About Clare van der Spuy

  Those words have been with me for a long time.

Not more successful. Not more productive. Not more impressive.

Simply more fully myself — and more awake to the life I am actually living.

My route here has not been particularly conventional.

Over more than 30 years, I have worked across accountancy, fashion, energy trading, aviation, property and coaching.

I’ve worked with numbers and people, businesses and organisations, pressure and performance. I’ve experienced very different professional worlds and seen first-hand how much of life refuses to fit neatly into the boxes we create for it.

For a long time, much of my work centred on performance, health, wellbeing and burnout.

I was interested in what helps people perform well without sacrificing themselves in the process.

My own experience of burnout made those questions personal as well as professional.

But over time, the questions became bigger.

Why do intelligent, capable people keep doing things they know aren’t working?

Why can we understand something intellectually and still struggle to behave differently?

How much of what we do is genuinely chosen — and how much comes from habit, expectation, old stories and rules we absorbed long ago?

How do we know what we actually think or want beneath all the noise?

And what helps us live and work in a way that feels more coherent with who we are?

Those questions gradually changed the way I worked.

 Today, I describe myself as a Thinking Partner.

Sometimes you don’t need another person telling you what to do.

You need somewhere you can think properly.

Somewhere you can say the thing you haven’t quite been able to say. Follow a thought without having to know where it is going. Question an assumption. Notice a contradiction. Change your mind. Sit with uncertainty. Laugh at yourself. Or finally acknowledge something you may already know.

That is the kind of space I try to create.

I listen carefully. I ask questions. I notice patterns and inconsistencies. I may challenge something that doesn’t quite add up or invite you to look at something from another direction.

But I don’t assume that I know what your answer should be.

The aim is not for me to become another voice in your head.

It is for you to hear your own more clearly.

 I am an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC), with training in health coaching, psychodynamics, Physical Intelligence and applied neuroscience. My work is also trauma-informed. 

That professional grounding matters to me.

So does everything that came before it.

More than three decades of working in different businesses and industries have given me experience of organisations, responsibility, uncertainty, pressure, relationships, change and the sometimes considerable gap between how things are supposed to work and how human beings actually work.

Life has taught me a fair amount too.

I don’t believe we can neatly separate the professional person from the rest of the human being.

Work affects life. Life affects work. Our bodies affect our thinking. Our relationships affect our choices. Our histories travel with us. And sometimes what appears to be a work problem isn’t really a work problem at all.

That is why my conversations are allowed to go where they need to go.

 Alongside my work as a Thinking Partner, I have been developing Clare Vie® — meaning clear, bright life.

Clare Vie grew from years of working with people, studying human behaviour and asking some fairly persistent questions about how we live.

Its first principle is:

The quality of your life will never consistently exceed the quality of your relationship with yourself.

Everything flows from there.

How you lead. How you love. How you work. How you care for your body. How you make decisions. How much peace you experience. How much of yourself you bring to the world.

At its heart is a very simple practice:

Stay Awake.

Pay attention.

Notice what you feel before you explain it away.

Hear your intuition before the noise.

Question inherited stories and assumptions.

Notice when you are reacting automatically rather than choosing consciously.

And keep returning to reality — including the parts that don’t fit the story you would prefer to tell yourself.

I don’t regard Clare Vie as a finished answer or a set of rules for how anyone should live.

It is a developing philosophy and practice concerned with a question that matters deeply to me:

How do we become more awake participants in our own lives?

 Of course, qualifications and professional experience only tell you so much about the person you might choose to work with.

My own path has been anything but straight.

Before coaching, I worked across accountancy, French fashion, physical energy trading, aviation and property. I’ve always been curious about different worlds, different people and how things work.

Outside work, I’ve sailed thousands of miles offshore, including across the Bay of Biscay in a Force 9 storm. And while I was working in energy trading, a male trader challenged me to come along to a Kyokushin karate class.

I’ve always found a challenge rather difficult to resist.

So I went.

I ended up training twice a week for four or so years, often as the only woman in the dojo!

I’m also a mother, and motherhood has given me a very personal perspective on aspiration.

My daughter had big aspirations of her own. Her sport took her overseas to the United States, where she competed in NCAA Division I field hockey while studying for a degree in Physics. I watched her leave home, enter a completely different world, pursue two very demanding things at the same time, encounter setbacks, make difficult choices and gradually work out what she wanted her own life to look like.

Being alongside that journey taught me something important.

Aspiration is deeply personal.

We can encourage another person, believe in them, challenge them and stand beside them. But ultimately, we cannot decide what a meaningful or successful life should look like for them. Their aspirations have to belong to them.

I think the same is true for all of us.

And my own life hasn’t always gone according to plan either.

I know what it is to be capable, responsible and very good at carrying on — until carrying on is no longer the answer. I’ve experienced burnout myself, and some of the most important changes in my life have begun not with knowing what to do next, but with becoming willing to question what I had previously taken for granted.

I’m naturally curious. I like evidence, but I’m equally interested in lived experience. I care about language and what we actually mean when we use it. I ask a lot of questions. I’m fascinated by people, patterns, relationships and the often rather large gap between what we think we ought to want and what we actually do.

I can take things seriously without taking myself too seriously. I appreciate good food, beautiful things, a decent conversation and the absurdity that seems to accompany being human.

I don’t have life figured out.

I’m not sure I would trust anyone who claimed they did.

What I do bring is more than thirty years of professional and life experience, rigorous training, considerable curiosity and a genuine interest in the person sitting opposite me.

Because ultimately, a Thinking Partnership is a very human thing.

Two people. One conversation. And enough space for you to hear yourself think.