Claire Davis reached out to me on Facebook. She and her husband run an incredible business out of the UK and Spain called The Midlife Mentors. Let’s chat, she said, I want to know more about what you do.
And that says a lot about Claire. She is interested in other people. And she’s focussed on how she can help them as opposed to how she can compete with them or how she compares to them. It’s refreshing.
In society, she states, there is so much looking outside of ourselves at what everyone else is doing, because social media gives us a direct view into someone else’s life – and we think ‘I want that too’. We chase the quick fix but what we are chasing isn’t even real. It is just someone’s highlight reel. I want to be as authentic as I can be to show others that what they are comparing themselves to is not real. Everyone has their struggles.
Claire’s own struggle with her body image across multiple decades have sharpened her compassion for other women and men caught in the cycle of comparison. After being bullied at school, she battled an eating disorder as a teenager – limiting her nutritional intake allowed her to experience a level of control and became a way of expressing her emotion through her physicality. Her eating disorder challenged her through her twenties and into her thirties where she weaponised eating and her weight fluctuated two dress sizes either way.
Throughout her twenties, Claire tapped into every self help course she could lay her hands on in an attempt to heal her mind. She was fascinated with the law of attraction and manifestation and the challenge of rewiring her brain. And it mostly worked. But in her mid thirties after a short marriage to the wrong guy her weight ballooned, she was drinking too much and her doctor put her on anti-depressants.
I was so unhappy, she says. I was desperately seeking love and affection and a feeling of belonging. But this man could not give it to me. Only I could give that to me. One day I didn’t want to look in the mirror anymore – I didn’t want to see a bloated, unhappy body. But equally, I didn’t want to see a tiny, gaunt body. Either way, all I saw was pain. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t like myself. I was in a hole. And I needed to dig my way out. I wanted to see strength in that mirror. I wanted to feel strong. And to feel strong, to actually be strong, I needed to nourish myself. I needed to get my shit together.
Claire started exercising and eating well, and for the first time she did weight training. She became obsessed about her nutrition (not her diet) and how to honour her body and not starve or over indulge it. She became obsessed with how powerful she felt – her sleep improved, she came off the anti-depressants, she trained as a personal trainer and took the leap away from her safe day job to work every hour god sent to work in a gym and start her own business as a personal trainer. At the same time, she continued to train her mind on positivity, goal setting and self love.
I had only previously worked on my mindset, but now I was also working on my body and that was a mega revelation for me. To be my best self, I needed to integrate mind and body wellness. I felt brilliant and I shared that brilliance with my clients. And my clients – these women – started to blossom in front of my eyes. I made them believe in themselves. I gave myself and my clients back our self respect – and when you have self respect that is always something you can anchor on to.
Fast forward to today – Claire is telling me how she and her husband James reacted to Covid and its impact on their face to face, monthly retreats in Spain. They were agile and quickly pivoted their retreat based business and took their teachings online – creating The Midlife Method which they run along with their incredibly popular podcast: The Midlife Mentors.
Claire lights up when she talks about her passion teaching others about the power of embracing the junction between physical and mental wellbeing. Midlife Mentors focusses on sharing the authentic with their clients looking for a real fix as opposed to a quick fix. They work across 6 core pillars of mindset, movement, nutrition, hormones and metabolism, emotional wellbeing and accountability.
Coming out of Covid, Claire and James are living and loving in London. Claire dreams of having a little cottage in the Cotswolds and a house in Spain and has added them to her Life List. These days Claire is loving extending her personal growth and still battles with a little self-sabotage every now and then – I firmly believe that life gives us stuff when we can handle it. The trick is to ride the wave until it crashes and then come out the other side.
We end our chat where we started it, with Claire talking about her mentoring work with fledgling entrepreneurs. Giving back is key for Claire: I keep reminding myself that all of my dark moments are there to make me the person I need to be to help others. We are all doing it together. We are all equal. We are all connected.
