Why Taking The Time Out Can Move You Faster In Life With ClaireYvonne Naisbitt

People always want to move fast and move forward. However, as an award-winning mentor and leadership coach, ClaireYvonne Naisbitt shares with Tony Martignetti, sometimes taking the time out is the turning point we need in our lives to discover how we can actually move forward better. From having to leave her corporate job of 20 years to saying goodbye to a personal relationship, Claire inspires us on how she was able to take her life around, beginning from learning to ask herself and listening to what her desires are. Taking the time out to analyze what is happening helped her realize it was a new beginning and another chance to live the life she’s always wanted.  

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Why Taking The Time Out Can Move You Faster In Life With ClaireYvonne Naisbitt 

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, ClaireYvonne Naisbitt. She is a transition pro having changed her whole life in less than two years. She loves deep personal work so she can serve her clients powerfully and go wherever they need and want to go. ClaireYvonne thrives in the land of duality where we can have humor and be serious, be artists and scientists introverted and extroverted, celebrating and integrating our unique wholeness. Her clients hire her to bring clarity and help navigate their transitions. Be that a promotion, career change, relationship or switch out and move from being incredibly busy to slow down.

Her clients are passionate, driven and successful yet have a sense that there are something more out there. ClaireYvonne’s clients love being in her vibrant energy and uninspired transition into powerful leaders, live empowered lives and have successful and fulfilling careers. Before coaching, Claire was a Senior-Level Leader in the oil and gas industry for over twenty years, where she was responsible for leading teams to solve and deliver complex technical work. She understands the challenges of working in a fast-paced, male-dominated, demanding technical workplace and has always been drawn to getting the best out of people teams as team lead and through organizational design. She’s a Brit and is figuring out where she will end up living full-time. ClaireYvonne, I want to welcome you to the show.

Thank you, Tony. I’m excited to be here. I appreciate it.

There are so many things about your intro that I love because there’s this duality that we are always playing in the space of being the artist and the scientist, that introverted and extroverted. The world is made up of different aspects of this and not the world but each one of us has these aspects inside of us, which is cool.

We get encouraged to pigeonhole ourselves in one foot or the other being creative or being a scientist and we can’t be both. There’s something around celebrating and accessing all of us, which is then exciting, inspiring and gets us woken up.

I’m thrilled to have you on the show, as we can dig in and know what has brought you to where you are now, which still is a bit of transition, not even knowing where you are going to be living next, which is exciting, I’m sure but also at the same time can be nerve-racking.

It takes a lot of courage to keep moving forward.

I left my corporate job a few years ago. I left home for a month and have been away for a few months. I haven’t quite got back to my base in Scotland. It has been an incredible year and I have transitioned everything in a few years from leaving corporate, leaving my husband, changing where I live, my name, my hair and slowing down everything. It has been a lot of hard work to get to this new, happier, joyful version of me and taking a bit or lots of courage along the way to keep moving forward.

This is exactly why I’m excited to have you on because I know in that period, there are an element of a lot of change that you have navigated bravely and courageously. That’s why this show is going to be powerful. For your sake and the people reading, what we do on the show is help you to share how your gifts have been revealed through what’s called flashpoints. These are points in your story that have ignited your gifts into the world. As you are sharing your story, you can start wherever you like. We will stop along the way and see what’s showing up for themes. I encourage you to share before those months.

What came to mind going back a few years that when I was still in my corporate role, I was fed up. I was in a lot of physical pain. I had lots of headaches and my back was falling apart. I was unhappy. That would have put me at either 42 or 43 and I said to myself, “Is this it?” I’ve got my first coach because I felt I was at the end of a road and didn’t know where to turn. That was a flashpoint. Getting my first coach, which helped me calm down enough to have a chat with my boss the following day. The interview appraisal then got me my promotion to a Senior Level Leader.

About 1.5 years later, I was in the middle of then doing some coaching, training myself because I’ve got inspired by my coach. I thought, “This is interesting.” It was in the middle of that coach training I was like, “This is exciting. I could do this for a career. I don’t have to stay in oil and gas for twenty years and banging my head against a brick wall but be a square peg in a round hole, keep squeezing or shaving my corners off to fit in. I can be expansive.” I made the decision then that I was going to end my corporate role. Having done the same thing, it takes a lot of courage when you’ve got a great salary, pension and lifestyle to go, “I’m going to try. I’m going to do something different and be an entrepreneur and create my own business.” I took that. That was a flashpoint in the middle of that training.

Another flashpoint was when I met you a few years ago, in San Diego, when we were at the Rich Litvin Intensive meeting so many awesome people and starting to build the network that we are both still highly connected into part of. That helped me because that was after I had left my corporate job so that propelled me into my first year of operating as a sole trader and as a coach. That was exciting. That would be March and April 2019.

Another flashpoint was the same year but later on, the end of October 2019, when I had my first working time with Christopher Maher of True Body Intelligence which stripped out a load of stress and tension. At that point, the fear disappeared through that work. I lost the fear of being on my own and at the same time, I then went, “I’m not sure I need to be in my twenty-year relationship anymore with my husband, my partner.” I decided that I was going to end that relationship. That was quite pivotal as well. That was October 2019 and six months later, I had moved out and got lockdown like a lot of the world did in March, April 2020. My wheels fell off.

It wasn’t long but it was a low point of having created this network for 2020 that was going to support me in my separation to have all the events pulled from under me like everybody did but I was like, “How am I going to cope?” I had a couple of tearful wailing conversations down the telephone to a few individuals going, “I can’t cope.” I realized then I was exhausted. After twenty-plus years of running in the corporate and I ran straight into headlong Claire Stylist, I was Claire then rather than ClaireYvonne. I was like, “I will do this 150%.” It was April and May of 2020 when I went, “I have to have a break. I’m out of energy.” That was another flashpoint. I was like, “My impossible goal was to take only a month.”

Here I am months later. I have done some work and had some clients but mostly, I have been off for months and using my savings, traveling the world, meeting new people, having experiences, doing lots of deep work and it has been amazing. The whole months were a flashpoint in a way and it’s an extended one. I know the metaphors used a lot but I do feel like that caterpillar in its cocoon, I’m in the cocoon stage and I feel the butterfly that his nose is coming out of the cocoon. I know I’m a butterfly yet I don’t quite know how to one, get out of this cocoon or two, how to fly yet with this new body that I made and this new mental framework that I have evolved over 2020.

There’s something about this break you have taken that’s more of a reset and gives you a chance to say, “I needed to deprogram all the things that I have been programmed,” because a lot of the things that you accepted, your relationships, the way that you showed up to work and the way that the society sometimes it’s not you. Society has its way of making a show-up and doing things the way that we expect us to be. You said a male-dominated field. I’m sure you tried to fit in, in that world because that’s the way that it’s programmed to be.

When you took this reset, your mind had been cracked open already a little bit but now it gave you this chance to take all that out and say, “Who do I want to be now?” You’ve got this clean slate that creates a palette for you to paint your life from. I love the fact that you did this. It’s something that a lot more people should embrace the idea once you have had a successful career to find the ability, maybe not a few months, maybe it’s shorter but find some ways to release yourself.

It has been a complete blessing and I do feel incredibly grateful. I was fortunate. I don’t have any children because we were unable to have children so that wasn’t a happy time. As you can imagine, we went through various fertility rounds that weren’t successful in having children. It’s because I didn’t have children and I have been working in a corporate job that was well paid, I had savings that I could use and tap into to support me in this time.

I do feel grateful for that. I created that space for me as well in a way. It certainly took a lot of courage to take a break. What I perceived and the next thing was maybe a 1 or 3 months break to then keep going and realize that I still need it. I wasn’t ready. Even in January 2021, I wasn’t ready to start working again. It was in February 2021 when I was in Mexico and I was like, “Now I have the energy,” and I started to do some calls and connect with people and start to build things back.

I want to ask a question on the travels because I have always been a fan of traveling and seeing that it’s one of the most powerful ways to learn about the world. When you are in the mode that you were in, what did you discover about people in this journey that you were on the past few months that you didn’t quite understand or maybe didn’t allow yourself to understand before and during this period?

For me, it’s around this massive desire to be in control the whole time or fear of uncertainty. I know I’m being on my own. Normally when I have been traveling, it would be with my ex-husband. You are suddenly in this world of uncertainties, “Where am I going to stay in three days or a week?” You don’t know. It’s getting comfortable with that and the fact that you don’t know where the restaurants are or what the supermarkets look like.

It sounds basic things but when you are doing this week after a week or even find yourself driving a rental car in a strange country on strange roads has made me realized that one, I’m courageous and there aren’t many 47-year-old women that would do this on their own in Mexico, Croatia or Albania. The beautiful thing is I never felt unsafe in all of my travels, coming to the people side of things. There are always people around, yet you choose and you are sensible. I met some amazing people and had great times. A lot of the time, I was on my own. The big learning for me was to be on my own.

