Claire Williams
The Missing Piece of the Burnout Puzzle
CCO Summit 2024
This session was presented at the annual CCO Summit 2024
Here’s an all-too-common scenario: high-achieving leaders and professionals feel increasingly demotivated and unfulfilled by their old drives and dreams. What used to excite them has lost its luster, and they’re craving more meaning and fulfillment in both life and work. They feel stuck and disillusioned. They may suffer burnout symptoms and performance setbacks, allow their fear of the unknown to keep them mired in misery, trade one unsatisfying job for another, or find that their work-related despair is infecting their personal lives as well. What if the sense of dissatisfaction and disengagement they’re experiencing in their work isn’t burnout after all? What if, instead, it’s an invitation to something deeper and greater than they’ve ever experienced before? What if they’re not stalling out but growing in a powerful new way? In this session, you’ll learn how these experiences actually fit neatly into an adult development stage theory which psychologists have been using for decades, most commonly called “Vertical Development.” This mid-career angst is a common symptom of crossing over from one developmental stage to the next. For leaders, understanding how to navigate this shift can turn a season of burnout into a season of incredible transformation. This session will give you tools and techniques to apply with leaders so they can embrace this growth and find more fulfillment in work and life.
About Claire Williams
Claire Williams is an Executive Coach, Team Coach, Writer, and Speaker. Claire has trained and coached hundreds of leaders, from managers to the C-Suite, in dozens of organizations across five continents, including Target, Boeing, McDonalds, GE, United HealthCare, Hershey, and Post Consumer Brands. Leaders and organizations seek Claire out for her expertise in transformational development in the workplace, particularly her specialized approaches in Vertical Development, the Enneagram, and the Leadership Circle Profile. Claire publishes The Diving Board, a Substack newsletter for people pursuing meaningful work in a swirly world – people who want to develop themselves, lead consciously, and link their humanity to their job. She’s currently working towards publishing her first book. As a writer, Claire engages both the mind and the heart of her readers, inviting them into soulful explorations and experiments rooted in time-tested leadership research. She challenges leaders to do the hard work of inner work and equips them with the most powerful tools for the job. Claire refuses to choose between the language of business and the language of the human spirit, because both exist in the real world, and both will shape the world of the future. Claire lives in St. Paul, MN, with her husband Rob and 2 kids: Amos (9) and Mabel (7). She loves books, early mornings, ice cream shops, and avoiding household chores.