About
Dr Clare Allen
The long way home.
I spent thirty years at the top of organisations before I realised I had spent most of it performing. This is the story of how I stopped, and what I do now with what I learned.
Identity is everything when it comes to accelerating your career.
Where I started.
I grew up in a council estate in Wales, where my parents casually mentioned that I wasn't bright enough. This comment lingered with me, influencing my experiences for years, often without my realisation. Unconsciously, I made it my mission to prove them wrong. By my early twenties, I was leading organizations, and by 29, I had become a CEO. Over the next three decades, I led four organisations through various challenges, managing nearly three billion dollars and overseeing hundreds of employees. My leadership earned my organizations prestigious awards, and I received accolades like the Telstra Businesswoman of the Year for significantly boosting client numbers, as well as a doctorate and master's degree. Yet, despite these achievements, I felt like a successful robot, performing without joy, constrained by the expectations of others.
The day I stopped.
It took an eleven-day hospital stay for me to see it clearly. On day seven I asked myself, very simply: if these were my last few hours, what would I actually want to do?
The answer had nothing to do with the next board seat.
I did not leave executive life on the spot. The unwinding took years. But something irreversible happened in that hospital bed: I saw, for the first time in my adult life, the cost of what I had built. And I understood that success without joy is not success. It is a very expensive performance, one I had been paying the bill for, alone.
"Success without joy is not success.
It is a very expensive performance."
What I do now.
I coach senior leaders who are living the version of the life I used to live. CEOs, directors, boards, technically competent, paid well, respected, and quietly burning out inside a role that has stopped fitting them.
My work with them is called Identity Anchoring. It is a structured, data-informed process that helps a leader anchor who they actually are, so it shows up consistently in how they think, decide and lead. When that anchor goes in, almost everything else becomes easier. Confidence stops leaking. Decisions get cleaner. Teams follow more willingly, because there is a real person at the front.
I am not a motivational coach. I am not a lifestyle designer. I am a former CEO who did the work on herself, and now does it with the people she used to sit next to on boards.
What I believe now.
Success without joy is not success.
It is a performance, and it is unsustainable. The people who tell you otherwise are usually selling you the next thing.
You are paid for your skill, not your hours.
The assumption that a big salary entitles the organisation to own your soul is a false contract. It was written by people who wanted you to agree to it.
Who you are is who you think you are.
Identity is not a fixed inheritance. It is chosen, or it is inherited by default. The work of a serious leader is to choose.
Your purpose will find you.
Not the other way round. Most of the forcing we do, of careers, of decisions, of outcomes, is a symptom of not listening.
Developing others is the long game.
It is also the only leadership work that matters in the end. Everything else is housekeeping.
Credentials, briefly.
EXECUTIVE
CEO, Port Macquarie–Hastings Council (2021–2025). CEO, Minda Inc (2019–2020). CEO, VisAbility / Guide Dogs WA & TAS (2012–2019). CEO, Community First International (2004–2011).
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ACADEMIC
Doctor of Business Administration, University of Western Australia (2012). Master of Business Leadership, Curtin University (2000). Graduate, Australian Institute of Company Directors (2009).
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RECOGNITION
AIM Pinnacle People and Culture (2019). HESTA Business Excellencer (2018). CCI, Enterprising Woman of the Year (2009). Winner Telstra Businesswoman of the Year, WA (2007). Ten further awards across three decades.
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TODAY
Founder, Dr Clare Allen Consultancy (Words That Express Pty Ltd). Executive coach, keynote speaker, author.
Three books.
Sacred Heart (2014)
Part memoir, part reflection. The story of the successful robot and the eleven-day hospital bed. Written when I could finally see what the previous twenty years had actually cost me.
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Wings of Purpose (2018)
A leadership fable. It came to me in a dream, almost in one piece, and I wrote it down. It follows Moment, a high-ranking eagle, and Fearful, the companion she cannot leave behind. It is about the difference between the self you inherit and the self you choose. I think it is the truest thing I have written.
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How to Stop People Stealing Your Joy (2020)
The practical companion to Sacred Heart. If the first book named the problem, this one builds the map out of it, through awareness, acknowledgement, and advancement.
A note of eagles
People sometimes ask why eagles. There is a long answer and a short one. The short one is that I have always loved them , their vision, their capacity, the way they rise above the storm rather than through it. The long answer is that a fable about eagles turned out to be the only container large enough to hold what I needed to say about leadership.
If that interests you, the book is where it lives. If it does not, the coaching work is translated into ordinary language and does not require you to care about birds.