Claire Rogers

Many people put up with unhappiness or dissatisfaction with the way things are due to a sense of duty, guilt, fear or financial obligation and are afraid to challenge the status quo. And, when people are stuck in a rut, it usually takes a major event to jolt them out “sleepwalking” through their life.

Two such major events happened to Claire Rogers that woke her up and changed her life forever.

The first was surviving an encounter with a 600lb angry grizzly bear in the Rocky Mountains and the second was when a month later, Claire found herself at home, curled up on her bathroom floor suffering from a panic attack. The impacts of modern-day work culture had taken its toll on her in the form of:

Insomnia. Being in autopilot mode. Sleepwalking through life. Always being “on”. Email & screen addiction. Anxiety. Depression. Burnout.

At the time, she was a Director at an American Fortune 100 company responsible for successfully managing a team of global account managers with a $3 billion portfolio. Like many individuals in today’s society, she operated in a global environment accommodating multiple time zones, which led her to ‘always being on’ – meaning being contactable 24/7. Furthermore, constant re-structuring equated to increased working hours and unsustainable workloads, which saw her go from being an ambitious perfectionist and a high performer to becoming a highly stressed, burned out, overworked leader.

That first panic attack led to further panic attacks, which eventually led her to sink into her own private world of hell – chronic fear, anxiety, and depression, which lasted 18 months - a disturbing dark night of the soul, which steered her to explore not only how to recover her mental health but also to search for the meaning and purpose of life.

In Claire’s speeches, she combines the lessons she gained from her personal struggles and her twenty-year corporate experience, alongside a unique scientific understanding of happiness and creating a culture of health gained from her studies with UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School.

She energises, empowers, inspires and raises her audiences to their highest level of personal and professional growth – because it shouldn’t take a heart attack, bankruptcy, loss or an encounter with an angry grizzly bear for people to decide to change their life.

She challenges people to challenge the status quo.

Claire Rogers specialises in mindset, wellbeing and personal empowerment. With her individual clients, she coaches them to rise to their highest level of personal and professional growth by creating healthy, purposeful lives. She does this by aiding her clients to re-discover their passions and develop healthy habits and empowering beliefs.

With her corporate clients, she trains and speaks on corporate wellness to support, improve and enhance employee wellbeing, talent retention, productivity and employee engagement. She is passionate about driving business strategies and ensuring results while also maintaining employee health and wellness.

Claire has as an honour’s Diploma in Advanced Travel and Tourism from the Canadian Travel College. She also holds a professional certificate from the University of California, Berkeley on The Science of Happiness at Work as well as a certificate from Harvard on Improving Business Through A Culture of Health. Claire has spoken at conferences sponsored by KPMG, Shell, LNG Canada, Encana, and Royal Bank of Canada amongst others.

Claire was born in the UK, raised in Canada and has lived in and travelled to 60+ countries. At the age of 18, Claire became a professional model and lived in Japan and Australasia for five years. At 23 she returned to her hometown of Vancouver, Canada where she attended college and earned a diploma in Travel and Tourism. For the next 20 years, Claire held senior global Director roles within the Travel Industry and Financial Services Industry, where she developed an expertise in building diverse, high performing sales teams across multiple regions.

The business and leadership skills she holds today she owes to the experience she gained in various management roles throughout her career. While working in these positions, her extensive responsibilities included sound decision making, managing complex negotiations, stimulating her teams to go beyond their annual objectives, and driving growth for the organisations she worked for. Having these responsibilities and more is what has enabled Claire to understand business on an operational and strategic development level. She understands the basics as well as complex core ideas of business growth, which she now utilises in her coaching & consulting practice.

Prior to forming her company, iTopia Coaching & Consulting, Claire was a Director at an American Fortune 100 company where she was responsible for the successful management of a team of global account managers with a portfolio of $3 billion.

Recognising her passion to inspire and empower others, Claire studied coaching for two years while still employed in the corporate world. Upon completion of her studies, she resigned from corporate life and founded iTopia. She created the name iTopia by playing on the words “individual” and “utopia” because she passionately believes everyone should be working towards and living their own version of utopia.