My learning was I didn’t need other people. It was almost like I could spend a week chatting with people in the supermarket and that would be it. I’m not chatting with them because they are speaking Croatian and I speak English. That was okay. That’s something a lot of us have learned in COVID in lockdown. We can survive and can be happier on our own. I almost took another step. I’m traveling on my own. That was beautiful to learn that it’s okay, to learn to trust that things work out. There are always options and also to be in the moment and the day and enjoy that day because you don’t know where you are going to be in a week.

There’s something about that that I would like to know because it’s about this duality where you are being comfortable with being alone, embracing that and enjoying that but at the same time, knowing that you have also found beautiful people who you have celebrated and loved connecting with. Being in the community is also important to you, too.

If you start to feel unhappy, how can you start to recreate yourself?

With technology these days, we can stay connected via Zoom. We are always on calls with friends or the groups that we are in. I never felt alone because there was always somebody I could have the Zoom call or wherever I was in the world. That was a massive gift as well. I did do some traveling when I was in my twenties like in Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. It’s much more common to do that when you are that age and you are much more flexible at not knowing where you are going to be staying. It was more challenging to do it as a grown-up woman on my own with having had life luxuries for twenty-plus years and living in one house for most of that suddenly, to be moving and moving.

I’m still not so, the nomadic life is one for me but I can certainly see a future where there’s one thing I have learned is that maybe I don’t need to be based in one location. Maybe I can live some of the years, let’s say spring and the autumn in Croatia, the summer in the UK and go over to Mexico to Baja for the winter and live in three different locations. How cool is that? That excites me. I’m going to manifest that somehow. Also, have coaching retreats around the world in these different locations. It’s like, “I’m going to be wintering in Baja, who wants to join me here?” In Croatia in the spring and have some back in the UK in August 2021. That’s what I’m looking to create for myself and others.

I want to get into some other parts of your story but there’s one thing I want to do before the travel element here, which is to say, what has been one experience that you will share that has profoundly touched you maybe some something that you have done that you felt that was interesting?

I will keep them short. One is listening to my body and knowing where I feel expansive. When I feel expansive, that’s what I need to be doing or where I need to be. When I’m in Croatia with the mountains at my back and the sea in front of me, I feel alive and home in my entire system, my entire body. I feel whole. There’s big learning there around feeling that expansive. The other is, for me, a relearning is the amazingness of nature, the planet and being in connection with it.

In Baja on the Pacific Coast, seeing the moonrise and moonset, the moon cycles, the sunrise and the sunset every day with wildlife and whales going by, it’s incredibly powerful, grounding and beautiful. Reconnecting with the fact that we are on this planet that is spinning and rotating and we are part of the massive universe and feeling in awe of all of it. Also, in awe of me, as a spirit in this human body and all of the universe and its scale. It’s crazy and incredible. We have got this one life. How can we live it and love it because it’s such a stunning gift?

The visual that you created in my mind, I’m seeing it and I’m like, “Take me.” I want to take you back a little bit. First of all, who was the child? Did you ever imagine you would be where you are now? What did you think you were going to be when you were a child? Did you have any expectations of what you wanted to be as a grown-up?

The truthful answer is I didn’t know. When I was a teenager, some people knew that I had no idea. Going back that bit further, though when I was five years old, I wanted first of all to be a ballerina, then a newsreader, a weather presenter. I thought I couldn’t do those things. There was something around performing. I forgot those memories. It’s 2020 when we asked everyone in the sourcing team together when we were asked what those dreams were and suddenly, I remembered those.

I am coming back to wanting to perform my poetry, wanting to share and get my voice, wanting to go on stage and tell my stories. It’s like with you here. It’s fascinating that I had forgotten that inner child’s desire in most of my life. It took me taking this time out to realize that this is something that I want to do and I’m less scared of doing it. I wouldn’t say I’m not scared but the fear was so great before that, I have completely forgotten it. I removed it from a place of possibility. I was like, “I hate being on stage. I can’t act.” It was so fixed in my mind. Whereas now I’m like, “Maybe I could. Maybe it’d be fun.”

It’s enough to excite, not enough that it paralyzes you.

I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was fortunate enough to go to Edinburgh University to study and I was originally doing Geography but I had to do additional subjects and I started studying Geology, which is what I ended up doing in oil and gas. I loved Geology. If we talk about finding the things that you love doing and I loved Geology. I switched to do a full Geology degree and that’s what I ended up getting a job in.

