About Clare van der Spuy

 “I Aspire to be More” has been my personal motto for as long as I can remember.

For many years, I probably understood “more” in the way many of us do: more achievement, more progress, more capability, more success.

I understand it differently now.

Aspiration, for me, is less about continually adding more and more about direction.

Who am I becoming?

What kind of life am I creating?

Is the way I am participating in my life taking me towards — or away from — what really matters?

Those questions sit at the heart of my work today.

 I have more than 30 years of professional and life experience, across worlds as varied as accountancy practice, French couture fashion, physical energy trading, aviation and property.

I've worked in demanding environments, run businesses, led people and experienced the pressure, uncertainty and responsibility that come with professional life.

But work is only one part of a life.

I am also a wife and a mother. I've experienced marriage, parenthood and all the adjustment that comes as a family grows and changes. I've supported a high-achieving daughter through competitive sport and education, including the enormous step of leaving home to study and play Division I field hockey at university in America.

Being alongside someone you love as they discover who they are and what they are capable of has taught me a great deal about aspiration too: you can support, encourage and create conditions, but ultimately another person's life is theirs to participate in.

My own life has included adventure and challenge as well. I've sailed thousands of offshore miles, trained in Kyokushin karate and repeatedly found myself drawn to experiences that test what I think I know about myself.

And I've experienced what happens when the way we are living stops working.

Earlier in my career, I pushed myself relentlessly. I was very good at carrying on.

Until I wasn't.

Burnout became an important interruption in my own life. It led me into natural health, then coaching, and eventually into a much broader inquiry into how human beings think, behave, make choices and participate in their lives.

Over time, my questions changed.

I became less interested in simply asking:

How can we perform better?

and increasingly interested in asking:

How do we live, work and participate well?

That inquiry is no longer separate from the way I live my own life.

It has grown out of work, relationships, parenthood, challenge, failure, achievement, change and the ordinary business of being human.

And it continues to shape both my work and my life.

 Clare Vie means clear, bright life.

It is the name I have given to the developing philosophy that now informs my work. 

At its heart is a belief that the quality of our lives is profoundly influenced by the quality of the relationships we have — with ourselves, with other people, with the world around us and with the reality of our circumstances.

And those relationships are not static.

We have histories. We develop patterns. Our circumstances change. We make choices. We influence and are influenced by the systems of which we are part.

We are always, in some way, becoming.

Clare Vie is my continuing exploration of what it means to remain awake to that process and to participate in it consciously.

Not perfectly.

Consciously.

 I am an ICF-accredited Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and a Registered Health Coach.

Those professional foundations matter to me.

But qualifications alone don't make a thinking partner.

I bring decades of professional experience, ongoing study, observation, curiosity and lived experience to my work.

I notice patterns.

I ask questions.

I am comfortable with complexity and with not immediately knowing the answer.

I will challenge you when I think challenge is useful, offer an observation when I notice something important, and give you space when what is needed is simply somewhere to think.

I don't assume you are broken.

I don't arrive with a predetermined version of who you should become.

And I don't believe that every difficult human experience needs to be turned into a problem to solve.

Sometimes we need to understand what is actually happening before deciding what, if anything, needs to change.

 We live in an extraordinary time.

Information, advice and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence are available to us almost instantly.

I use and value those tools myself.

But information is not the same as knowing yourself.

And generating an answer is not the same as living with the consequences of a choice.

My work is deliberately human.

It happens in relationship — through conversation, attention, curiosity, judgement, challenge, humour, silence and the things one human being sometimes notices in the presence of another.

I don't need to have your answers.

I want to help you hear your own more clearly.