Episode #046 · Clara Artschwager
The Myth Of Feeling Ready
When you come from an academic family, "dating coach" definitely wasn't on the bingo card as a potential career. Even so, she's always been meant for it.
The "she" we're talking about is Clara Artschwager, a coach, writer, mother, former start-up marketer, and much more. And the conversations she's most interested in having today sound like...
What does the next half of life look like?
What do I want it to look like?
And how can I give myself aaaaaallll the space to not know yet?
We discuss the pressure many high-achieving women feel to prove themselves—to be smart enough, accomplished enough, and thoughtful enough to deserve the life they actually want.
From Marketing to Becoming a Dating and Relationship Coach
Clara can trace the instinct behind her current work all the way back to childhood. At eight years old, she was writing letters on a typewriter to imaginary employees, telling them how they could do a better job—and reassuring them that it was okay that they were struggling.
It took considerably longer to call herself a coach.
Clara spent the first 12 or 13 years of her career in marketing, branding, PR, communications, publishing, and startups. She developed an ability to understand what people needed to hear and feel in order to connect with an idea, product, or brand.
When she moved into coaching in 2018, she discovered that the same ability to spot patterns could be useful in a completely different way.
A mentor during her training warned her that she would probably see where a client needed to go immediately—“up the hill, around the corner, to the left, five degrees to the right”—and would have to resist dropping them directly into the solution.
“They have to live into it,” Clara explains.
Her job became guiding someone “brick by brick” into places where they could see themselves or their situation differently. For a person accustomed to knowing the answer and proving that she knew it, that required a very different relationship with her own expertise.
Taking Yourself Seriously During a Career Change
Calling herself a dating and relationship coach brought up another problem entirely: Clara was embarrassed by it.
She grew up in an academic family where rigorous schools and advanced degrees were valued. She jokes that you got a PhD in clinical psychology, worked at a university, wrote a book, and saw esteemed patients.
“You didn't become a coach.”
Clara knew the work was in her heart. She also worried that people would think she was “sleazy and trashy and a matchmaker and a bullshit fake therapist.” So she kept one foot in marketing.
Even after launching her website and working with coaching clients, she continued consulting. Some opportunities came to her; she pursued others. Marketing was work she already knew she could do and a reliable way to make money.
“Well, this sucks,” she remembers thinking. “I'm not going in either direction.”
Clara decided to give coaching a real attempt and hired a coach to work through the shame she carried around the profession and her fear of how other people would perceive her.
Within a month, her client load began growing. She made $40,000 coaching in 2020 and $200,000 in 2021.
Looking back, Clara can see how much energy she had been spending trying to establish that she was smart enough, credible enough, and different from the parts of the coaching industry she disliked. Even today, she catches the impulse to prove herself by pointing to the executives she works with or the longevity of her client relationships.
Taking her own work seriously required her to stop waiting for the title to sound impressive enough to everyone else.
Getting Fired From a Job You Probably Wouldn't Have Left
A decade earlier, Clara had experienced another career transition she hadn't entirely chosen.
At 28, following the death of her father and the end of a nearly seven-year relationship, she needed work that didn't require turning her personal life into content. She applied widely and landed at Self magazine.
There were glamorous parts of working at Condé Nast: free fitness classes, expensive beauty products arriving at the office, and the cachet of working for a major magazine in New York City. The actual job revolved heavily around clicks, traffic, and repackaging content.
After Clara's boss left, the magazine changed direction and brought in new leadership. Clara could see that her role was changing with it. She was a brand marketer working in a job that increasingly required skills in social media strategy and content creation that weren't her strengths.
Would she have left on her own? “Probably not.”
When the HR meeting finally appeared on her calendar, Clara knew what was coming. Her immediate response reveals something she understands much better about herself today: she took care of her boss through the firing.
“I had to make her okay.”
Clara appeared composed, but she carried significant shame afterward. She told very few people what had happened. Her mother even reframed the story for her: Clara hadn't been fired; she simply hadn't accepted other opportunities.
A decade later, Clara can say plainly that she wasn't meeting the expectations of the role as it had evolved. Within a week, she was consulting elsewhere at Condé Nast. The firing forced an ending she had been struggling to initiate herself.
What Happens When You're Good at Building Something From Nothing
Coaching has now become the longest job Clara has ever had. She's been doing it for seven years. And she still gets itchy.
“I can build something from nothing,” she says.
When Clara looks across her career, she can see that pattern everywhere. She has repeatedly entered businesses, roles, and projects during periods of growth or transition, helped build something, and eventually felt ready to move again.
At 40, she's less concerned about how other people categorize her. She spent her teens, 20s, and 30s weighed down by other people's opinions. These days, if someone wants to call her a matchmaker, she's fine with it.
Her attention is beginning to move elsewhere for a different reason.
Clara has already started reducing the number of discovery calls and client sessions available on her calendar. She continues to coach, host her podcast, write her newsletter, and work with longtime clients. She also admits she has “a few irons in the fire.”
One of those has been waiting for her for years. Literary agents and major publishers have approached Clara about writing a book. She knows she wants to write one. She also knows she's been hiding from it.
“I gotta do that damn thing.”
At 30, Clara describes herself as “reaching for myself.” At 40, she already knows how to get the accolades. She's more interested in figuring out which desires deserve her attention now.
What Does the Next Half of Life Look Like?
When I ask Clara for one unresolved question she's living inside of today, she answers: “What makes a good life?”
Eighteen months into motherhood, she's emerging from a period dominated by pregnancy, caring for a baby, working in the available spaces, moving, buying and selling a house, and managing the basic logistics of family life.
Now she feels able to pick her head up and look farther ahead.
“I'm staring down the barrel of, God willing, the next half. What does that look like?”
Clara is also nostalgic for earlier seasons—the one-bedroom apartment where the only mess was hers, mornings spent journaling with a bougie candle, dinners with friends, and really good yoga classes. She wouldn't choose to go backward, but she misses parts of who she was and how she lived then.
“I'm feeling a bit nostalgic these days,” she says.
And that's where we leave it.
Clara Artschwager
Clara Artschwager is a dating and relationships coach and writer, whose work has been featured in The Cut, Fox 5 NY, Cosmopolitan, Pure Wow, Well n’ Good, SHAPE, Mind Body Green, Elite Daily and more. She’s spent the last seven years working with high achieving women across their 20s, 30s, 40 and 50s, from set designers at Saturday Night Live to leadership at TikTok and founders of private equity firms, who’ve experienced tremendous professional success but have struggled in their personal relationships. Her work has been described as “Like doing 10 years of therapy in 60 minutes.” She specializes in helping women, from single and dating to a decade into marriage, understand how the very traits and characteristics that have led them to be successful, the golden child, the one who “can handle everything on her own,” are the very things driving the deterioration of her love life. Prior to her work as a coach, she specialized in brand marketing and communications. She has supported and led the marketing efforts for SELF, Condé Nast Traveler, General Mills, Shiseido, Peloton, the Meredith Corporation, M.M. Lafleur and more. She served as the VP of Marketing for Aaptiv (acquired by Pear Labs in 2021), the first audio-based fitness app, taking the company from a team of three to over 100 full-time employees and 20 million in revenue in less than two years. Clara holds a B.A. with honors in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University with a concentration in Women & Gender Studies. She received her life coaching training through the Coaches Training Institute.
