Joey Clifton spent her early years working against business. She did time with Greenpeace. She has been a vegetarian since she was ten, for the animals. The organizations she stood against were enormous corporations doing real harm to the natural world. So when she says she used to hate business “with venom,” she means it.
Then she started one.
That contradiction sits at the center of this conversation. Joey is a professional certified coach, facilitator and retreat host with over fifteen years behind her, living in rural Cornwall about a fifteen minute walk from the coast path, working with values-driven midlife women in sustainability and social change. She started her coaching business while moving four hundred miles from London to be with her now husband, in a part of the country where the opportunity wasn’t going to hand itself to her. She trained, she moved, and she opened the doors all at once, carrying hard beliefs around what business meant.
The work was changing her mind in public. As she puts it, business can be a real source of good, and lots of companies do real harm, and both of those are true at the same time. She didn’t resolve the contradiction by picking a side. She built her own way of doing it instead.
The world she works in runs on a particular story: the problems are hard, so the work has to be hard, so you grind, you isolate, you burn out. Joey agrees the problems are hard. She just doesn’t think approaching the work as if it’s hard makes the problem any easier to solve. “The energy that we approach something with is also the energy that it’s imbued with,” she says. Push harder and that’s the energy you build into what you make. So she works the other way: with other people instead of alone, and with some joy in it, because we’re human beings and we need joy.
Joey describes years of avoiding visibility, dodging opportunities, building reasonable stories about why staying invisible was fine. Then she describes working at it the way you’d turn an object over in your hands, looking at it from every angle, again and again, until something gave. What she landed on, she says with a laugh, is “I’m here to be seen, man. We’re all here to be seen.” A year ago she wouldn’t have accepted the invitation to this episode. She’d have had a perfectly reasonable excuse. She showed up anyway.
If you are someone doing work that matters, in a culture that keeps telling you it has to cost you everything, this conversation is for you. If you’ve been treating the grind as the price of doing good, Joey makes a great case that the joy isn’t a reward you get at the end. It’s the thing that makes the work last, and the thing that makes it worth doing at all.
A few other threads from the full episode:
Why she says resilience on your own is “a bit of a mirage,” and what she puts in its place
The Paul Simon lyric about drifting that names her whole first decade of working life
The moment in a coaching room, not coaching, not being coached, that moved her to tears and rerouted her career
“There is no done. There’s no destination. It’s just a chapter to a chapter to a chapter.”
The walking retreats she’s starting this summer on the Cornwall coast path, and the three ingredients she’s putting together
Why she calls herself “a curator of the fun,” and what changes when you hold the work that way
What she’s most proud of, and why it has nothing to do with results
Watch the full conversation here:
If anything here lands for you, Joey’s main home is Substack, and she’d love a connection. Subscribe here:
Thank you Sarah-Frances McCormick, Dr. Tara Cousineau 💛, Corine van der Werf, and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full Light with Joey Clifton and Carolina Wilke!
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
