We usually think of stress as coming from the circumstances that surround us: busy jobs, busy lives, difficult bosses or clients. But what if stress has another origin? What if it comes from the thinking we have in any given situation?

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Clare Downham is the dedicated mentor you need on your unique journey to unlock your innate potential and cultivate a thriving business aligned with your true purpose. As a certified ILM Success Mentor, she specialises in guiding emerging and established female entrepreneurs to embrace their innate mindfulness and harness it as a powerful tool for success.

With a deep understanding of the inside-out nature of our human experience, Clare expertly navigates the complexities of the entrepreneurial journey, helping women to silence the inner critic, dissolve self-doubt and cultivate a strong sense of intuition and self-trust.

You can find Clare Downham at ClareDownham.com and on Insight Timer at claredownham.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

• On what happens when we ignore warning signs from our bodies





• The false messages business owners receive about having to be ‘on’ and ‘up’ all the time





• How motivation ebbs and flows naturally and there’s nothing wrong when we’re at a low ebb





• On the cyclical nature of levels of personal energy





• How some of our best ideas come during down or quiet times





• How we believe we need to be busy all the time and that resting is ‘lazy’





• How we so often try to be in a different feeling state than the one we’re naturally in





• On overwhelm and its one cause





• How being in the present moment starves stress of the oxygen it needs

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Insight Timer

Transcript of Interview with Clare Downham

Alexandra: Clare Downham, welcome to Unbroken.

Clare: Hello. Lovely to be here.

Alexandra: Oh, my pleasure. It’s lovely to see you. 

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the Three Principles.

Clare: I was a primary school head teacher. So our primary school in the UK is aged three to 11. I was in primary education for 20 years. And the last five or so I was a head teacher to two different schools. And I became very stressed, although I didn’t know I was stressed at all, I didn’t have a clue. 

I knew there were things wrong with me. But I thought those things were what was wrong with me rather than stress as the underlying cause. One day I went into work, fully intending to start my working day and I took one look at my computer. And it was like, it was like I was frozen. It was like, my body just finally went, “No, no more, let’s go, let’s leave.” 

I literally did walk out of work.

And I never went back in the end. Didn’t know I wasn’t going to go back. I thought it was going to have a nap, and have a little rest for a couple of weeks and then go back. But that’s not what happened. 

I was initially diagnosed with depression, because I was burnt out. And it looks very similar. Because all your motivation is gone. You can’t get out of bed, you can’t really do anything. But all the way through they were saying it was depression, I kept thinking I don’t feel depressed, I’m not really in a low mood, I’ve just got no energy, it was like it had been syringed out of me. 

It was a messy year. I didn’t work for a year, I was off sick for a year. And through a vast part of that it was all depression, depression, it’s depression. So obviously I was taking tablets, I was trying all sorts of things to cure myself with depression. And it was only really much later on in that journey that I realized that I burnt out and realized actually how stressed I’d been and how, as I learned about stress, how my body had been screaming the warning signs at me. But I had just ignored them or not known they were there. 

I didn’t deliberately ignore them, I just didn’t know they were there. I didn’t know that’s what they were telling me. So a year went by, and eventually my governing body and the people I was working for needed to know when I was going to come back. And I just didn’t know. I couldn’t give them an answer because I was still not brilliant. And so in the end, I had to resign. 

I resigned on the first of April. April fool. I think it’s quite funny that I resigned the first of April, and then didn’t know what I was going to do. Obviously at that point, apart from just, it felt like a massive, I actually got a lot better once that weight had been almost like my thinking. Now I know my thinking about going back to work was really not helping my recovery. So I didn’t know what I was going to do. 

Then I got a random email 10 days afterwards which invited me to train to be a hypnotherapist.

This is in 2016 I resigned. And so I thought, well, I’m interested in that  thing. I had had a bit of hypnotherapy, and it helped a bit. And I thought, You know what, I’m going to go and I’m going to go and do hypnotherapy. So that’s what I did. Not really with the intention of starting a business just, well, it’s something to do you know, something to learn, something new, I’m always interested in learning new things. And it was only like partway through the course. Well, near the end of the course, when they started to say they started talking about clients, they started talking about business, started talking about marketing, Facebook, all these things and only think about in terms of business. 

It seemed I was starting a business completely by accident. That’s my first accidental business. I didn’t say it was a first accidental business. So I started this business and I guess it was probably about the autumn of 2016 when I started going networking and things like that. I started to go to these networking events where they would have somebody do a little 20 minute presentation. And a lot of them were  self development and there was a lot of messaging around, “You have to have all these big goals and you’ve got to have a plan. You got to have like a 12 week year plan, you got to have a three year massive or a five year plan and you’ve got to stick to these plans.” She was scheduling your day and there was all this stuff about time management about managing tasks. 

What I  picked up from that, and wrongly held maybe, the business world seems to think this is right was that motivation wise I was supposed to be a straight line.

Never fluctuating, never changing, just be motivated all the time supposed to get up every day and just smash through everything, and hustle and if I didn’t do that I was going to be a failure as a business owner. 

As a result of that, I get into all these different self development things. So I’m reading books and listen to podcasts, I’m going on endless courses. And then I’m doing all the therapeutic look into the past. What’s wrong with Clare? When did she become broken? Was it as a child and those sorts of things? Counseling more, obviously, that was a hypnotherapist plenty hypnotherapist I could tap into, I was just trying so hard. Oh, Miracle Morning, every day, get up, do this  ritual in order to make yourself be okay. 

That went on for about three and a half years. Now when I say that to a lot of people to go, Oh, God, I was like, for 20 years or whatever. So actually, I think three and a half years, I was very fortunate. It was only three and a half years I was like that. Then in January 2020 I can only say a miracle happened really. And again, I don’t know miracles, accidents, luck, whatever you want to call it. So a friend of mine, Peter, had just finished his training with Michael Neill. He had just done the Super Coach Academy. And he just put a post on Facebook saying, I just need some people to sort of practice on to finish my qualification off. And I was like, Oh, you can fix me then. Come on, put my hand up. Like, come on. Let me come. 

I went to his office. He doesn’t live far from me. I cried through the entire first session.

I can’t even remember what he said to me. Only I remember him drawing a stick person. We’d like a lot of squiggles above its head. And I’ve seen Michael Neill and other teachers draw that picture since. I remember that but I don’t remember much else other than I cried and cried and cried. There was so much frustration that I’d done all this stuff. I’ve done everything the blinking gurus have told me to do and I still wasn’t motivated all the time. 

That was the starting point. I had some coaching with him. I then started to really listen to Michael Neill’s stuff first of all, I guess. He was my route in. Then lockdown came along. And my in person hypnotherapy business went poof.