Meet Claire and James Davis
Claire and James Davis are the husband and wife team behind the multi-award winning wellbeing company The Midlife Mentors, which gives men and women over 40 the body, mind and lifestyle tools they need to live their best life.
The couple also have a successful midlife health podcast; The Midlife Mentors (top 1.5% in global charts), run luxury retreats in Ibiza and Marbella and are regular media commentators, having been featured in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Observer & Conde Nast Traveller to name but a few.
The couple’s science based approach, leveraging their backgrounds and qualifications in psychology, coaching, hormones, nutrition, personal training, stress management, menopause and NLP, empowers individuals to regain control and make positive, lasting change.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Podcast transcript:
Welcome back urban monk podcast. A super fun one for you. I met this couple. Uh, working out at the gym at a health and wellness conference. And it was amazing that no one else from that conference was ever in the gym. And so we’re there bright and early 6:00 AM. Um, and, uh, got to be fast friends and, uh, really enjoyed this podcast.
They’re all about midlife crisis and what to do about it. I think you’re going to really enjoy this one.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Well, you guys, it is so good to see you. Welcome to the podcast. Oh,
Claire and James Davis: Oh, great to see you again. Thank you for having us along. Thank you so much. We’re about to go live with your podcast as well when you were on ours, just so you know.
Dr Pedram Shojai: excellent. I Yes, I’ll let you know when rambling podcasts.
Claire and James Davis: can share that. It’s really
Claire and James Davis: great to be here.
Dr Pedram Shojai: it’s, you know, what’s funny is, you know, you, I’ll tell the audience here, um, you know, we, we got to be friends at a health conference where we’re the only people out of, I don’t know, several hundred at the damn gym every morning. And I looked over, I’m like, okay.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Here’s some people that are walking the walk every morning, right? Rain or shine, we’re in the gym. And so we got to be fast friends and I just love your guys vibe and I love what you’re doing. So welcome. Welcome.
Claire and James Davis: it was quite ironic that we were at a health conference and no one else was bothering to turn up for the gym, but we were there 6am every morning.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. It’s like going to a, like a financial consultant conference and having everyone there be broke. Right? Like it just, it, it doesn’t make sense. So you all have been working with people who are having quote unquote midlife crisis, right? Which is a weird, which is a weird thing because human life expectancy was 30 to 35.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Uh, for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, then we got really good at living long and then we got sad about it. What the fuck?
Claire and James Davis: exactly. And, um, you know, I feel like the more we have. The more unhappy we are, you know, we talk about the happiness curve and a particularly during midlife. It’s, you know, it’s well documented that in our 40s and 50s, that kind of happiness level goes, goes down and then starts to rise again once we get into our 60s and 70s and beyond.
Claire and James Davis: So yeah, it’s, you know, people take the mick out of that whole midlife crisis thing, but actually it’s in our, in our experience, it is a real thing. We just don’t like to call it the midlife crisis. We kind of. Try and call it a midlife reinvention, but
Claire and James Davis: yeah, that’s, that’s a powerful place, right? Because the narrative is broken. Right? Like, I don’t know what you guys do in the UK, but over here you, you work, you move on to a golf course and then you slowly deteriorate on Advil playing golf and, and drinking and that’s the American dream, right? Like, and, and of course I don’t want that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right. But people have been duped into thinking that is, you know, you’ve arrived. Right. And so let’s talk about what the problems are that y’all have found and where this, this thing can be remedied.
Claire and James Davis: it’s, it’s really interesting actually, you know, um, the midlife crisis originally coined by, um, a psychoanalyst. I think he first talked to a conference in the sixties and then wrote a paper. Um, but he later admitted that he was actually quite depressed at the time himself. He talked about, you know, looking down the slope towards the inevitable decline and death was, was, and, um, I think, you know, one of the issues we have, we have in the Western world, a systemic problem, right?
Claire and James Davis: That we have the system we go into, that it’s like, you go to school, then you go to a higher education, then you go to your job, your career, and then suddenly you hit like, 50 55, you know, retirement is getting earlier these days and it’s like, thanks. We don’t, we don’t need you anymore. But of course, you know, that wasn’t such an issue when people were living like, you know, if, if they made it to retirement, they were lucky.
Claire and James Davis: But now of course, we’ve still got another like 40, 50 years ahead of us after we reach that. Um, what tends to happen is people invested so much of their identity. In climbing the ladder, you know, either in the career or accumulating the material things and suddenly they’re like, Oh, that’s not really relevant anymore.
Claire and James Davis: Where, where do I go from here? What, what does light me up? What are my values? What’s, what’s my purpose? So really big questions that we’re faced with, which I think part from experience, part psychological driven, but part systemic in just the way that we’re set up at the moment. Yeah. And we’ve talked about this before, you know, we’re in a world where.
Claire and James Davis: You go to the doctor. If something’s wrong with you, you’re going to the doctor and they, they try and cure you with the pharmaceuticals, with the pills, but actually, you know, no one’s really learning to look after themselves, you know, through holistic lifestyle modifications. So. there’s kind of like this real dramatic moment we feel in their 40s and 50s.
Claire and James Davis: It can happen for different people at different times, but you know, not only are they feeling like in mentally, they’re not feeling themselves, but physically their body’s letting them down. Um, and then they’re going to the doctor. They’re not really getting the support they need, not at all. They’re just being put on pharmaceuticals. Um, and they’re on that for the rest of their life. And they’re like, well, that’s it. That’s it. I’m on these pills now. I don’t need to do anything. I don’t need to look after myself. It’s all downhill.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, it’s really inconvenient truth, isn’t it? When you realize, Excuse me. When you realize the reality that you live in, the story might, might be wrong. Right? So you’re trying to reconcile how you feel around a story and maybe you were just in the wrong game the whole time. Right? Um, I, I often thought about this in, you know, America and the West in general is a very declarative culture, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: At the ripe age of 17, I was thinking about cars and girls, but they’re telling me to think about my major and what to be for the rest of my life. Right. Um, whereas in, you know, say Australia and Israel, like they go off, they do the military, then they go travel the world for a while. Right. And so there are cultures where you’re allowed a walkabout.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Go figure out who you are and then come back and, you know, figure out what you like doing and figure out a way to make money doing it and then start a family if that’s what you choose. But it gives you a little bit more space to think before you jump in. But you know, in America at least, we just jump in and you spend 40 years with a bunch of people who, you know, made a similar decision that may or may not even get along with you.
