Welcome to your brand amplified, the podcast where we interview marketers, publicists, and

brands to learn their stories, what makes them tick, and tips and tricks that make a

difference. Welcome back to another episode and I am very excited to have Claire Gallagher on the show today, Claire Creative.

You are a strategy coach that helps solo coaches and creative show up online and we were just talking about a little thing that you use to see if you're having success which I want to get to in a little bit but I want to get to in a little bit, but I want to have you talk more about your story and how you got into what you do now because I know as entrepreneurs and women and mothers and all of the things ourselves, you know, often we have pretty interesting roads that we've woven together.

There's always a story when there's somebody who works for themselves. There's some

epiphany moment or rock bottom moment that inspires change. Mine wasn't so dramatic. I had my boy, I had my son and that kind of triggered the whole thing.

Should I just get into the whole backstory? Are we going straight into it? Let's go. Okay, so way

back many a year ago I met a lovely Frenchman on a dance floor in Dublin and decided I must learn French.

So we moved to Paris in inverted commas for a year and that was 13 years ago and we're still in France so the jigg is up I guess we're staying and

when we moved Paris and the energy of the city I I had always wanted to work in the art world. So I had the opportunity to work as a

digital projects manager for a gallery in the center of Paris, doing the fairs, doing the exhibitions exhibitions and everything and just by getting into that network I was able I met so many people who needed websites

So that it became it came a point where that became feasible for me to step into that as a full-time thing to be completely independent.

I had always kind of freelance graphic design is a very easy thing to freelance in so even before moving to Paris

I had travelled with that to London and Melbourne and various other places around the world.

So travel and graphic design go very well together.

But it was when I had my boy, my first child, I realized that I needed the kind of the flexibility and I wanted to kind of have my have agency on my own schedule and really be able to do my own thing with my time and not have to ask permission to leave to go somewhere as

sometimes happens in agency work. So fast forward a couple of years into having a little baby and working all the time

saying everything that came my way building word WordPress websites with a baby on one arm and a mouse in the other hand.

And a moment came when I thought this is a little bit crazy here, I'm burning myself out because

I was doing a lot of work, like really work really saying yes to absolutely everything and saying no to a lot of stuff in my personal life.

Yeah, and that's I feel like that's the thing that we get into.

We think that being an offer was going to free up our time.

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