It was that expansiveness of finding that joy and passion in something that then doors open because you are doing the thing then. The university’s wanting you to do it and you were like, “Yes.” That was special. Even though I didn’t know 2 or 3 years previous that’s what I did want to do, to find that was real, “I have found my calling.” The same thing happened years later when I discovered coating. It was that same feeling of excitement and expansion.

It’s interesting because there’s an element of when we get stuck in these ruts but it starts with good intentions. You start with this element of, “I’m going to follow this instinct of this thing that I like.” At some point, twenty years go by and you were in this field and you were like, “I’m okay.”

We all transition and change in our lives. There’s a lovely book called The 100-Year Life and that is about how we can recreate ourselves, how we can use our recreational time to recreate our lives instead of having one career. Maybe we will have 2, 3, 4 careers and we will transition from one to the other and that’s cool because what we tend to learn at university, school or college won’t necessarily see us through in the entirety of our career until we retire. Partly because we are living longer and we are going to be retiring older. I have loved that as a concept. If you start to feel either unhappy or have itchy feet how can you start to recreate yourself in your recreational time? You might not know but you start to dabble. Maybe you use your evenings, weekends, holidays or vacation time to try out other options and something might suddenly light you up.

There’s an element of that that also leads to this element of what you do in that time can also change your perspective at what you do in your day job and what you do in your existing pursuit.

If you light yourself up in one area of your life, chances are you are going to stuff and other areas of your life as well.

Speaking of lighting people up, let’s talk more about your poetry. What happened there? You discover that again or you discovered that you had this ability. I’m sure at first you started writing and you were, like, “I don’t know if this is any good.” Tell us more about how this came to be.

Talk about labels but I believed I was not creative. I hated English at school. Hate is probably too strong of a word. I thought I was rubbish English at school. I wasn’t artistic so I had labeled myself as these things. Talk about listening for signs. A good friend of mine writes poetry and my dad started sharing that he had written some poetry. I had never written a poem in my life. I never studied it. It never studied other poets either. It was my first week in Croatia back in September of 2020 when I had a little bit of space.

We got this one life; how can we live and love it? Because it’s just an incredible gift.

I suddenly started writing these little limericks but limericks have quite a set structure to them. I’ve got onto the Island of Vis, which is this beautiful island, which is a UNESCO site. Suddenly, this poem came out. I sat on my own in a cafe outside and this poem flowed out of me. Pen on paper I had written a poem. It’s carried on from there. When I’m in nature, I find it grounding. It helps when I’m outside and have peace. Topics come or when I’m waking up in the morning, I may have an idea or a title of a poem and the poem will flow. I don’t know how many I have written now. I have come up to about 40 in 6 or 7 months. I love it.

I don’t follow any strict rules or any rules. I like mine to rhyme but they don’t have to completely rhyme. They have their own form because I have never learned the rules so I don’t have to follow them because I don’t know what they are. I love it because I try to bring a bit of humor but talk about topics or write about topics that are here at the forefront. I have come back to the UK and I have had this underlying sense of, “Where is home? What is home? Home sweet home. Home is where you lay your hat.” These phrases are going around my head. I sat at my mom’s house at the back of her house overlooking fields and that poem flowed out. There’s something around space permission to have a bit of a play. It turns out that it has been a joy.

That’s the lesson that a lot of people need to know because we label ourselves so easily to say, “We are not creative. We are not this or that.” What happens if we play, create something and see what happens. If you give yourself the freedom to see what flows out, don’t worry about the rules. It’s not like you are out there to create some book of poems that are going to appeal to prize-winning poems. I don’t know if that’s even possible but looking to create something that’s going to be a winning poem. You are creating something for yourself.

You don’t even have to share it with anybody. The interesting thing is as I have started to share, some of them have gotten excited about it and emotional. I’m like, “I wasn’t expecting that.” That has been joyful. I have had an opportunity to perform three of them when I was in Mexico. I’ve got a poetry page on Facebook that I put up homes on and record them. I don’t know about you but when I read a poem, I can’t get the flow but when I hear someone read it, it’s much easier. I always try and record them in the place that I wrote them then the energy of that poem comes through in the reading and the writing. The fascinating thing is, if I don’t finish it, where I started, it typically doesn’t get finished. I have to make sure that I complete the poem before I leave. I’ve got a few unfinished poems sitting out there.

I want to come to this place where we allow you to share. We look back at the past, the totality of your journey to getting where you are now. Honestly, your journey is far from over like all of us were still always evolving. What have you learned that you want to share? What is your message at this point?