Claire and James Davis: yeah, and it’s exactly the same here. I have to say it is exactly the same here It’s you know, do this do that and you know, you you wake up one day Normally at midlife and you’re like hang on a minute. I’m surrounded by things that I don’t feel like I actually chose Did I actually choose this? Was these my choices? And that’s a very, very harsh reality actually. It can, it can be very, very terrifying. I, I think also there’s a narrative, you know, when, when we are younger, we we’re kind of told, we look ahead when we hit midlife, we’ll be sorted. You know, we’ll be everything. Everything we’ve ever wanted to achieve we’ll have achieved, will be top of our game.
Claire and James Davis: Everything’s gonna be great. Actually, when we get there, it’s not that way at all. We’re like, Oh, either we have gone down that path, but it’s not what we expected. It’s not what we want, or we’re not quite where we wanted to be. We start looking back a bit. Um, you know, there’s that introspection. So it’s really interesting how we kind of set ourselves up almost to come, to come to this reinvention point in midlife.
Claire and James Davis: Just, just by the way that the system is at the moment.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. And there’s a certain degree of Maslow’s hierarchy that I guess implies here, right, is you’re, you know, you come out of school, you’re struggling, you got to make some money, you know, you do what you do and then 10, 20 years into it, hopefully, you know, you didn’t squander those, those decades. You made a couple bucks, you’re out of survival mode and then you stop and think, well, how the hell did I get here?
Dr Pedram Shojai: What am I doing? Who are these people? Right. And those are the people that come to you, aren’t they?
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, and also it’s like people that I was just having a coaching call this morning with a lady And she’s kind of lost. It’s almost like she’s lost So much self belief that she doesn’t even know she doesn’t even want to take risks anymore She’s so muddled in in head. This is so common, you know We, we get to the stage in life and there’s all these questions.
Claire and James Davis: We don’t really know what to do with them. Our brain feels very, very muddled, but actually we’ve kind of lost self belief. We don’t really necessarily know that we can do anything different. And also the main thing is we’re really scared of taking any risk, but we get very, very in our comfort zone. Um, even if it’s uncomfortable. So we’re in our comfort zone, even if we don’t like it. It’s kind of, we’re comfortable in it. And taking a risk seems completely alien. We often say when we’re younger, we play to win. You know, we’ve got everything to win. And actually when we get to midlife, we’ve got this inherent, you know, fear that we don’t lose anything. So it can be, yeah, it can, it can also be a coming up of lots of like healing stuff that needs to be looked at as well. Lots of disappointments that you’ve had in your life. Because actually, if you get stuck there, we call it the disease of disappointment. If you get stuck in this kind of disease of disappointment, you’re never going to move ahead in your life.
Claire and James Davis: And, you know, you might have another, hopefully, fingers crossed, another 40 years, 50 years, maybe, you know, with the way things are going. You might have all these years ahead of you, and yet you’re already feeling like you can’t take a risk, like you don’t want to fail, like you’re just disappointed.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s funny. Um, Carlos Castaneda, um, Don Juan, the character in the Yaki books, uh, one of the things he always counseled was to always live your life as if death, death was lingering over your left shoulder to know that at any given moment it could all be over. So are you truly living? At what point does this go away?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? Like, and how do you bring that back in people?
Claire and James Davis: And I, and I think, you know, a lot of people don’t want to look at that because especially when we get to a certain age, we’re like, I don’t want to think about death coming. I don’t want to look. It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to think about how much time I might have wasted, which we haven’t because nothing is wasted.
Claire and James Davis: It’s just, you know, pure experience and it’s where we are, where we’re meant to be. Yeah, I think people don’t want to really, that is, for, for me, I think about that a lot because I, it’s a very sobering thought that kicks me up the bum to to do things now, not just go, oh, you know, I’m going to wait till tomorrow.
Claire and James Davis: It’s like, okay, death is lingering over my shoulder. You’re exactly right. And I use that. Not as a scary thing, but to push myself on.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s a tough one. Um, I’m a martial artist. I’m a tree skier. I, you know, I’m doing stupid things on the mountain routinely. And I have this counterweight of, you know, a family and children and like these things that would be pretty upset if I wasn’t around. And so, you know, I, I flirt with death in a controlled fashion to remind myself, but I find that as I’ve gone from say aesthetic Kung Fu monk to a householder, all the shit that I’ve layered on that means a lot to all the people around me also weighs me into this other kind of life math where now I’m like, well, maybe I shouldn’t take risks.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So how much of that do you see with people in your ecosystem?
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, a lot. I think it’s, it’s a really tough balancing act for people, right? It’s about, the best way I heard it put was actually was in a TV program recently, um, one of the characters was dying. And someone asked him, what was that feel like? And he’s like, it’s like, I’m trying to catch all the pieces of joy in my life. And just remember them and hold them. But as I get nearer death, it’s just they’re going too fast and I’m too slow and I can’t catch them. It’s like right now you’re young and you think you’ve got all the time in the world and the pieces are moving slow. As you get older, which will happen before you know it, those pieces will be moving too fast. So make the most of life now. And I think that’s a challenge we all face, right? You know, if we were all to follow our just like our hedonistic ideal and go out. Our life would be completely chaos. So it’s finding that balance between what brings me joy and pleasure, what lights me up, but where are my responsibilities as well.
Claire and James Davis: And it’s, it’s, it’s finding a way to walk that tightrope that that works for you individually. And I think that’s something we, we help people with. ’cause I think what’s really common is that people have come and they’ve given so much of themselves to something else, you know, a career, maybe raising the family, whatever.
Claire and James Davis: And they suddenly realized that they haven’t prioritized themselves for like. 15, 20, 25 years. And they’re like, not only have I not prioritized myself, I don’t even really know who I am now or, or what brings me joy and what lights up. So the first step we always say is giving people permission to prioritize themselves again. And that’s not like a selfish act because, you know, if you step forward, if you’re, if you’re the matriarch of the family and you set forward, it’s like, right, I’m doing this for me now. I’m going to prioritize myself. You actually give permission to everyone else around you to do the same. You’re like shining a light. So I think that’s really important.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s this, um, what comes up for me as you say, that is. I always try to leave time in my life for digestion, whether it was the lunch I ate a couple hours ago or how some, someone said something and how it made me feel and you know, if I don’t chew on it and digest it, I’m going to snap at somebody else who didn’t deserve it and then I don’t know, fast forward 40 years and I’ve got so much mental, emotional, spiritual and just time in digestion that It must be really hard, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like that, that person that like doesn’t want to take risks and is frozen. I wonder how much just energetic stagnation that they’re, they’re sitting on having not chewed on their life. When it was happening,
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, and I think it sits in the body as well. We were having this conversation with someone else on a podcast earlier on today. You know, that, that, level of frozen, that word you’ve just used, like you’re frozen, that all of the, all of our trauma, all of our stuff, and trauma’s banded around, you know, really, that word, trauma, trauma, but actually, you know, those experiences, let’s call them the experiences we have, um, You know, the negative ones also sit in our body.
