EP52: Finding Purpose - How Clare Left Corporate Agencies to Build Meaningful Work for Changemakers
“I remember one Christmas Eve… instead of being with my husband and not-yet-two-year-old, I was finishing a project because that felt more important.” If your career looks great on paper but feels wrong in your bones, Clare’s story will resonate.
This is the first episode in my Finding Purpose series—monthly conversations with clients and other brave souls who’ve left corporate, done the inner and outer work, and built regenerative careers on their own terms. These episodes are about real transitions, not highlight reels: the fears, the false starts, and the choices that lead to meaningful work.
Clare spent years in London’s creative agencies, living the long-hours rhythm that corporate culture normalises. Then life forced a rethink—pregnancy, twins, a move out of London, and the dawning realisation that the “fun had stopped.” We talk about how burnout drains the imagination you need for career change, and how the fear of slipping back into burnout can keep you in limbo even after you’ve left. Together we reframe work from the ground up: start with how you want life to feel (family first, balance, a sense of craft) and only then design the work around it.
What’s powerful about Clare’s path is that nothing was wasted. She turned years of brand/communications experience and a master’s in sustainability into Story Labs—participatory, community-led sessions that surface lived experience and weave it into collective narratives for places, projects and changemakers.
If Clare’s journey resonates and you’re ready to reimagine your relationship with work, let’s talk. The Meaningful Business Incubator is my six-month intensive coaching program where we will design, test, and launch your regenerative business or offering.
Book a call with me and we’ll talk about what the Meaningful Business Incubator can unlock for you.
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Full Transcript
Alisa:
Hi Clare, welcome to the podcast. It’s very exciting because you are the first guest I’ve had on the podcast that’s actually been here in the office with me. We are in the same room; we can actually touch each other. And so Clare is the only client I’ve ever had who is actually here in the same space as me. We live in the same town and we’ve had the joy of being able to do all of our coaching work together in person, often out in the wild.
But Clare has agreed to come and talk with us today, and Clare, what I would love to share with people is your story in terms of how your work life has changed. So perhaps going right back to what your kind of conventional work life looked like, why you chose to step out of that, where you were when we started working together, and then we can take it up to where you are now – which, spoiler alert, involves launching a really exciting regenerative offering. So does that sound OK?
Clare:
Yeah, all right.
Alisa:
So, take us right back to the beginning in terms of where you were at this sort of peak of what would be considered your successful career.
Clare:
Well, from the age of 24 – actually even prior to that really – until I left, I worked for creative agencies in London, so predominantly on brand strategy and corporate communications. And when I left, I was Client Partner, I think was the term. I was working on multiple projects. I had clients in Germany, so I was regularly flying over there.
And I had a young child – actually young child, sorry – and I was working very long hours. Dylan was two and I would – we’d drop off at nursery. My husband would do the drop-off at eight o’clock in the morning, then I would have to get to him, to my son, on the other side of London by six. And some nights that was a challenge; the tubes weren’t working or something. I remember one day ringing my husband and saying I’m trying to get on the train, there’s no tubes, and I can’t. I think I’d been in a meeting, and he said, “Well I can’t get there.” And I got to the nursery and Dylan was in his coat and they’d actually switched the lights off so he had his little coat on and they were just sat there. And it was – you know – those kinds of things are actually really difficult in the end.
And I think for a long time I’d also been feeling like, when I did that job in my twenties, I loved it. I thought I worked with really a lot of autonomy. I worked with designers and strategists and we would create our own projects essentially with lots of different clients. And my clients were like the who’s-who; we had BP was one of them at one point, but there was L’Oréal, and we’d go to Paris, and it felt like quite an exciting time.
But I think there was something starting to make me feel uneasy – maybe not just the work that we were doing, which was a lot around sustainability communications – something to make me question what we were doing, but more than that I think it was the lifestyle. It was long hours. Agencies are quick and that’s fun to a certain degree, but then at a certain point the fun stops.
And I don’t think I would have stopped. Though there were little bits of me that were thinking, maybe this isn’t quite right for me, there was the money thing as well because I earned as much as my husband, so we had to keep working.
But then I got pregnant with twins, and that really did change everything. I was very sick during my pregnancy but I didn’t take a single day off work, and I kept working until I was taken to hospital and they basically said, “You have got nothing left in your body; we need to stop now.”
Alisa:
I also had twins – my twins are two years younger than yours – and I was also really sick through my pregnancy. I found it extremely physically hard, and I cannot imagine how you went to work every day. Because at the time I was running a company but I had more flexibility, I suppose, but I would lie in bed until I had to literally drag myself out for super-critical meetings and then go back. It’s quite astonishing what we ask of ourselves and what conventional work asks of us as well.
Clare:
I used to – and this is a bit graphic – but I’d get a bus down Anerley Road, and on the way home I knew where the bins were because I would get off the bus to be sick because I was so sick.
