One of the things I've noticed over the years is that women often underestimate the experience they've built.
After twenty or thirty years at work, you've solved problems, managed people, adapted to change, learnt new skills and accumulated knowledge that you probably take for granted because it comes so naturally.
When you're standing at a career crossroads, it's easy to focus on what you don't know rather than everything you already do.
Sometimes all it takes is the time to step back, take stock and look at your experience through a different lens.
Not because you're starting again.
Because you're deciding how you want to use everything you've already built.
It's not necessarily about earning a six-figure salary at 55.
The important thing is making a decision that's right for the life you're living now. It's about creating work that fits your life.
Work is one of the biggest parts of our lives.
For most of us, it takes up more of our waking hours than almost anything else. It shapes our routines, influences our wellbeing and affects the time and energy we have for the people and things that matter most. If we're likely to be working into our sixties and beyond, that's a long time to spend doing something that no longer feels right.
Nobody wants to spend another twenty years doing a job they don't enjoy.
The world of work has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, yet much of the advice we're given still belongs to a different era.
Many of us started our careers believing there was a fairly predictable path. Find a good job, work hard, climb the ladder and keep going. Today, that picture looks very different. Flexible working, freelancing, consultancy, portfolio careers, self-employment and AI are changing the way we work, while new opportunities are emerging all the time.
At the same time, our lives have changed too.
The reality is that many of us will be working well into our sixties and, for some, even beyond.
We're not the people we were in our twenties. We've built careers, raised families, cared for parents, experienced redundancy, divorce and countless other life events. It's hardly surprising that what we want from work changes as well.
So why do we expect the same career to fit us for forty years?
I've come to believe we're asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, "What's my next job?", perhaps we should be asking:
"What kind of working life do I want now?"
That's the conversation I want to have with you.
The conversation has changed
I'm not a career coach.
If you're looking for someone to rewrite your CV, prepare you for interviews or help you apply for jobs, there are plenty of excellent people who do exactly that.
That's not what I do.
I work with women who have reached a point where they're questioning what comes next. They know they want something to change, but they aren't convinced another version of the same job is the answer.
Together, we'll look at the bigger picture.
We'll explore the experience you've built over the years, the skills that have become second nature and the different ways you could use them in today's world of work. Sometimes that leads to another employed role. Sometimes it leads to freelancing, consultancy, running a business or a combination of several different ways of working.
There isn't one right answer.