Claire and James Davis: They sit in the cells of our body. And actually a lot of those kind of like physically make us freeze, you know, like we feel, we feel our body actually starts to feel very closed down and not open. Our heart doesn’t feel open. Our mind doesn’t feel open. So yeah, I think it, I think it, you know, it must be really, really hard.
Claire and James Davis: And, and I. totally resonate with what you just said. I have not given myself, and it’s actually only been, I would say, in the last 12 months, actually, that I’ve realized I really need to do this. I have not given myself enough time to digest, um, the things that have happened to us, particularly. Since we’ve been together in the last, you know, eight years where we’ve got together into a relationship, we’ve moved place to place to place. We obviously had COVID. Our business at the time was a travel business that all fell apart. Um, and we’ve had lots of stuff go on in the last eight years. And actually it was only last year, 2023 was a year of. Digesting, actually, and, and it came as a bolt out of the blue and I, and I had to digest. It was forced.
Claire and James Davis: I felt like it was really forced on me and for you. It’s crazy. It happened at the same time for James. It was like, I’ve got to take a breath and digest what’s gone on. And I, and I think people are very scared to do that. It is very scary to sit there and feel the feels as we say.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I would assume that, you know, if you’re spending a year digesting eight years, it’s somewhat burpy, Yeah. But, if you’re trying to digest 40 years, that might be rough.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right. That might take three years and a lot of burps.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. Yeah. But again, I think this comes back to the way we’ve been conditioned to live, you know, we mustn’t forget, you know, the agricultural industrial revolution only like, you know, a matter of 100 hundreds of years ago. So that really, it was a big cultural shift for humankind. You know, before that, we lived more in tune with the seasons, we had an under more closer understanding with nature, we live more in communities, you know, what brings religion into it.
Claire and James Davis: But you know, yeah. Church was a thing, days off were a thing, you know, they were sacred days, whatever the culture, where you had time off to do stuff. And now we live in this world where it’s fast paced on all the time and there’s distraction everywhere, you know, with our phones and social media, especially with things like TV.
Claire and James Davis: So how many people now born in the last 50, 60 years. I kind of like sleepwalking through their life. Almost. There’s no, no part of this connection to, to nature, to others, to community and this time for introspection. I think, you know, it’s so important being prepared to look at what’s going on. What do I learn from that?
Claire and James Davis: Where do I go forward from that? Because, you know, as human beings, we learn from our experiences and we learn from our mistakes and we learn from our failures. But if we’re just constantly learning. Numbing them off, shrugging them off with like, Oh, I’ll just, uh, watch something on TV. I’ll just dive back into my phone. You know, we’re not moving forward. We’re not evolving in the right way. So I think, you know, we’ve kind of lost that skill and we have to reconnect that and be brave enough to look at these things that have happened to us. Look at the events that have shaped our lives and look at what we learned from that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So you guys have done this with a lot of folks at this point. How much of what you just said, James is a key point in that unlock, just giving them the permission to kind of turn inwards and sit and digest and all that. Like, is that, is that like the beginning of the healing?
Claire and James Davis: I’d say so. Yeah. I mean, I feel like a lot of people actually. Commenting people come to us and they’ll say something like, Oh, you know, I’m just not happy with the way my body looks at the moment, but that’s a very surface thing when you actually dig into it a bit. It’s like they’ll feel lost in some way.
Claire and James Davis: So it’s about finding that reconnection to themselves. They’ve, they’ve lost that connection to themselves and actually getting them back into physicality is a really good way that a lot of people just lost the mind body connection, right? Because they’re not used to moving their body. So, yeah. you know, you know, from your background, when we, when we move our bodies, we create more energy.
Claire and James Davis: We established that mind body connection again. It’s great for our whole system. So it’s about letting these people realize what’s been going on and saying, that’s fine, bringing compassion to it, but giving them the tools to actually reconnect with themselves again and think about what they really want going forward.
Claire and James Davis: And to say, you know, life doesn’t have to be this, this slog. Um, it can be an amazing adventure and especially, you know, midlife, um, Jung talks about, you know, our ego has become so tired that we can actually now overrule it, which I think is, I love that concept so we can actually like just move forward, like take a breath and move forward with more ease.
Claire and James Davis: Once we allow ourselves to do that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So there’s so many people listening to this right now that are thinking, yeah, that sounds easy, but I can’t afford to land this plane to fix it. So how the hell do I fix a flying airplane?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Because my kids depend on me, my, you know, I got, I got, I got responsibilities. So what you’re saying sounds luxurious, but I don’t have time for that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like what, you know, how do you respond to that?
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. We hear that all the time because actually, you know, we’re all. We’re all busy. You know, I know we think, Oh, I’m really busy. My life’s really hectic. Listen, um, midlife. A lot of our lives are really hectic. I’d like to find the midlife of whose life isn’t really hectic and pressured. You know, we’ve got children, we’ve got aging parents, we’ve got finance issues, we might have relationship issues. Um, so actually we’re all busy people. And what I would say is if you don’t try and bring the plane into land at some point, you’re You’re never going to land, you know, it is never going to land. You are always going to be up in the air, ungrounded and unfulfilled. So actually just knowing that you don’t need to know. All the steps. You don’t need to learn how to do all the bits of landing the plane using that analogy. But what you do need to do is take a step forward, start doing something different because we know, as Einstein says, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So we need to do something different and actually being put in a in a community of people where you’re accountable, but also where you’re kind of shown the step by step way to do it. It doesn’t need to be like we’re Also in a world where everyone seems to over complicate everything. It doesn’t actually have to be that complicated. And little tiny strategies, little daily things can make add up to a really, really big thing. You don’t have to do it all at once. You just take tiny little nuggets. But actually, if you don’t do that, your plane’s going to be up in the air forever and you’re never going to start to land it. And like change doesn’t happen overnight.
