Midrising Conversations · Episode 10
What happens when the career that made sense for years suddenly doesn’t feel like it fits anymore?
Changing careers in midlife isn’t usually just about finding a different job. It can mean questioning an identity you’ve spent decades building, letting go of an old idea of success and admitting that you want something different now.
In this episode, Barbara leads the conversation as she and Gill talk about building a second career in your third chapter. Not by pretending everything that came before no longer counts, but by using your experience, confidence and hard-earned perspective to shape what comes next.
About this episode
By the time you reach midlife, you’ve usually built up years of experience, skills and knowledge. You know how to handle difficult people, solve problems, make decisions and get things done. Yet the moment you think about changing direction, it can feel as though you’re back at the beginning.
Gill and Barbara talk about why that isn’t actually true. You’re not wiping the slate clean. You’re bringing everything you’ve learned with you, even when the next role, business or career looks completely different from the one you’ve left behind.
They also get into the confidence wobble that can come with changing direction, the difference between having credibility and feeling visible, and why the next version of your working life doesn’t have to look anything like the last one.
In this conversation
- Why changing careers in midlife doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch
- How the experience you’ve already built becomes part of your next chapter
- What happens to your identity when you step away from a role you’ve held for years
- Why you can be highly capable and still have a crisis of confidence
- The difference between being credible and being visible
- Letting go of old expectations about what success is supposed to look like
This episode is for you if…
You’ve built a career that looks perfectly respectable from the outside, but you can feel that something’s changed.
Maybe you’re thinking about changing industries, returning to work, starting a business, taking on a different kind of role or finally admitting that you don’t want to keep doing what you’ve always done.
You know you’ve got experience and capability, but there’s still a small voice wondering whether it’s too late to change direction, whether you’ll have to prove yourself all over again or whether you’re even allowed to want something different.
The Midrising takeaway
You’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting from experience.
Your next career doesn’t have to erase what came before it. The judgement, knowledge, relationships and resilience you’ve built aren’t baggage. They’re the foundation you get to build from.
About Midrising Conversations
Midrising Conversations is the podcast for women navigating the messy, funny, confronting and unexpectedly liberating middle chapter of life.
Hosted by Gill Townsend and Barbara Scalzi, these are honest conversations about identity, work, relationships, confidence, reinvention and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
No hype, no hustle and no pretending to have it all figured out. Just frank, funny and useful conversations about what comes next.
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