What Is A Good Life? #150
Moving From Fear To Love with Claire Goodey
On the 150th episode of What is a Good Life?, I welcome Claire Goodey. Claire is an artist, writer, and humanistic psychotherapist. After a decade in private practice—alongside a new autism diagnosis, perimenopause, and a shifting social landscape—she’s returning to her creative roots to cultivate a slower, more analogue way of living. Claire blends therapeutic insight with artistic expression, offering presence, vulnerability, and play to others feeling the squeeze of modern life.
In this conversation, Claire and I explore what it means to stay part of a world that often feels overwhelming, especially while navigating major life transitions. We discuss the gap between knowing something intellectually and living it, the challenge of discerning fear from genuine bodily wisdom, and the importance of presence, rest, and connection.
Claire shares her evolving relationship with retreat—what she calls “getting into the slipper”—and how love, openness, and honest self-attunement can shape a more humane way of being.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (56 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
2. My Weekly Reflection
When listening back to this conversation, and the title of the episode emerged in my head — Moving From Fear to Love — one thing instantly came to mind.
For a year of my life, he and I were almost inseparable.
This was despite our very first encounter being him barking and snapping a matter of inches from my toes.
“Breathe… don’t move… they won’t bite,” my wife calmly uttered beside me as I squirmed and wanted to run.
We had just arrived at the property we were going to rent for a number of months in the countryside in Peru. There were two houses on it, in a huge garden, and the owners had two big dogs.
A whistle came and the dogs backed off. I was momentarily relieved yet deflated, sure my trip was ruined before it began.
While we stayed somewhere else in town for the first two weeks, I was already a bit overwhelmed by the number of dogs in the rural town and on the road I walked into it — street dogs, domesticated dogs, farm dogs, etc.
Here, I had hoped, would be my peaceful domain: a quiet garden for sitting, contemplation, etc. And then I feared I wouldn’t want to spend any time in it at all.
At the time I was petrified of dogs. I remember my first girlfriend’s family had a tiny and extremely friendly Bichon Frisé, and after six years I still never felt at ease with it.
In the first weeks of my year-long sabbatical in Peru, I’d walk on whichever side of my wife allowed me to use her as a shield for any dogs that approached us.
Now I was in a huge garden with these two big dogs who would charge down it whenever anyone came close.
However, after a few days I simply began to observe them. I began to notice that what I thought was fighting was actually playing. I saw that barking was a warning or a boundary.
At the same time, Alianqu, who saw himself as a bit of an alpha in the local area, began to approach me every morning.
It got to the point that whenever his owners opened the door in the morning, he would charge down to our house, and if we weren’t outside on the porch he’d scratch the door furiously.
Aside from my wife on that trip, I spent nowhere near as much time with anyone else as I did with Alianqu.
He’d patrol the local countryside and I’d find myself at one particular bend in the road each morning, walking by several German Shepherds barking and growling in our direction, following us a little down the road — and somehow being OK with it.
In the strangest of turns, I ended up volunteering at a castration campaign, nursing dogs as they came out of the effects of the anaesthetic, taking their temperatures, and propping them up with hot water bottles. I even found myself feeding sick dogs in the area and once took one all the way to the vet in Cusco.
One day, upon seeing me with four dogs walking on the street, my landlord jokingly called me The Dogfather. I had to remind him that only a few months earlier I was shitting myself whenever a dog came near.
My good friend Alianqu passed a few weeks back — actually on my birthday — and I guess that is also why he came to mind again. A few years ago, when I’d reflect on this bizarre shift from fear to love with dogs, I’d say: “Well, if we just stay with the fear, observe it, pay attention, etc., anything is possible.”
And while that isn’t total nonsense, I got over my fear of dogs because he enabled it. Because in some way, he reached out to me. I had no choice; I was going to be stuck in that garden anyway.
Looking back, I sense that whenever a moment of development comes, we focus way too much on what we did to cultivate the shift, and not the role that others or the environment around us also played in it.
As Claire and I touched on towards the end of the conversation: what if the whole point is that we are not supposed to figure ourselves out by ourselves?
We can offer and receive this grace from each other, and it may change our lives in ways we could never have imagined. And as I said to my good friend, and owner of Alianqu recently, in that way he will always remain a part of my life. When I look at my dog Alma now, I can’t help but be grateful to him. He opened a door I never would have walked through on my own.
Work With Me
This is the work I do with leaders, teams, and individuals:
• For your team: Executive & Team Coaching (clarity, alignment, better conversations)
• For yourself: Good Life Coaching (clarity, belonging, meaning)
If you’d like to explore whether it’s a fit, we can begin with a simple conversation.
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Full Episode - Moving From Fear To Love with Claire Goodey - What is a Good Life? #150
4. This Week’s Questions
Is there someone in particular who has helped you move from fear to love in an unexpected way?
Is your body presently calling on you to rest? What would it take to listen to it? (as per the clip)
About Me
I am a coach, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you’re interested in exploring your own self-inquiry through one-on-one coaching or helping your leadership teams feel more coherent and together in uncertain times, feel free to contact me via email or LinkedIn.