Claire and James Davis: It doesn’t. It’s. Bit by bit, habit by habit, behavior by behavior, and it’s incremental. And sometimes we might not even know that we’re making any of those changes. They might not feel like we’re making any of those changes, but over time they accumulate and they create bigger changes. And then we look back and go, Oh my goodness, actually, you know, a year ago, I wasn’t that person a year ago.
Claire and James Davis: I wasn’t that person. So, you know, if you don’t make time for it, it’s going to make time for you because your, your body’s going to, your mental health is going to suffer. Your physical health is going to suffer. Relationships are going to suffer. So we have to make time for this stuff, but it’s not as difficult as everyone else that makes out. To sing, and you don’t have to do it all at once.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s a challenge though, right? Is okay. I spent 45, 50 years getting myself into this mess and I’m giving you six hours to fix it. Go. Right. And that’s the unrealistic expectations we have been trained to demand by the bullshit marketers who say you could have six pack abs with this pill or whatever it is.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I’m sure you guys are going against that every day Every day, every day. I mean, this is a thing. Again, we were saying this on a podcast earlier on today, you know, it’s people look, we’re in a world where everyone’s highlight reels are all over the place. And all that, that person did that really easy. Make a quick buck, make a million pounds in like six months, do this, do that. And actually, oh, it’s really easy for them because they’ve got some magic. You know, button that they, it’s, it’s, it’s hard for all of us. And no, it’s the unsexy truth that I don’t feel like enough people talk about. It is brutal. Change making change can be utterly brutal. Um, and it can, in order to get really amazing things, we have to sacrifice.
Claire and James Davis: And no one ever talks about that either. I can have everything I want. I don’t have to compromise. Actually you do. And you do have to sacrifice certain things in order to get. You have to do hard things now to have an easy life later.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I was joking about this with a fellow acupuncturist earlier this week is Chinese herbs are bitter and disgusting. Nobody wants needles. I do Chinese medicine, right? Whereas the industry is selling sugar cereal to children. They want it to be easy. They want it to be palatable. They want it to, it’s just bullshit.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? And so the, the, the truth is it’s hard work. The truth is when you do the hard work, shit gets better. But 30 years trying every shortcut until you’ve run out of time. And then you’re not at midlife, you’re at end of life, aren’t you?
Claire and James Davis: Boom. Yeah, that’s it. We’re all seduced by the shortcut, right? It’s one of the great pandemics of our time that’s only been accelerated by the internet first and then by social media, you know. Everyone’s offering you the quick fix, whether that’s the get rich quick, get girls quick, get slim quick, you know, it’s, life doesn’t work like that.
Claire and James Davis: That, and that is the truth. You know, it’s, it’s a long process you’ve got to go through. It’s often a painful process, but the rewards. are amazing when you come out the other side of it. And actually the journey you go on is amazing in itself. And I think more people just need to be prepared to knuckle down and do, do the work to live, to live a more fulfilling and better life.
Claire and James Davis: And be prepared to fail as well. People are so afraid to fail. Because I feel like it’s, it can feel so public these days, you know, we’re all on social media and oh that person didn’t fail, we can, we can feel like we’re falling short all the time. So actually, to fail, to try anything and fail at anything, well that would be, be horrendous. So yeah, we’re We’re, it, it’s a whole multitude of things right there.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So there are all sorts of interesting scripts, right? Is I remember that one time I failed in front of my class and that was embarrassing. So now I’m going to not try as hard to say I didn’t really assert myself. Um, so if I fail, I could just say it’s cause I wasn’t trying that hard. Right. And you have a million versions of all sorts of the bullshit that we do.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right. Um, but the vulnerability and the raw honesty of someone who says, yeah, yeah, wow, that didn’t work out. I mean, what’s wrong with that? Right. Like as an adult, you see someone say that and you go, wow, how refreshing is that?
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s a grownup
Claire and James Davis: I know. We, we need to have a new conversation around failure. Right. I’m not saying that we should, we should go out and, and try stuff we know we’re gonna fail at, but you know, it it, I think it was Churchill said, if you show me the man who hasn’t failed, I’ll show you the man who hasn’t tried. And I think it’s exactly that. You know, when we are younger, we’ll come up with all reasons that failed. That was embarrassing. So next time, I’m just gonna pretend that I don’t care about this thing, because then it won’t matter if I fail at it. Actually, if you go, you know what? I tried my best there. That didn’t work out. But what can I learn for next time? How will I approach this differently next time? It’s about failing forward, right? Rather than failing backwards. And when we, when we make excuses for ourselves and we take responsibility away, that’s when we’re failing backwards. And we can actually step into that vulnerability and that responsibility. We’re really empowering ourselves to go, okay. That didn’t work. Happy to say that didn’t work. And I’m going to figure out next time how I do it differently. So I get a different result from it. I also think we over catastrophize like failure. Don’t we? We over catastrophize it. No one actually cares. No one.
Claire and James Davis: Here’s the reality as well that we really have forgotten because we can see everyone’s lives on social media. We think that everyone and everyone, we’ve got the keyboard warriors, like Really going at you and, you know, cancel culture. We think that people really, really care, but they don’t like, they’ll do that.
Claire and James Davis: And then move on to the next one. And then the next one, the next one. So, but that’s actually made us even like more catastrophized in our own heads about what could happen if we found like the humiliation, but actually I always remind myself or try to remind myself. That actually, everyone’s busy getting on with their own lives. Everyone’s inherently, and I don’t mean to say this in a bad way, but kind of selfish. Like, we’re so, this is my life, I’m living my life. No one actually really cares. We think they care too much, but they don’t.
Dr Pedram Shojai: on. If we care about what they care about, it’s Epictetus said this, it’s a primal form of suffering who cares what they care about. Um, I’m curious, uh, you know, fail fast, fail forward. There’s all sorts of kind of like agile framework now, like in the tech space of kind of micro failures to learn quickly and iterate so that then you can launch a product with more, you know, reasonable assurance of success, like.
