There are seasons for everything.
I am sitting here in the quiet of the Cotswolds this Sunday morning. It’s 6am, the fields still and the light soft, and I can feel a shift in myself that is hard to put my finger on. Post-menopause, on the cusp of becoming a grandmother, something in me has settled. There is a deeper grounding. A clearer interior landscape.
My own grandmother was one of the great anchors of my life. Calm, measured, wise in a way that only comes from having lived through things that would break weaker people. She carried history in her bones. She taught by presence as much as by words. I find myself thinking of her more and more, not with nostalgia but with recognition. She became a grandmother in her mid-40s. I am 56 and stepping into a season she embodied.
We talk so much about women in the early and middle stages of their careers. We do not speak enough about the extraordinary value of women who reach this point, still working, still contributing, still leading. Not at the end of their careers; at the height of them. After everything lived, everything learned, everything survived, something remarkable happens. The noise drops. The urgency shifts. The clarity sharpens. I am acutely aware that there is less time ahead of me than the years that have already passed, which demands that the work I still have to do be done with intention, with honesty, and with the kind of focus that only arrives when you finally understand what matters and what never did.
I feel that I have so much I still want to build and write and change. The ambition is still there, but the energy is different. It is purer. It is quieter and stronger at the same time. The way I interact, the way I lead, the way I listen, all feel transformed. The reactive edges have softened. The strategic ones have sharpened. I am less willing to spend my life in places that drain and more intentional about creating spaces that lift.
This is a season of distillation. A season when experience becomes power, perspective becomes influence, and presence becomes its own kind of leadership.
Women in this stage of life bring something organisations do not yet fully understand how to measure or value. Stability. Insight. Emotional intelligence honed over decades. The courage to say what needs to be said. The capacity to hold complexity without panic. The ability to see patterns others can’t yet recognise.
I can feel all of it working in me. A lifetime’s worth of lessons coming together in a way that makes sense for the first time. And I believe, with every fibre of me, that the next few years will be the most valuable of my career.
There is nothing finished about this season. It is not a winding down. It is a deepening of understanding.
It is the moment when everything learned becomes everything offered.
And that is its own miracle.
