. There are moments that I am in protective of myself, my energy, my capacity, my feelings. And I think there's a really interesting pivot in well-being towards, you know, towards both. But yeah, and that's part of the knowing, is it like knowing when we are resourced enough that we want to expand and play and get curious, and knowing when we need to kind of just protect ourselves a little bit more and like pull back a bit more and just be in a kind of different state. And I I've I think I think there's I think there's a place for both.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree. And I feel like just being respectful of time, I feel like I could always talk to you forever, which um, you know, we started before we were recording uh talking forever, but I was curious, um, you know, if you could think of one message to leave the audience with or you know, something to think about as they go into their days, if there was something that came to you just based on what we've talked about, or something you like to leave people with.
Curiosity And Creating Spaciousness
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I I really like the idea of curiosity. I really find myself going back to that again and again and again. And so I suppose it's about how might you get a little bit more curious about yourself, your life, like what excites you, what you want, what curiosity can even offer you. Um and where is the spaciousness? Like, where is there space for you? And how might you create that?
SPEAKER_00That's beautiful. Um, where can people find
Where To Find Claire And Closing
SPEAKER_00you? Obviously, I'll put all the links in the show notes, but I'll let you hype yourself too.
SPEAKER_01Um there's a few places. Um we we, Amanda and I have our website, so if loss. You can always so find details of the book, which is also called if loss. That is available widely. Um, so in the UK, like WaterZen's and Amazon. In the US, actually in the US, um, just DM us and then we'll send you the link to buy that because we're figuring out shipping and things like that because of the whole thing. Um, on Substack, I have two Substacks. Um, Morgid Days is around navigating everyday well-being. Um, it's also where we post the podcast. And I have a newish one called It's a Lot Actually, which is about being emotionally exhausted in midlife. And that's about that moment that someone says, How are you feeling? You're like, I'm fine, but really not fine. It's just all a bit too much. It's a lot actually. Um, that's there. Um, and we're on social, so we're on Instagram as if loss.here and a thought I kept is the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Well, great. I just want to thank you for coming on, for having this chat, and also just for all the work that you're doing. I think it's really wonderful and uh very needed.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you so much. This has been really delightful. Thank you for making the space.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you got something out of it that will stick with you and help you live a less stressed, more satisfying life. Even if it's something small, these little things add up to big things over time. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would rate and review the podcast on Apple or Spotify. I also invite you to subscribe to make sure that you get all the newest episodes as soon as they are released. And for bonus points, if there's something that really landed with you, I would love it if you could share with a friend or with your network. That's how you can help humans leading grow and reach a bigger audience. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.