For me, there are two and they were linked. It’s time to get out of our heads and connect with our bodies. When you are taught at school and culturally in the West that the brain and the mental intelligence is king and overrules everything yet, there’s the equivalent intelligence in our bodies, we don’t stop connecting with it. It includes connecting with our emotions, which is scary. I get that and it has been difficult to connect with joy and fulfillment if we are not prepared to connect with some of the other fears, too. Also, our bodies have lots of wisdom. Wisdom as to simple things, whether to turn left or right or what to eat for dinner. How many of us override the signal to go to sleep or the signal that, “I probably shouldn’t have that drink or eat that meat.”

We override what our body is saying to us. “I’ve got a backache. My knee hurts so maybe I shouldn’t run.” We push through all these signals we get from our bodies, which builds up over the years because it is over years. We do this for decades. We wonder as adults in our age, why our bodies fall apart. The reason is, we have not been listening. Not only that but the signs in our bodies are also subtle but they tell us where to go in life. They will tell us who to marry or not marry. They will tell us what job to do or not to do but we are not listening. 

One of the key things I have learned is to use the metaphor of the amount of information we have coming into the world that we live in. It’s almost like a concert or a live band going on. There’s this volume of information and that’s loud. The body signal is more like an internal tune or melody. We then need to create space where we can start to reconnect with that inner melody because that’s our unique melody. One way to do that is to get into nature because it’s harder. In nature, it’s quiet, peaceful and it grounds us. We are less likely to get on our phones. We are more likely to sit, pause, look at the view or smell the roses and breathe. In that space, we might be able to start to hear our own melody.

That is such a great sentiment. For me, I can resonate with that. I love getting out, getting away from the desk and getting into this place where you can connect with nature and it does make a big difference. We are shifting gears. One last question for you. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

That’s a great segue because that metaphor came from a podcast that I listened to with a guy called Boyd Varty, who has written a book called The Lion Trucker’s Guide to Life and it’s wonderful and I love it. He used that as a metaphor or in a podcast. Maybe it was all Aubrey Marcus who was interviewing him. All credit goes to them for that metaphor and his book, The Lion Trucker’s Guide to Life. It’s about when they are tracking animals not to hunt them but to bring tourists to them. When they set off, they don’t know where they are going. They know they have a sense of where they are going, they have some dead ends, they have some miss turns and there are some dangers along the way. That’s what life is like.

The book is a metaphor for life and there are some beautiful gems and wisdom in there. I’ve got many but my other top favorite has to be The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz because, for me, The Four Agreements to be impeccable with our words is incredible. Don’t take things personally. It was the first time when I read that I was like, “I get it. How to find our inner diamond?” It’s the smoke that’s covered. It means the cultural imprint of so many gems in that book as well.

First of all, that’s brilliant because the first book, I’m going to go by that. I will be getting that and Don Miguel. That book is so brilliant because there’s an element of simplicity in the message that we ignore sometimes. When we hear that it’s like, “That’s simple but why have we not heard that?” Once you hear it, you were like, “Yes.” Integrate. Make that one of your life. It changes everything. I can’t thank you enough for bringing yourself fully into this conversation and sharing your story and your amazing insights. Thank you.

We need to be comfortable with being alone and embrace that and enjoy that.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Tony. I appreciate it.

Where can people find out more about you if they wanted to reach out?

I have posted quite a lot of videos in the last couple of years on LinkedIn. That profile is up-to-date. I have started using Facebook quite a lot. I have used it for personal stuff but I’m now transitioning that into more thoughts, ideas, concepts and stuff so and it’s ClaireYvonne Naisbitt both on Facebook and on LinkedIn. I do have a website that could do with some updating.

I’m sure people can be anxious to read some of your poems. I’m sure they will go to Facebook and check that out. Thank you for coming to the show. Thank you to readers for coming on the journey with us. I know you are leaving inspired and connected to the ground and want to get outside. It’s beautiful.

Thank you, Tony. Cheers.

Cheers. 

Important links: 

• ClaireYvonne Naisbitt 
• Rich Litvin Intensive 
• True Body Intelligence 
• The 100 Year Life 
• Facebook - ClaireYvonne Naisbitt 
• The Lion Trucker’s Guide to Life 
• Aubrey Marcus  Past Episode Aubrey Marcus  
• The Four Agreements 
• ClaireYvonne Naisbitt - LinkedIn 

About ClaireYvonne Naisbitt 

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