For years, we did what many ambitious professionals do. We put the work first.
Our careers began together in acute healthcare before taking us in different directions. Renee went on to lead an acute clinical dietetics team through one of healthcare's most demanding periods, while Claire moved into business leadership, leading a team of 25 and helping grow a family business five-fold.
We were doing work we cared about, taking on more responsibility and achieving what we'd worked towards.
What we hadn't realised was how much of ourselves we were sacrificing to sustain it.
We became accustomed to operating under pressure. Running on adrenaline felt normal. Exhaustion felt normal. Looking after everyone and everything else before ourselves felt normal.
Until eventually, it wasn't sustainable anymore. We both had to step away from the pace we had been maintaining and, for the first time in years, create some space to recover.
It was only once we were out of that cycle that we could see the toll it had taken, not only on our health, but on how we were thinking, feeling and functioning.
So we started rebuilding from the foundations: sleep, nutrition, movement and stress regulation.
And as our health improved, so did something we hadn't expected: our capacity to perform.
We began asking bigger questions and seeing possibilities we simply hadn't had the capacity to see before.
Today, we run two businesses together, including our private clinic, Discover Your Health, and still have the energy and capacity to be present for our families and our lives outside work. We haven't achieved this by pushing harder. We've built the health that allows us to perform at this level sustainably.
We thought we needed to protect our health from work. We discovered our health was what made our best work possible.
