Welcome!

Welcome and thanks for visiting! I’m Claire Stephenson and I’m a Public Relations practitioner, life & business coach and also creator of The Creative’s Planner.

I live in Lancashire with my husband and two daughters, where we run two businesses and home-educate our youngest child.

Although we seem to be always busy, we actually have quite a minimalist lifestyle, with both of us working from a home base and enjoying a slower living pace with plenty of downtime.

The Planner was created literally, just for me! I was really struggling to find the perfect creative space where I could plan for client projects, brainstorm for strategy and ideas, along with my own projects. I knew I didn’t want another diary-type notebook but I did need somewhere to layout creative project work in a dedicated space that was big enough, with my top priorities of the day clearly marked.

And I am a paper lover! Digital is great but I love the process of handwritten work, and how memory retention and creative flow works more productively when we write by hand. There’s a good bit of research behind this too. Physically writing things down has long since been associated with clearer thinking, improved memory retention and deeper learning. A research experiment by psychological scientists, Mueller and Oppenheimer, found that students who composed hand-written notes displayed higher performance levels in comparison with the other students in the sample, including those who used a device to type the lectures as a transcription. The students who hand-wrote their notes actually increased their retention of information and had the ability to transfer, process and “reframe” this knowledge into their own work.

Many years ago, after I graduated with a forensic psychology degree, I trained as a Reiki Master Teacher and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Practitioner, as well as a few other holistic therapies. I learned the value of preserving personal energy and self-care, but somewhere along the way, I seemed to forget this as a priority in my own life!

I’ve previously suffered from two long and stressful cases of burnout which left me empty, anxious and depressed. I was determined to never fall back into that cycle of work and life overwhelm and I want to raise awareness of burnout prevention for other women, before it actually happens to them. So I included self-care as a priority in The Creative’s Planner because as busy women, we must prioritise ourself before anything or anyone else. If our emotional and physical health isn’t at an optimal and sustainable level, then how can we expect help another person or work to full productivity?

The Creative’s Planner is a tool that helps you to: