Change ma vie: The French Podcast That Brought Me Back to Myself
Change ma vie, Clotilde Dusoulier’s French personal-development podcast, found me in Fayence in 2020.
I was finally back in France after eighteen years in Wales, in the village in the Var I had dreamed of returning to for so long, and I was falling apart. Three children. Paperwork that never ended. A husband doing his best in a country that was not his. A teaching qualification France did not recognise. Exhaustion so deep that a full night’s sleep did not touch it.
I had postnatal depression, three times over – once for each child – and I was only beginning to understand what that had cost me.
That was when I discovered Clotilde Dusoulier. I listened to 96 episodes of Change ma vie, one per day, earbuds in, notebook open. It quietly changed the way I thought about my inner life, my habits, my self-compassion and the version of myself I was trying to find again.
Table of Contents
Qui est Clotilde Dusoulier?
Clotilde Dusoulier is a French life coach based in Paris. She is probably best known in France for her food blog Chocolate & Zucchini, but her podcast, “Change ma vie,” is something else entirely – a warm, intelligent, research-grounded exploration of personal development. Habits, purpose, self-compassion, relationships, confidence, emotions, creativity, money, the inner critic. All of it. Covered with precision and without hype.
She is, in the best possible way, very French about it. No toxic positivity. No American-style ra-ra enthusiasm. Just clarity, rigour, and a tone that says: I have thought about this carefully so that you don’t have to start from zero.
I found her in 2020 and I listened, from the very beginning, to episode 1. Then episode 2. Then 3. I kept going until I reached episode 96.
Ninety-Six Episodes, One Per Day
One per day. That was the rule I gave myself – and I am, generally speaking, very good at following rules I give myself. This one held for 96 days!
I was also, at exactly the same time, starting my very first Bullet Journal – the one that Michelle Colomer, my TCM practitioner, had suggested after lending me Ryder Carroll’s book. The BuJo and the podcast arrived in my life together, and they are inseparable in my memory. Every morning, earbuds in, kettle on, notebook open. One episode. Pausing and rewinding to take notes in my first Dingbats Notebook.
The method mattered more than I realised at the time. One episode per day meant the ideas had time to land before the next one arrived. I wasn’t bingeing. I was listening. There is a difference – and learning that difference was, in itself, one of the first things the podcast taught me.
Hearing It In French
This is the part that’s hardest to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived in a second language for nearly two decades.
I had been working, thinking, dreaming, parenting, arguing, laughing, and crying in English since my early-twenties. My French had become the language of phone calls home, of work as a French teacher, of summer holidays. Important, yes. But not the language of my interior life.
And then Clotilde Dusoulier’s voice was in my ear, in French, talking about self-compassion and the inner critic and what it means to build a life that actually fits you – and something clicked that had never quite clicked before.
It was like hearing these ideas for the first time. Concepts I had encountered in English – and found useful, but somehow slightly at arm’s length – suddenly felt like they were being said directly to me. In the language I grew up in. The language that lives closest to the bone.
Je rentrais chez moi. Not just geographically. Something deeper than that.
What Those 96 Episodes Gave Me
Not a list. I refuse to flatten this into a bullet-pointed curriculum, even though, looking back, it was one.
What I can tell you is that by the end of episode 96, I had a clearer sense of my values than I’d had in years – maybe ever. I had started asking different questions: not “what should I do?” but “what do I actually need?” Not “why can’t I make myself do this?” but “what does this resistance tell me?”
I encountered, for the first time, the idea of building habits with intention – long before I read Atomic Habits, Clotilde was already mapping out why habits work, why they fail, and how to build them gently rather than brutally. I encountered self-compassion as a practice, not just a phrase. I started noticing my inner critic – that loud, exhausting voice that had been running commentary on everything I did – and I began, very slowly, to stop automatically believing her.
I felt my emotions rather than filing them away for later. I thought about purpose not as a grand destination but as something woven into ordinary days. I gave myself permission to want things. To take up space. To be, as Clotilde would put it, une oeuvre en cours – a work in progress.
There is no turning back from that kind of shift. Once you start asking these questions, you can’t un-ask them.
Notes from Soph – and Where It All Started
Here is the thing I have been sitting with as I write this post.
What Clotilde Dusoulier does – distilling ideas about the inner life into something accessible, warm, and actually useful – is exactly what I am trying to do with this blog. Notes from Soph is, in a very real sense, my version of what she built. Not a copy. Something personal, something mine. But the impulse is the same: I found these ideas helpful, I took notes, and now I want to share them.
Which means this post is, in a strange way, the foundation post. The origin story.
The BuJo post, the NVC post, and this one – these three things pulled me out of that dark period in 2020 and built the scaffolding for everything that followed. The reading list. The blog. The notebooks. Eventually, this website.
Well, well, well! Turns out the podcast I listened to in the darkest year ended up inspiring the whole project. New phase, new me, it’s never too late to improve – and I am still figuring it out, I promise you that. But I am figuring it out on purpose now. That is the difference.
Practical Takeaways
If you want to listen to Change ma vie with intention – not just as background noise – here is how I did it.
- Start at episode 1. Yes, even if there are hundreds now. The early episodes build on each other and Clotilde lays a foundation that makes everything else land better.
- One episode per day, maximum. Give the ideas room to breathe. Let an episode sit in your head for a day before you add another one on top.
- Take notes in whatever format works for you. A BuJo, a notebook, even your phone. The act of writing forces you to decide what actually stayed with you.
- Notice which episodes make you uncomfortable. Those are the ones to revisit. Resistance is information.
- Listen in a language that lives close to your heart. If French is your mother tongue, this podcast will reach places that English content cannot.
Why This Belongs in Soul
This is not a productivity post. It is not a habits post, technically – though habits are woven through it. It belongs in Soul because what Change ma vie gave me, at its core, was a reconnection to my interior life. To what I value, what I feel, what I actually want. That is Soul work. Full stop.
I have been meaning to write this post for a long time. Longer than I can quite admit without feeling faintly embarrassed about it.
But some things need to settle before you can write them properly. Five years on, I can finally see what those 96 mornings with Clotilde’s voice in my ear were actually doing – not just filling the time while the kettle boiled, but slowly, patiently, handing me back to myself.
I am an eager learner. Always have been – even when I had temporarily lost access to that part of myself. Change ma vie reminded me she was still there, waiting.
Merci, Clotilde.
Related Notes on French Voices and Inner Life
If Change ma vie is your doorway into this part of Notes from Soph, these are the notes I would read next:
- Florence Servan-Schreiber and the French practice of three kifs
- Frédéric Lenoir on building an inner life
- Christophe André, Matthieu Ricard and Alexandre Jollien on inner freedom
- The Bullet Journal Method: the notebook that helped me catch what mattered
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Et toi? Did you discover personal development content that changed things for you? Do you have a podcast, a book, a voice that found you at exactly the right moment? I’d love to know – especially if you are a French speaker who has listened to Change ma vie. Leave a comment below or come and join the conversation in the Notes from Soph community on Skool – that is exactly where I want to be building those connections.
Source Details:
Change ma vie – Clotilde Dusoulier
Episodes 1–96 (2020–2021 – the podcast has since continued) | Language: French
🎙 Clotilde’s website · Search “Change ma vie” on Apple Podcasts / Spotify
