The Story Behind the Work
One Tuesday night in 2013, I peeled myself off the sofa and went to my first ever salsa class. It changed everything, and kick-started the journey I now support other women to make.
A return to my truest essence. A reclamation of my hip-swinging, hair-blowing-in-the-wind, alive, embodied self. Because, of course, young me had loved dancing. I'd simply forgotten.
As a little girl, I loved dancing on stage. I loved being seen. Aged seven, my body was a wonder to delight in rather than a problem to solve. The bullshit conditioning had only just begun to settle in.
And that night, back in 2013, going to salsa made zero logical sense. Separated from my husband, hanging on for the sake of our two young children, numbing the pain with red wine and box sets so I could show up for work with a smile slapped on my face. But something insistent within me whispered: go.
It was my highest, wisest, minxiest sovereign self (You’ll see that term a lot on this website). She told me to go. She knew where it would lead. Not in some sweeping, transcendent movie-montage kind of way. But a door did swing open, and I cha-cha-cha’d right through it.
Salsa, ballroom, Latin, Ceroc – the wonder of partner dancing in many glorious forms showed me the power of letting myself be led. Being spun around the floor was how life was meant to feel. And if you’re reading this, you know how embodiment works.
I let go of my failing marriage, said goodbye to my soul-crushing corporate job, booked a photo-shoot, made a website, set up my consultancy, started earning my own money my own way for the first time in my life, and a year later trained as a coach.
And throughout it all I danced like my life depended on it. Every day, alone. I shoved my dirty-washing basket against the bedroom door to keep my kids and new partner out, and I rage-danced. Grief-danced. Danced for my desires, my lost dreams, and most often just for the sheer unadulterated joy of it.
I even flew across the ocean to San Francisco, where a mentor who I now think of as my fairy godmother introduced me to conscious burlesque and a next spiral of becoming. Artistry from within. Improvisatory choreography. Zero critique. Glitter. Sisterhood. Women playing, delighting in themselves exactly as they are.
Who knew that our own delight was the essential ingredient to creating what moved other people? Who knew it could be as profoundly simple and liberating as that? Who knew what that embodied knowing would make possible in my life and work?
I flew home, and my work began to change, little by little, all led from that place: my own joy, my own delight, my newfound connection to eros. My relationships with the organisations I served deepened, but I also longed to create spaces that belonged entirely to me.
I started teaching workshops with my own Claire spin. I wrote and published poetry and personal essays on Substack. I gathered women to write together, and speak their words aloud. We laughed, we cried, we remembered how fucking fabulous we are. I gathered yet more women to create their own won’t-fit-in-a-box businesses, together. I allowed my words and invitations to become an expression of my burlesque self - Aphrodite Jones. The Goddess and the Girl Next Door. Divinity in imperfect human form. It was marketing and leadership, but it felt more like art.
As I stopped contorting myself and allowed more of my truest essence to flow into my work and expression, a portal opened for other women to do the same.
More permission. More joy. More aliveness. More power.
This is the work I do now. Always rooted in my own becoming, in service of yours. One expression. One offering. One act of love-fuelled, shame-shedding, Joy-Led® reclamation at a time.
The short version
Claire Mackinnon is a transformational coach, creative catalyst, community leader and founder of the Joy-Led® movement. She supports leaders, founders and changemakers to reclaim their creative power and bring forward the change only they can make.
Before founding her business in 2015, Claire spent 15 years leading large-scale organisational transformation, including senior roles at Barclays and as HR Director for one of the UK's largest social housing mergers to date.
Today, she partners with organisations internationally, coaches senior leaders and founders, and stewards intimate communities for women exploring creativity, visibility, leadership and business creation through the Joy-Led® Philosophy.
An ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with more than 2,000 hours of coaching and facilitation experience, Claire is also the author of the forthcoming memoir Finding Aphrodite, exploring one woman's dance from shame to aliveness.
You can find a fuller official bio here.
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Continue Exploring
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
Below you'll find a lovingly curated collection of essays, poems and field notes that have shaped this body of work – many written long before I understood what they were leading me towards.
Follow your curiosity. Wander. Get gloriously lost. That's often where the good stuff happens.#
And for the full shebang, head over to my Substack, Glitter and Biscuits – a love letter to myself, and perhaps to other women reclaiming their creative power and aliveness, too.
I want to live like a poem, I want to confound those who aren’t meant to read me, make their eyes glaze over and know I still deserve to exist…
These words encapsulate how I live, work and create. Here I am reading them at The Joy-Led® Creativity Collective’s spoken-word show in March ’26.
Being witnessed by other women, as we express the fullness of who we are is a lot. In the best kind of way.
Is it too late?
Writing this helped me alchemise the grief I was feeling about all the years I had not been writing.
A cycle of 'what if, what if?' had gripped me as I approached a milestone on a creative writing project (the latest draft of my memoir), and I was so damn tired of the bullshit bypass offered from multiple directions: At least you're doing it now! Keep going! You're doing great.
This essay helped me look directly into the fire of that grief and move some its energy. Readers later told me it helped them do the same.
Originally published on Substack, October 2023
On shame and aliveness
Our shamed parts are tricky, aren’t they? They can slip past even the most earnest seekers. Perhaps the most powerful work we can do on ourselves is the kind that is not work at all. When transformation itself is no longer held as the goal.
For me, there came a point where ‘working on it’ had laws of diminishing returns. Embodied experiences of being allowed to exist exactly as we are – and express what we have dared not elsewhere – are among the most potent forms of transformation available to us. My experiences as a burlesque artist taught me this. That creative, experiential, shame-melting play is an underrated and holy route back home.
Originally published on Substack, October 2022
On celebrating my first rejection (what following your heart really looks like)
Oh man. This essay broke my heart to write, and I needed it to. In a strange way, it also cheered me up.
Following our heart offers no guarantees about specific outcomes we might fixate on. In this case, securing a traditional publishing deal. And yet I still believe deeply in trusting and following the divine whispers that say: make this.
Originally published on Substack, December 2024
This Substack isn’t growing
How do we keep creating when the metrics imply what we’re making isn’t ‘working’?
The old stories about success, growth and visibility run waaay deep. This essay tracks one moment of shimmying free from all of that, and reconnecting with aliveness instead.
Originally published on Substack, June 2023
On the longing to be truly met
It should feel joyful to express our joy, right?
But when we stop dampening our aliveness, not everybody knows how to meet us there.
This essay explores the ache of not feeling fully received, and the life-changing power of spaces and relationships where we can bring our whole selves – inappropriate joy and all.
Originally published on Substack, September 2023
Of course I give a f*ck
The silence. Oh, the silence that can follow sharing our voice.
The wave of shame. Then the shame for feeling the shame. Ouch.
This essay is about learning to hold ourselves more tenderly through all of that fun stuff.
Originally published on Substack, January 2023
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