Dr Pedram Shojai: If I’m 50 years old and I can’t really afford to fully fall on my face, can I stumble onto my knee and get back up? Like, how do you guys work in that kind of halfway house of little failures to prove success so that you can learn that, um, you could keep moving.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, I think, I think it’s, what we need to do is, like, calm the central nervous system a little bit. Like, when we start having These conversations with people in our groups or coaching is actually set to say, listen, you don’t need to do all of this at once, but actually what you can do is go outside your comfort zone a little bit by expanding your world. So it might be that you go and start. a new hobby. If you thought, you remember when, when I was younger, you know, I love to paint. I haven’t done it since I was 14 years old. Okay. We’ll go to painting class then, you know, if, if you’re rubbish, it’s a, you know, so starting small, um, connecting with other people’s just going outside your quite isolated world starts to build a bit of confidence and self belief putting those people out there a little bit more because we’ve, again, forgotten how to do that. We’re even fearful of that. And like, Seeming ridiculous or, you know, being humiliated doing something new. So that’s how we started. We don’t have to do any really big things. It’s not like I’m going to dump my career. I’m going to dump my partner. I’m going to just, it’s, it’s, about gathering some courage to do those smaller things, those small little steps until, well, until it might not go anywhere, you know, like even that in itself can bring so much aliveness and like juiciness back to your life. I was going to say, the other thing is, you know. Belief often follows action. So, um, we’ve got to have the belief that we can succeed in the first place, but it’s only when we start to see the results, the actions we’re doing, we’re like, Oh, that’s working. Now I start to believe in that process. So coming back to the physicality with clients, well, one thing is, you know, when they start feeling the change in their energy levels, seeing the change in their body, there’s like something they can actually, you know, they’re physically experiencing it.
Claire and James Davis: They’re like, wow, I’m, I’m believing in this. So what else is possible for me? And the same with some of the, you know, the mindset tools. Getting people just to think about what they’re grateful for from, from the day before every day over time that has a cumulative effect. They’re like, wow, yeah, there’s so much in my life that I’m grateful for.
Claire and James Davis: So like Claire said, it’s these small steps over time. People are realizing I actually can, I’m actually experiencing the difference and that helps them build the belief. for them to do more.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s funny. Um, I had a chain of clinics back, you know, 20 years ago where I think between a couple CrossFit studios and a Bikram yoga class, like we, you know, we were full, right? And it was all these people who went from zero to hero and, you know, went from, Stagnation to, I’m going to do, you know, six days a week of CrossFit and they’d hurt themselves, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: And you know, I don’t think anyone along that journey said, how about taking a fucking walk, right? Like, how about just 10 minutes a day of getting your body moving before you jump into something that gestalt.
Claire and James Davis: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we just, we, again, it’s this message like you’ve got to find your purpose. You’ve got to do your thing. You’ve got to have a passion. You’ve got to change. You only happen if I do something really massive. But actually, you know, the unsexy truth again is it’s like small incremental things over time is going to lead to massive transformation.
Claire and James Davis: It’s rarely that like one moment that suddenly changes everything in your life. You know, that you have a epiphany. Yeah, it’s more. Having the
Dr Pedram Shojai: a minute, hold on a second. I thought I was supposed to go to burning man, take a bunch of drugs, become a polygamist, find God and become a millionaire and do all of that, but that’s exactly it. But that’s, that’s it. And also we’re just surrounded by this, this, constant message and this constant noise. I’ve got to have this, got to have this, got to have this, got to be this. You’ve got to do your cold water swimming. Then you’ve got to meditate. Then you’ve got to do breath work.
Claire and James Davis: Then you’ve got to, and like, it’s exhausting just to even think of all these things that everyone’s pumping at you all the time. So yeah, it’s. It really is about taking a breath, taking a step back. Actually, And this is a lifelong lesson, right? Being comfortable, starting to be just comfortable with who you are.
Claire and James Davis: I mean, that’s a never ending that for me, that’s, you know, I think that’s a never ending for everyone, but actually just going, what works for me? Cut out the noise, shut out the noise. What actually do I want? What works for me without being influenced by all this other stuff?
Dr Pedram Shojai: I don’t. You know, it is a can of worms, but aren’t you being influenced every time you open up your phone,
Dr Pedram Shojai: literally by influencers and brands competing for your attention, gaming your dopamine to say, look, Claire, you’re not good enough, you need this purse. Cause Susie over there has that purse and Susie is now better than you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so, I mean, I don’t even know if we stand a chance if we’re in our phones.
Claire and James Davis: No, and I, and I, I have to say, I, you know, it sounds really defeatist, but there’s, there’s a level of which I agree, you know, like we’re so far gone now down into this rabbit hole of the digital age. Um, but that’s why, well, that’s why we have such mental health issues, so much anxiety, but I think, you know, it takes a lot of strength.
Claire and James Davis: It takes awareness, first of all. Because a lot of people aren’t even aware of this. They’re not even aware that they’re being influenced like literally every moment of every day. So even the awareness, again, can be quite scary. It’s like, hang on a minute, I’m being influenced all day, every day. But it takes a lot more strength and courage, obviously, than ever before, because we’ve never had this situation. to take responsibility for how much you’re consuming that stuff. I mean, we’re not going to necessarily be able to stop consuming it because so many of our businesses and our lives do kind of rely on it to a degree, but we’re all going to have to take responsibility for how much we’re letting it in. And that’s hard. Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: a story. Um, I was a young doctor and, um, I’d finally thought that I obviously, you know, deserved a better car. So I got myself a Range Rover, right? And I was just, you know, now I’m a rich guy. And I remember some, it is perfectly clear cause I was in Newport beach, California where, you know, the, there’s a lot of vapid souls there.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And this one guy kind of patted me on the back and says, Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a good, that’s the car we get our wives. And. And I just stopped right there and was like, okay, what do you mean? What do you drive? And he was like a Bentley or, you know, whatever. And I stopped right there. This guy was an angel, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: He was a dickhead, but he was an angel in my life because in that moment I was like, Oh, fuck you. I’m out. I’m out. I’m not playing this game. I don’t want the stupid range. I don’t want any. I don’t want like what? Right? Like it’s a never ending. And if you know boat people, right? Your boat’s never bigger than the other guys, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like it’s this never ending game of conspicuous consumption that pulls you into a parasitic universe that consumes your life well past midlife.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. If you let it a hundred percent. Yeah. It’s
Dr Pedram Shojai: what are we supposed to be caring about guys? You got all these people coming to you for advice. What do you, where do you start refocusing their attention?
Claire and James Davis: think we start with like, you know, what, what’s important to you? What do you actually, we don’t, I think we take, we talked about this earlier, we don’t take the time to pause in life and actually think about what do I, what do I want going forward from here? You know, we, like you say, we often fall, fall into life and stumble through it.
