Sitting with a coaching client this week, I heard a familiar question: “Angelina, I just don’t know what’s happened to me.”
It’s a question I hear often from the women I coach, particularly those in their late 30s, 40s and 50s.
These are capable, experienced and often senior women who have worked hard, built successful careers and cared deeply about doing good work. Then they find themselves wondering where their drive has gone.
Are they less ambitious? Have they simply “slowed down”? They may feel less willing to push themselves and others as they once did. Less interested in proving themselves or climbing towards the next role.
Often, they are genuinely unsettled by this change because ambition, capability and hard work have been part of how they have understood themselves for a very long time.
Sometimes, something really has changed.
Life can look and feel very different in our 40s and 50s. Children may need us in different ways. Parents may need us more. Our bodies, health, relationships and energy may be changing. We have a growing awareness that our time isn’t infinite, and perhaps less willingness to spend it doing things that don’t feel worthwhile.
What mattered enormously in our 30s may simply not matter as much at 47 or 55.
But there is something else I hear too.
Many of the women I coach haven’t lost interest in meaningful work. They still want to contribute, learn, lead and make a difference. What they have lost is some of their tolerance for the sheer amount of bullshit that work can throw at them.
The pointless meetings. The performative busyness. The politics and posturing. The constant restructures and shifting priorities. Poor behaviour that everyone works around rather than addresses. Unnecessary urgency. Processes that make it harder to do good work. The expectation that capable people will simply keep absorbing more.
After 20, 25 or 30 years in the workplace, you’ve often seen the same patterns play out many times. You know which conversations are genuine and which are theatre. You know that the latest “transformation” may not transform very much. And you may be less willing to invest enormous amounts of yourself in things that don’t feel useful or meaningful.
Perhaps what looks like a loss of ambition is sometimes a loss of tolerance for work that consumes enormous amounts of energy without giving much back.
That doesn’t mean the feeling should be dismissed. Sometimes women really are tired, depleted or disengaged. Maybe even burnt out. Sometimes they need rest. Sometimes the role, organisation or profession no longer fits. Sometimes their ambition has genuinely changed: and that can feel disorienting, particularly when it has been central to their identity.
This is where coaching can be helpful. Not because a coach will try to make you more ambitious or push you towards your next promotion, but because coaching gives you space to explore what is actually happening.
Is it the work itself, or the conditions surrounding it? Are you depleted, or are you done? What do you still care deeply about? What are you no longer prepared to tolerate or trade away? What might meaningful work look like in this next stage of your life?
One of my favourite coaching questions is:
What is truly worthy of your time, energy and attention at this point in your life?
Anyone who works with me has probably been asked this at some point in their coaching journey. It isn’t an invitation to give up, retreat or stop caring. It is an invitation to become more discerning about where you place yourself.
And I love that word: discerning.
You may discover that your ambition is still there, but that it has changed shape. You may still want to contribute, grow, lead and do work that matters, but be less willing to expend your energy on things that don’t matter so much.
And just maybe, this isn’t a problem to fix. Maybe it is wisdom and an understanding of our own worth: finally shining through.