Alisa:
It really strikes me, that story you shared about picking up little Dylan with the lights off – there’s a real lack of humanity in that model that requires long hours and unwavering contribution. For me, part of thinking of regenerative work is just making space for the human stuff that happens to us – that we need to go and get our kid, or somebody gets sick, or our parents are ageing, or we’re growing two humans inside of us – that there’s just so little space in conventional work for being human and all the things that happen in life.
Clare:
Yeah, but also in our own heads. That’s the other thing. There was a need for me to work. I was living in London, I had a mortgage to pay, and that was my job, so it sort of had to be that way.
But there’s another part – the latter jobs I had, I actually had a relatively understanding boss; he had a family – but there was something within me as well that had come from that world. I remember one Christmas Eve – this is how ridiculous things get – that rather than being with my husband and my not-even-two-year-old son, I was trying to finish off work on Christmas Eve because that felt so important, that I got this particular project wrapped up before Christmas.
At that time that felt completely normal. I can’t say that my boss was necessarily standing over me and telling me to do that. Maybe if I’d not done it, the consequences – I don’t know what they would have been – but there was me. I was thinking, honestly at some level, that the more important thing in my life was to finish that project than it was to spend time with my family.
Alisa:
Where do you think that compulsion came from?
Clare:
It’s hard to say. It’s a kind of – well, I mean, I worked so hard for so many years. I literally did nothing but work. I’d get in early in the mornings, I’d work long hours. I remember one job within an agency where I finished at five and I got to the train station at five o’clock one day, and I thought, what am I going to do? It’s five o’clock; what do people do? I didn’t have hobbies. I didn’t have anything other.
I always knew I wanted a family, but then I had Dylan and I left my job. At that point I was thinking about doing something different, but again money – I felt that was the reason I needed to keep going. He went back to nursery at ten months and I went back for three days, and I thought, there’s no way I can do this work in three days. I need to do four days, obviously. And then I used to work on a Sunday to catch up from the Friday I had off.
Alisa:
I mean, obviously, yeah, we have very different experiences because I was an entrepreneur, so I worked for myself. But I do recognise that compulsion to work and that feeling of, what will I possibly do if it’s not there?
I remember when I got married, and I was pregnant at the time, and I took ten days off to go to New York to get married and have a honeymoon at the same time. It was the first time in – I’m trying to work out the dates now – close to ten years that I had switched off from work in that period of time. So I really recognise that.
I find it very interesting to think about where it comes from. For me, my sort of working hypothesis is that the system asks so much of us. The expectation on you was that you work long hours, that the project gets done no matter what, that you don’t let something like getting pregnant or being sick or having a young child get in the way of your ability to perform. And that’s a real demand.
Because that is asked of us, we respond by almost doubling down on it, because it’s unnatural to make that bargain. To say, yes, I can give you that much, we end up giving all of ourselves. We invest our self-worth and our value into that exchange for work, and then it becomes really quite frightening to think, who am I outside of this?
So take us to that point for you, because that did happen for you – where it reached the point that you needed to change things.
Clare:
Yeah. I mean, my hand was slightly forced, but I woke up one night in the middle of the night and wrote this letter, and I said that I will never work like this again – to my unborn children.
And then everything changed. When the twins were five months old, we left London and we moved to Wivenhoe, which is where we are now. That meant financially things changed, because suddenly we weren’t paying those kinds of costs. Everything shifted. It meant I didn’t have to work to pay the mortgage, which was a first.
And also just having three young children – under three at one point, because Dylan was two when the girls were born – everything just switched for me. I wanted it to switch. If I’d been really invested in that job as a career, perhaps maybe I wouldn’t have, but either way everything changed at that point.
For two years I’d say I was just so immersed in the children that I didn’t particularly have time to think, although there was always this nagging sense of, I need to get back to work. So there was this dual thing: it was fine for now, but obviously it’s not fine forever, for multiple reasons.
Then, when one of the girls was two or three, I started a master’s, and that coincided with lockdown. I did my master’s in Sustainability and Behaviour Change, which I loved, but again I really threw myself into that too. There was another part of me that was still really wanting to do something.
At that same point, a lot of people were saying, “What are you doing?” As if it was never enough just to be a mother. That’s quite a hard thing to say, but it’s true.
From the master’s, that’s when I think we met. I felt very, very lost. I couldn’t conceive of work. I knew I wanted to go back to work – I knew I wanted to – but I couldn’t conceive of work as being anything other than what it had been.
For me, work was associated with everything: long hours, my whole identity. It was what I did, and I couldn’t see how that would ever be compatible with children.
Alisa:
Yeah, and I remember that was a really big part of our work at the beginning – that kind of overshadowed everything for you, because anything you might want to try or explore came with this baggage of, but it’s going to mean going back to that way of existing. It’s going to mean sacrificing time with my family. It’s going to mean long hours and getting burnt out.