Claire and James Davis: It’s kind of predefined for us almost. And we get to this point where like, Oh, that’s not, that’s not what I wanted and I’m not where I want to be. So it’s like. What do you want from this next stage of your life? Have a think about that. But also I think building that connection to yourself, also realizing the connection to others around you.
Claire and James Davis: Now that might mean, might mean you’re, you’re looking again at your, your partnership, it might mean your family. It might mean like finding a community of like minded people that you can connect with and go on this journey with. Um, cause there’s a lot of power in community, but I think it stems from really getting an understanding of where you want to move forward to, right?
Claire and James Davis: It’s like waking up. Right. It’s like, like the transformation that you go through coming out the chrysalis. I also think actually just giving people that permission to prioritize themselves, like that’s a very powerful thing to do, like right off the bat. It’s like, if they’re coming to us, we’re like, congratulations. Congratulations. You’re taking the first step of actually saying that you are important. You are important. Your life is important. Your health is important. So giving them clarity around how, how amazing that is that they’ve actually decided to prioritize themselves. And actually it is that bit by bit change of behavior.
Claire and James Davis: You know, it is the incremental changes of habits and behavior over time. That, that’s where we start because if we dump everything on them at first, like way, the way we take people through our program, it’s a very softly, softly approach. It’s not kind of like you have to do all of this at one time. It builds things up, um, throughout the eight weeks and beyond. So, but it’s, it’s, it’s almost subconscious. It’s well, we have obviously our conscious mind and we have all of our subconscious values, beliefs and behaviors underneath, but it’s about starting to shine a light on why they’re, why they’re doing what they’re doing. Right. And actually asking themselves, becoming aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Claire and James Davis: Because at the moment they’re just on repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, repeat. And actually even that is a, is that wake up. It’s, Oh, I have a choice here. Um, and I’m starting to do things a little bit differently and I’m starting to feel. and look better. I thought my life was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, but actually it’s opening up even just a little bit.
Claire and James Davis: And with that opening up just a little bit, like you just see this transformation of like, Oh my goodness, I’ve been living this small life when actually I can expand it by doing a few tiny things, becoming aware. And I wonder what’s possible now.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I would assume there’s, it’s a sum total of all good dishes and decisions and bad decisions, habits, good and bad.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and. Habits, whether they’re good or bad, have momentum, don’t they?
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so the folks that are coming in saying help, they’ve just got a lot of momentum that’s been picked up over the years with bad habits.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, yeah. And I, and I also think the word discipline sounds so like restrictive and so just, you know, Oh, I was disciplined at school. That word, it just makes us feel, but actually it is a superpower. If we can just have that discipline of showing up and doing some of the things that we show people how to do. That’s going to give them more awareness. That’s going to give them some more self reflection. That’s going to give them some prioritization of themselves. If we can just discipline ourselves to make these small little acts of change, honestly, like, our whole world just opens up. It really, really does.
Claire and James Davis: There’s a sense of trust. A sense of self trust. A sense of self belief. And all that’s been kind of hammered out of you. you. know, like every time you let yourself down, Oh, I’m going to start tomorrow. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that every single time. It’s like a notch on notch on our belt of like, Oh, you know, I, I, I can’t do this. I told you I couldn’t make it. Look, look how stupid you are. Look, you failed again. But every time we have that disciplined approach where we start making positive change, it reverses it. And, and years and years of kind of self loathing and I can’t do this, do start to turn around very, very quickly.
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Dr Pedram Shojai: That’s refreshing. That’s refreshing. Cause I mean, we all need the Jesus plan, right? It’s, uh, I have sinned, right? Like, yeah. And look, just because you’ve made mistakes, just cause you’ve had bad habits in the past, doesn’t mean your next decision can’t. Click in the right direction. Right. And you know, I find this every morning with my children.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Like they, we just started a gong with them and they have 15 minutes of their karate practice every morning. Their alarms go off. It’s karate time. And, and look, I’m a, I’m a Kung Fu guy. I grew up with a lot of discipline. I don’t know how the hell my parents did it, but I’m a disciplined guy. I don’t, I’m not, I don’t.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You know, shrink away from that word, but watching how I have to parent this discipline and build hard work into these two young children, I can very easily see this going wrong, right? This is a very trauma inducing, uh, era where you’re trying to get them to become self motivated learners and hard workers and all that, but if you push too hard.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Then they’re the person that comes to you at 50 saying, I can’t, I’ve been disciplined enough. I need, you know, I need a hug, but then they’re not willing to work hard for themselves. And that’s a tough place to be.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I, and I think, you know, I think we, we can balance out, I suppose when he just said that about the hug. You know, I do think that we can, there is a balance and I’m still trying to get this balance. I think everyone again will try and get this balance between that discipline, but also self compassion, right?
Claire and James Davis: Um, and like you were saying, we’ve had years and years of Momentum of unhealth unhealthy habits, but we can turn that around quite quickly. We do know that actually we can change the structure of our brain, right? So through discipline, through repeated acts, over and over again, we can actually change the structure of our brain, the neur pathways in our brain.
Claire and James Davis: So it’s not over we, we can get to this time of our life and go, well, it’s just over. Um, and, and we can really beat ourselves up about that. So actually, I think. What we always try to do is have that level of, yes, you need to be super disciplined. Yes, you need to, you need to do the stuff, you need to do the hard stuff.
Claire and James Davis: But at the same time, when those unhelpful habits and behaviors and thought patterns and stuff come up, be be the observer, be conscious of what that is, be aware of that. Know that it’s not you. I mean, we teach all of this stuff, but like, understand that that’s a thought, that’s a story that you’ve been telling yourself for very many years, but it doesn’t have to be, it’s just a story as well.
Claire and James Davis: It doesn’t have to be the story that you continue to tell yourself.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You know, I have this really interesting relationship with alcohol and how much I permit it with my patients because it very specifically. Kills the part of your brain that is there to negate your impulses the part of your brain that keeps you from making the bad decisions So on one hand, yeah, a couple glasses of wine help you decompress Right, you feel a little better because you’re so stressed out You know, the other hand you ate that fucking cheesecake right after you drank the wine.
