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.