It took quite a while for that to shift. One of the powerful things we did at the beginning was setting this vision – do you remember – of the balance you wanted to have, long before you knew any specifics about the kind of work you’d be doing. These foundational pieces of, my family must be part of this, it has to be balanced.
And I remember this sense of peacefulness that you were looking for in work, which clearly, from your story, wasn’t there before.
Clare:
Yeah. Actually, when we first did our first session together out in the wild, we had this image, didn’t we, of standing by the sea with a cup of tea in a warm jumper – and that was what I wanted in my life, and how could work be part of that.
Alisa:
That’s right. And it’s so interesting because I think most people live their whole professional lives thinking, what is work going to be, and how do I fit life around that?
And what we did was turn that around to, I want that experience – that kind of life – and then let’s work from there. I think so many people miss that, even when they’ve had a similar experience to you, of taking a big leap out of what seemed to be a really successful career. The next question is always, what do I do next, what is the work? And we miss that step of, how is work going to feel? I think that’s such an important starting point.
Clare:
Yeah, it’s the main work, I think – certainly for me. It’s re-imagining what work can be, and then thinking that it can be something different.
Because I think the image at the sea – with the cup and the cosy jumper – what that meant for me, and this came out through our coaching, was that I wanted something that was a craft and meaningful. I wanted something I was doing – something physical, perhaps – but I wanted something where I was creating.
A lot of my career had been spent doing things that, when it really came down to it, weren’t really doing anything. Sometimes it was being busy for the sake of being busy – lots of meetings, lots of spreadsheets. It was called the “creative industry,” which is kind of ironic.
I wanted something I could build. That’s what I was searching for. I saw it as a craft. And all of my imagery that came up was about people who had a craft – artists, carpenters – people creating. That’s not necessarily where my skills lie, but that’s what I was drawn to.
The only people I could really see doing that kind of work were people very much not in the corporate office environment. That was clear. When I looked at where I was and where those images were coming from, they were always people doing something they really believed in. That was a strong feeling.
But then it was, well, that’s not the work I know. Those are artists or carpenters or yoga teachers – that kind of world.
Alisa:
Yeah, exactly. And allowing yourself to think that way – to start thinking of yourself as an artist – I think that’s a big leap for a lot of people, but it’s something I really believe in. Fundamentally, what is an artist? Someone who’s creating something they really believe in, something that will have an impact and make change.
Clare:
Yeah, exactly.
Alisa:
So, talk us through how those threads started coming together. Once you were more connected with how you wanted work to feel, and you’d shifted your ideas about what work meant – from this corporate experience to this more craftsmanship kind of thinking – how did that start to come together into what you were going to do next?
Clare:
Well, you know, over time – and with a lot of help from you. As we both noticed, the threads were there, but it took a while. There were a couple of breakthrough moments, but it took time.
In hindsight, I wish I’d listened a bit more about allowing that time. I wanted to get on and do stuff quickly.
In terms of your question, there were a couple of things that stood out for me. One was that I thought I was too old to do anything – this was a big thing for me. I thought, I’m in my mid-forties, I’m just past it. That was huge. And you really helped with that, because you made me think about other people doing exciting things in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties.
This period of trying to work out the next thing has been very difficult. It’s been hard, and I’ve had you to help me. I honestly don’t think I would have done it otherwise, because it’s hard. It’s hard to reinvent yourself. It’s much easier to go back to doing what you were doing, isn’t it?
Alisa:
This is hard work. But I think the mindset shift you’re talking about there—and the thing of slowing down—because a lot of people feel like, I can’t afford to slow down, I’m getting older, it needs to be done now, or, I’ve already had a career break and I need to solve this.
A real shift that you had was: if I’m trying to create something I can do into my seventies, then if this takes a year, that’s nothing if it serves me for the next thirty years.
Clare:
Yeah, that was the shift. I remember it clearly. It was like: I’ve been thinking I need to decide what to do quickly because time’s running out—and then the shift came and it was, oh, but I want to do this for the next twenty or thirty years.
So now actually it’s about doing something that’s going to last. Change happens, things happen, maybe I won’t want to, but in terms of this real intentional change of direction, you can’t do that many times in your life because of the energy it takes. Maybe there’ll be more organic shifts, but I thought: right, I want something now that I’ll look back on at sixty or seventy and think, that was good work.
That was the big shift. So I had that, and I knew I wanted a craft—in the widest sense of the word. I knew I wanted something that would fit with family life. I knew I didn’t have the energy to work those hours anymore. Those threads were coming through quite strongly.
Alisa:
And then there was a fourth one. I’m curious—people will be curious—because we’ve talked about the mindset shift, but there was also a lot of inner work around self-confidence and self-worth. That comes up for anyone making these kinds of shifts.