Claire and James Davis: Yes. Right? Because that, then it’s kind of like that reward center. You’ve triggered it. And then, oh, hang on a minute. It, and we see that all the time. I see that in myself. Yeah. This is where we we’re, where we coach clients to, to play it forward. Right. It’s like, okay, I, I feel like that glass of wine, but it’s like, do you really want that glass of wine? Like, do you really want it or is it just like habitual that you, you think you might make you feel decompressed more comforting? And actually if you do have it. What might happen next? Will there be another glass of wine? Then there will be a cheesecake. Will you then skip your workout in the morning? So it’s not saying never have the glass of wine, but just play it forward and just think, you know, is this taking me away or towards my goal? Um, what we were talking about earlier, I think most people undervalue themselves. And by that I mean they underestimate their, their capability to change. Um, we tend to think, you know, our beliefs and our habits are like set. We’re somehow born with them, inherited them, and that’s just it for us. But actually, that’s not true.
Claire and James Davis: We can, we know we can change, like, our brain chemistry, our brain structure. You know. a belief or a habit is just something that we’ve, we’ve come acquired through life. If it’s not serving us, we actually absolutely have the right and we should, we should be doing it to challenge it and actively change it.
Claire and James Davis: I’m not saying that’s easy work to do, but the rewards on the other side of that are so immense. You know, when we, when we can change those beliefs, change those habits to step into a new sense of empowerment. I think the alcohol thing is really interesting actually, because I’ve had long stints. Um, myself where I’ve been alcohol free and I don’t drink much anyway, I’m alcohol free again.
Claire and James Davis: But, um, I, it’s really fascinating that I see it in myself. And it’s the same with anyone, right? Because it’s a brain, it’s a chemistry thing. It’s a, it’s a dopamine thing. It’s a reward. It’s, it’s, you’ll have one beer. You know, down the pub, down our English pub. We’ll have a hot, you know, one beer. And I’m like, ooh, that’s nice.
Claire and James Davis: Okay, I can, I can leave that now. Two weeks later, I go down there and I’ll have two pints. Three weeks later, you know, I’ll go down there and have any, and it just, it’s insidious. It kind of starts to build up and build up because it’s a chemistry thing. It’s, and I, and I think People understanding, I think awareness is so, so important, like knowledge of why that’s happening.
Claire and James Davis: That’s why there’s so many books out there now about addiction and the dopamine effect and all this kind of stuff. Because I do think that once we have a little bit of knowledge of understanding that it’s not our fault, right? Yes, we can take responsibility and we should take responsibility. But it’s actually something that’s going on within all of us chemically.
Dr Pedram Shojai: yeah, and I just the more I learn about the prefrontal cortex and the part of the brain that Keeps us from making the dumb decisions. The less I want to poison that, the less I want to inhibit that, right? Everything that I’ve had to deal with in the last couple of decades that was, you know, difficult came from bad decisions.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, not necessarily alcohol induced bad decisions, but bad decisions, um, that have downstream consequences. I can’t really afford any more bad decisions in my life. I’ve got mouths to feed and kids that are watching me and patients and people who rely on me. And so I just, I can’t afford the wind drag, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: And if you start to think of yourself as a high performance sports car, then you’d be like, what, what, why the hell is this flap sticking out of the top? Right? Like, I
Claire and James Davis: Yeah.
Claire and James Davis: And I, and I, that’s, I mean, that’s how I personally, that’s how I think about, um, rubbish food. That’s why I don’t eat rubbish food, because I’m literally putting garbage, rubbish, in my, in my car. So that’s why I don’t eat, you know, highly processed food. I don’t, that’s why, that is one of the main reasons for Like giving up alcohol is because I want to be thoroughly conscious as conscious as I possibly can be.
Claire and James Davis: I want to be able to be switched on. I don’t want to poison my body, but it’s for me, it’s more, I don’t know how to use this word, but that connection, I suppose, that, that spiritual connection, it’s a terrible word. It’s not always, you know, encompasses so many things, but I think that connection to myself and being able to make clear. Sound decisions from a grounded place. I think anything that you put in your body, we know like any, any garbage that you put in your body, including alcohol, it’s going to affect that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Which kind of brings us full circle because We were the only people at a health conference of several hundred at the gym every morning, rain or shine. And, you know, if I think about it, if I was to throw a number at it, I would say I’m probably 6 percent stupider every day I miss a workout. Right? So I could go a few days.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But, you know, once I’m, once I’m at about 30 percent I’m noticeably stupider and it keeps going. And so I just can’t afford to be stupider, right? Like I just am a better version of me having pumped some muscle, moved the blood, gotten some oxygen and just doing it. And I’ve learned that through trial and error, um, over the years.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I have to remind myself, even if I don’t feel like going to the gym, that I will be better on the other side.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, a hundred percent. I hear you so much on that. You know, I always say that the workout you regret is the one you didn’t do. And yeah, it’s quite common when we’re starting out with clients, they’ll be like, Oh, you know, I just, I just wasn’t, wasn’t feeling it or my energy levels. I was like, you know what?
Claire and James Davis: Here’s the thing. Just tell yourself. You’re going to start, you’re thinking about it is actually worse than doing it. You know, we start to catastrophize the workout, like, Oh, it’s going to be so bad. I said, just stop. Just tell yourself you’re going to do 10 minutes, right? And just start your routine. Guess what? Once you start, you’ll want to keep going. You know, the brain has a thing. Once we got going, it’s like, Oh, I want to complete this now. And you always, always, always feel better after a workout. Now. And we’re talking before we started, you know, Claire, Claire and I had terrible flu over the holiday period, which meant we just like laid up and we were too sick to go and work out.
Claire and James Davis: I could really feel like in every cell of my body that I was, I was missing that. So as soon as I was. Not really well enough. I was, I was back to it, back to it. And it pushed my energy levels back up. I got really low. I mean, like, literally, I just, it’s my thing. Um, but it’s not always been my thing. I’ve made it my thing. You know, it’s, and I just felt really, really low. There was some thoughts coming into my mind that, you know, wouldn’t normally be, and I know they wouldn’t normally be there, if I was in my routine, going and exercising and all that stuff. That’s the power. of actually moving our body, the endorphins that we get and the clarity of thought and actually being able to manage anxious thoughts or depressing thoughts. I mean, the truth is, as organisms, we’re not designed to be sedentary, right? We’re, we’re, we’re still, we’re still, you know, physiologically, we’re hunter gatherers. We’re meant to be moving like for a large part of the day, collecting berries or hunting our prey. Are you going to go collecting berries for us? We’ve lost that, so, you
Dr Pedram Shojai: Your neighbors might get pissed.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, I know. I know. Jay’s out there hunting for berries. Well, you know, I do when it’s blackberry season, but we’ve lost that. And again, it’s only in the blink of an eye. Like, you know, our great grandparents probably a lot more physical in their daily activities than we are now.
