We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Clare Morin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Clare thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I took a risk last year, when I took a sabbatical and stepped away from my career for five months. Unlike regular sabbaticals, I didn’t have a job to return to. I was stepping into the unknown.
It was March 2024 and the sun was starting to warm the forests of Maine. I wrote to our marketing team at Unum, the employee benefits provider where I worked as a content strategist, and explained that I would be taking a few months off. My plan was to learn how to garden, to reawaken my writing practice, spend time getting to know generative AI, and volunteer with my local meditation center. In short, I was going to take “a pause.”
In many ways, this didn’t make sense. I was at the strongest point of my career; in a job where I had been flourishing for nearly five years. Our talented creative team had just won a Gartner Marketing and Communications Award for Innovation in Multichannel Customer Engagement. But deep within, I knew I needed a change. And I didn’t want to immediately step into another role. We had enough savings in the bank for me to take a few months off. So, I took the plunge.
A few days before my last day at work, someone from Unum reached out by email. I didn’t know them well, but they had heard I was leaving and wanted to wish me well. They also shared this quote from the French writer André Gide:
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore”
Gide’s words sum up everything vast and transformative about my sabbatical. I didn’t do anything spectacular during my five-month pause. I stayed at home, spent time learning how to garden, and built a much-needed exercise habit. I went for walks by the ocean. I had occasional moments of deep fear, wondering if I’d ever work again. But mainly, I allowed myself to start to regenerate. And it was life-changing.
The Roman poet Ovid once said: “Take rest, a field that has rested produces a beautiful crop.” By the end of that summer, a new role appeared for me, as if on schedule.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a writer, meditator, content marketing and PR consultant. I help organizations and individuals tell authentic, uplifting, and engaging stories across channels—to build community.
My sense of home stretches across three continents. I was born in Blackburn in northwest England. At the age of two, our family moved to Hong Kong. My Dad got a job as a civil servant, as an architect with the British colonial government, and my Mum was an elementary school teacher. My brother and I were raised in Hong Kong and did all our schooling there. I graduated from high school in 1996, the year before Hong Kong was handed back to mainland China. After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Leeds in England, I returned to Hong Kong for most of my 20s, where I worked as an arts writer for HK Magazine, Time Out Hong Kong and the South China Morning Post newspaper.
In 2009, after marrying an American, we moved to Maine. Here, I was a new immigrant. I didn’t know anyone and felt deep culture shock! Career-wise, I had to completely reinvent myself. I took my skills of interviewing artists and positioning them in the media and used this to become a book publicist. I worked with some of Maine’s most celebrated authors and a few powerful rising stars across the U.S., like the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. I also worked on freelance writing and book projects, such as writing four of the 16 chapters in the anthology, ‘Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan’. Then, eight years ago, I moved into corporate America. I took on roles as a content marketing strategist for tech and financial services firms.
Last fall, after my summer sabbatical, I joined a cool agency called Longfellow Communications. It’s based in the Old Port of Portland, Maine. It’s part time, which allows me time to also do publicity projects for artists and writers. This summer, for example, I am helping the remarkable Maine photographer Felice Boucher as she launches her memoir. Felice has stage four cancer and is a fellow Buddhist student and a friend, so I’m doing this purely for the love of it. It’s been inspiring to witness Felice moving through this journey as an artist; her impulse to create new bodies of work, even as she comes to the very end of her life. It’s been powerful to hear her insights into how precious and fleeting our life is.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Try to keep positive, happy relationships with everyone you come across and build bridges wherever you go. You never know when someone you know will move into a new role and think of you. Network, but try to do it in a light-hearted, giving-focused way. My Buddhist studies have taught me to keep cherishing others as my main intention when I engage in work.
Also, be active on social media. It’s a natural way for us to appear in other people’s worlds—and it naturally brings about work opportunities. I’m lucky as today all my clients come in via word-of-mouth, but I’m at that mid-career stage where I know a ton of people. If you’re starting out, be endlessly curious and be open to new opportunities. Pretty much every single job opportunity that comes your way will teach you something important. We’re living in a world where it’s not so much about having one solid, fixed career in one discipline. We need to be agile, to continuously reinvent ourselves. Keep benefiting others as your main intention, and you’ll have a great adventure.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I struggled with anxiety in my early 20s. I had early career success as a writer and art editor in Hong Kong—which in the early 2000s was an epicenter of the Asian media industry. It was an exciting time, and I landed some dream jobs. But I began to find the deadlines stressful, and I battled an inner beast of perfectionism. The bar I set myself was incredibly high. I wasn’t sure what to do with all of this, but had an inkling that the answer lay deep within myself.
One day, I found a local Buddhist meditation center—the Kadampa Meditation Center Hong Kong. I started to study teachings on Lamrim (Tibetan: stages of the path to enlightenment) and Lojong (Tibetan: mind training). These practices have been phenomenally powerful in helping me diffuse stress. For the past 20 years, I have continued to deeply study these teachings and put them into practice in every element of my life. I am not entirely stress free; it still rears up from time to time. But now I have the practices to know what to do. I attribute all my career resiliency to these teachings.
Buddha teaches us that the mind is incredibly powerful, that there can be tremendous freedom in learning how to shift how we view things. Eventually, we can learn to view the greatest challenges in our life as our greatest teachers.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claremorin/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claremorin/