But it’s also inspiring for people to hear the practical side, because what you’ve done is you’ve taken all the experience you had from your corporate life—it’s not like that was wasted—you’ve used that as a foundation. You’ve used everything from your master’s. You’ve combined that with where you are in your life now and what you’re passionate about, and with something that can be a craft for you going forward. That’s what so many people are longing to do.
So maybe talk about what you’re doing now and how those threads came together.
Clare:
So what I’m doing now: I’m building a business as a story facilitator in the climate and community space. At the core of my offer is something I’ve called Story Labs, which are participatory workshops or experiences that bring teams or communities together to share stories and perspectives, then look at what the common threads are within those stories and create collective narratives from them. Those narratives can shape communications, place-based initiatives, or research.
Essentially the aim is to bring different voices into conversations—to start shifting narratives. There are practical outputs from that too. Story Labs is quite a simple offer in a sense, but it combines both the brand-communications world I was in for so long with social sciences: how you create more inclusive spaces and elevate voices that aren’t often heard.
There’s a practical reason for wanting to do that as well: stories that are shaped by people tend to resonate with people.
Alisa:
Exactly—and it’s such exciting work. What’s also interesting is that, on paper, it doesn’t seem like a dramatically different thing. I think often people feel that when they’re called to meaningful, regenerative work it has to be a completely new start—that they have to re-skill, start from scratch. But most of us already have a wealth of experience, connections, and education.
The real shift is how you’re expressing that—who you’re doing it for and your relationship with it. You doing that kind of work for huge brands, where sustainability was a sticking-plaster, is totally different from doing it as a craft that allows genuine balance and integration with family life, where you choose who you work for and feel the contribution your work can make.
Clare:
Yeah, exactly. I suppose it’s about doing something on my own terms, for things I believe in, and using many of the same tools. Creative communications and branding can be powerful—I didn’t stop believing in the tools; I stopped believing in what they were being used for.
Most of my friends still work in that sector. They’re incredibly talented people. But I just couldn’t keep giving that level of creativity to things I didn’t believe in.
Alisa:
And that’s it—you haven’t rejected your skills, you’ve redirected them. That’s the shift.
Clare:
Yes. And what’s changed most is commitment. The difference between me now and when we first met is huge. I’m still in the early stages, but one thing that’s changed—the biggest thing—is that I’m committed to something.
That was the hardest part: getting started, finding the thing that felt right. Once I committed, there was a completely different energy. Now I have something to do, something to build.
It’s hard—you get rejections, it’s slow—but it feels more doable because I’m on the path.
Alisa:
Exactly. That was the huge change that happened: actually having something to commit to, and committing to yourself.
And you mentioned before that the Purposeful Income Path was helpful. That’s interesting because I created it toward the end of our coaching, and I shared it with you before almost anyone else. You found it useful, didn’t you?
Clare:
Yes, it really helped. Two things helped at that stage. One was the phrase you said to me one day that shifted everything—you said, “You can build a mini business.” That really changed how I saw it.
Because I’m not twenty; I can’t do it every second of the day. I’ve got three children. So I have to do it in these hours. It’s a mini business—it’s not the only thing in my life; it’s one element of it. That changed everything.
I stop at half past two and pick the kids up, and I don’t start again until the morning. And I look forward to starting again in the morning.
The Purposeful Income Path helped too, because it gave me a goal. I want to earn a certain amount by next March to pay for our holiday. It’s tangible—not ludicrous—but still ambitious, and it keeps me focused on Story Labs. Before, I was doing bits of freelance work and saying yes to anything. Now I just do this.
That reinforces the commitment.
Alisa:
Yes, that theme of commitment has been running through our whole conversation—committing to yourself, to the journey, to building something that will serve you for the long term, and then committing to your idea.
That’s where the Purposeful Income Path can be really helpful, because it’s so tempting to move to the next idea or to be influenced by what other people say. So many people I work with think, maybe I should just go back and have a job, or here’s a contract, maybe I should take it.
There’ll be times when that’s right, but at the heart of it you have to commit to what you’re building and take it one step at a time.
It’s lovely to hear that that was helpful for you—as well as the concept of creating a powerful mini business. I think of my business that way too, at a similar stage of life to you. It’s totally different from when I was twenty-five and gave everything to a wild idea for thirteen years. I’m not in that place anymore, but I still believe we can create powerful mini businesses that bring us life and bring life to those around us.
Clare:
Yes.
Alisa:
Oh, thank you, Clare. This has been such a lovely conversation. It was such a joy to work with you over those months, out in the woods, by the beach.
Clare:
I know! I miss it. But it’s good, like I said at the end—it’s good to take flight and not be there. I felt ready at the end. It was like, yes, this is it; I don’t need you anymore.
Alisa:
Then my work is done.