Claire and James Davis: So in evolutionary terms, you know, we’re living a lifestyle that we’re not adapted for yet. And I think. It’s an onus on everyone to keep as active as they can. Cause it’s true. You know, the more we learn about it, the more it really is use it or lose it. You know, if you decide that, Oh, at 40, I’m too old to exercise now.
Claire and James Davis: So I’m just going to sit in my armchair all day. Guess what? By the time you’re 60, you won’t be able to get up out of that armchair. And you see, there’s amazing people out there in their seventies and their eighties that go into the gym and like a full active life. So, you know, it’s, it’s not just about how long we live.
Claire and James Davis: It’s about the quality of life that we want to have as well.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Honestly, it’s why I moved to a ski town because I met people my whole life in their eighties and nineties who were still skiing and were full of life and full of enthusiasm. Um, To me, that’s a longevity sport, right? Um, you know, don’t, don’t hit a tree, but it was okay. If I wanted, I want to find something that I can do well into the latter years of my life so that I’m breathing fresh air up at altitude and moving.
Dr Pedram Shojai: In a way that makes sense. Now, I do want to honor something that was said in the middle there. Um, there’s a very interesting kind of juxtaposition of yin and yang approaches here where, you know, yes, I got to get up off my ass and move. That’s just a rule for life. But Claire mentioned something about how she went down and needed to go down.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, and I’ve had that too, right? Where like, I’m like, sometimes when I get sick, I stop and think, okay. What would you have me do? Right? It’s what did I miss? What do I have to pull over for? What do I have to stop the train for and listen to and learn from so that I could start moving again and not be on the crazy train.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so somewhere in between that is, you know, this thing called awareness where we then have to check in with ourselves and say, am I just being a lazy ass or am I being told to pull over and heal right now? She
Claire and James Davis: Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s, where I was last year. It’s actually, I’m only just coming out of that really of, um, my goodness. And it’s not just been the eight years. It’s been years and years and years of going, going, going, going, going, like striving, pushing, trying to prove myself, um, trying to, to feel worthy in certain areas of my life and. And for me, it was, one of the best things that ever happened to me was like, the stop. It was also one of the most terrifying things, but it was The burnout, because that’s what it was. I experienced burnout where I just couldn’t get out of, I mean, literally physically couldn’t get out of bed, but emotionally I couldn’t get out of bed. Um, and I was, I was forced to, I had no motivation, no passion, no purpose. And it was like someone just unplugged me and took all of what I thought I was away. And I just, it was that scary moment where you’re like, you’re just lazy. You’re just being lazy. Come on, Claire, like, pick yourself up. You’ve got to fight, fight, fight.
Claire and James Davis: Like, everything’s going to fall apart unless you fight. Unless you strive. And actually,
Dr Pedram Shojai: needed to die. She needed to die and the new, the newer Chrysalis, you know, but you have to die to that first.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. And I, and I feel like my ego had to take a massive, you know, we could talk about like these mini ego deaths, the mini ego death of Claire, the midlife mentor, where she’s constantly like helping and putting, you know, like always out there, always on social media, always doing stuff. I just, it felt inauthentic. I mean, I carried on doing bits and pieces to keep things ticking over, but it felt out of integrity. To be doing as much as I did do and that felt good to me to actually sit there and, you know, I did come back to that sense of, and I don’t mean this, um, in a, in a religious way, but it did come back, helped me come back to that missing part of myself, which can only be filled, I truly believe, with a connection to whatever you want to call it. you know, God’s higher purpose, the universe, whatever you want to call it. There is no amount of doing and striving and trying to prove yourself that can fill that, that hole within you. And so that was such a blessing for me to, to
Claire and James Davis: actually want to honor you for going there. I’ve been in this world for a long time. Um, and I can’t tell you how many of these health and wellness celebrities will just hide when they’ve gained five pounds and then show their face again when it’s acceptable. How many of them have had, you know, just psychotic breaks that they will never admit to.
Dr Pedram Shojai: How many of them have, you know, and it’s just, Fucking be real, man, right? We’re all human. We all overstretch. Sometimes, uh, we get over our skis and we come back, right? And that’s part of it. And the health celebrities and the life gurus are also humans. And the authentic ones are the ones that I am listening to more.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Because they’re proving that they’re not full of shit, right? Like we all go through stuff.
Claire and James Davis: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, you know, for me, I was also really honest about. You know, I wasn’t going to the gym. We just talked about going to the gym and stuff, but even that for me was a massive struggle. I didn’t, I didn’t keep up with the gym. I didn’t keep up with my healthy eating. I gained weight and I, and I shared that when I was ready, I wasn’t going to going out there, you know, like again, how some people on social media go, I’m going through this massive struggle where they make this whole big thing out of it. It was a very gently, softly, softly approach to talking about it. I think after about four or five months. I started to, to share a little bit, I haven’t shared loads of it, but share a little bit of what was going on for me and I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, um, that I I, that I’d been really struggling.
Claire and James Davis: And I think the world needs, like you say, I really think the world needs more of that. I really do.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Well, listen, you two, um, love you so much. So happy we’re friends. How can our listeners find you if what you’ve been saying is what they’ve been needing to hear?
Claire and James Davis: So, uh, you can find this by going to the midlife mentors.com is our website. Um, you can check out our podcast, which is called the Midlife Mentors. Or find us on all the socials under Midlife Mentors or the Midlife Mentors. So yeah, that’s how you get us. And we love you too. We love you too. This has been amazing.
Claire and James Davis: Thank you. We really do. We’re so, so thrilled. You’re such a highlight. Meeting you is such a highlight of our trip around America, which lasted about, about three weeks. We had such a ball over in America. Such an amazing time, but it was a real highlight meeting you. And I’m so glad that we have this friendship.
Claire and James Davis: Thank you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I was telling this to an old friend of mine who’s over here for the holiday. Is, um, the morning hours. Are the ones that I’ve optimized for now. So I don’t do late nights, but I’ll see you at the gym in the morning. I will ski with you during the day. And those, those hours seem to be the best.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So we spent the best hours of the day together and I honor that.
Claire and James Davis: We did.
Claire and James Davis: Thank you so much for having us.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Of course.
Okay. That’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. I love those two. They’re great. They’re zany. They’re hilarious. And they’re helping a lot of people, so check out their work and I will see you in the next podcast.