Identifying What We Want on The Other Side of Menopause

Welcome to this series in which I join menopause coach Kate Usher to talk about menopause in the workplace. In this video we talk about identifying what we want on the other side of menopause.

Women often look at menopause as an end point, the run in to retirement, but actually the average age when we start to experience perimenopause symptoms is 45, which means we have over 20 years of career left to go at current age of retirement. For many, this is enough time for another career. We’ve got time to achieve greatness in that 20 years because let’s face it, the first 20 years we were building our awareness, knowledge and ability and in the coming 20 years we’ve got that to build on. This is an exciting time when you think about it.

Opportunity for a different direction

There is a real opportunity here to take your career to a completely different place and often that’s what women do. Researcher Aviva Wittenberg Cox, described your career in your forties as re-acceleration, and in your fifties as self-actualisation. We have much greater wisdom in our forties and our fifties than perhaps we did when we were twenty and thirty – figuring out who we are, what we want, what’s going to work for us, what we’re good at. We need to start to reframe how we view this phase of life.

Career re-acceleration

Society has got us thinking that menopause is the end because of numerous historical issues around our previous life expectancy. We have this position, this way of thinking, based on the way women’s lives were over 100 years ago. It’s definitely not how things are today, so we have to look at busting this nonsense idea that we’ve all bought into in some kind of way, so that we can actually start that process of re-acceleration and self-actualisation rather than stepping back and saying, it’s all done now.

Creating space for ourselves

In terms of helping women in this process, coaching can be a good place to start, because it creates a space for you to think out loud, visualise, think about goals, allow yourself to be really honest about what you want. Getting in touch with your values, what matters to you and what you want to do with this period of time in your life can be really powerful. It can be helpful to let go of old behavioural patterns that no longer serve us (pleasing others, being perfect) and instead allow ourselves get clear on what we really want. Reframe this time as another 10-20 years of career. What do you want to achieve now?

You can connect with Kate Usher on LinkedIn.

Other videos in the series:

Video 1:
Letting Go While Managing Societal Perceptions of Ageing

Video 3:
Managing the Menopause with Young Children and Teenagers

Video 4:
Menopause in Diversity & Inclusion