When Work Stops Working For You - why professional women need a new path
The Lean In Dead End
When Sheryl Sandberg told us to lean in, she created a cultural moment. Finally, we had a framework, a path and an answer to the question of why women weren't reaching the top in the same numbers as men. The solution, apparently, was to want it more. To push harder and to claim your seat at the table.
I understand why it landed. But something never sat right with me.
Lean in to what, exactly?
A model of work that was never built with your full life in mind?
A system that was designed, quite literally, around a different kind of body and a different kind of life?
The reality is that many of us have inherited a model of success that isn’t working for us.
The 40-hour work week is barely 100 years old. Henry Ford introduced it for car factory workers, for men who came to work, did their hours, and went home to a domestic infrastructure that supported them entirely. It was built for consistency, linear output, and endurance. It was not built for bodies that cycle, for people who carry pregnancies, endure fertility treatment or do excessive invisible labour alongside their paid work. It was not built for the full complexity of a human life or for brains that see the world in very different ways.
And yet here we are, still trying to fit ourselves into it.
Still shapeshifting, still cutting parts of ourselves off to squeeze through the mould. And when the mould doesn't fit — when we're exhausted, resentful and questioning everything — we conclude that the problem must be us.
Leaning in didn't challenge any of that. It just asked us to work harder at morphing and to desire traditional ambition and success more.
In my practice, I keep seeing a level of exhaustion that’s been completely normalised. It's so commonplace that it barely registers as news. It’s not the sort of tiredness that a decent night's sleep sorts out. It goes much deeper than that, where it sits in your bones. It's a type of soul exhaustion that embeds over an extended period of time and so by the time you notice it, it's already been living in the background of your life for quite some time. It's become a normal part of your inner world.
And when you wake at 3am considering ALL THE THINGS, questions can surface that feel too big, too deep or ‘not realistic’, so you push them away, to be dealt with at a later stage (or let’s be honest hope they just go away).
Lifting the Veil
If you're like many of the women that I've worked with over 20 years, then you too may be at an inflection point that appears somewhere in your late thirties or forties. Usually coinciding with additional caregiving responsibilities and/or the hormonal shift of perimenopause. I call this lifting the veil of agreeableness. Keeping the mask on that everything is just fine is no longer sustainable. At either of these thresholds, you may begin to notice that work no longer works. That what you thought and were taught was success no longer fits your life or who you want to be.
At this point, you may assume the problem is a personal failing—that you simply haven’t tried hard enough. But what if there's another path available, where we don't have to remain caught between two unsatisfactory options:
Either the burnout-and-resentment route of forcing yourself to fit.
Or the stepping back option through the quiet quit, the strategic retreat into roles you're overqualified for or the fantasy of becoming a tradwife.
Maybe there’s a third (fourth or fifth way!). In order to lay down new tracks we have to be honest about what's actually happening. We can’t really create something new if we believe that there is nothing wrong with the current way.
You rarely just wake up one morning and think ‘that's it’, but over time, you find that the patience you had for workplace inefficiency starts to wear thin. The jokes you endured now feel intolerable and irritating. The extra hours you've been overgiving without complaint for years start accumulating as resentment. You find yourself wondering where your lifeforce went, and then berating yourself for wondering, and then berating yourself for the berating. It's exhausting!
You might find yourself asking: ‘I was ambitious once. What happened?’
So of course you want to fix it and find some solutions. It's how you managed everything up until now - you are someone who gets things done, you’ll surely find the answer to this one?
You might download another podcast for the commute or you hit the health shop for a supplement haul and put them on the kitchen counter so you will definitely remember. Or sign up for a workshop about your personal brand, leadership presence, or how to communicate with impact. Or you follow someone on Instagram about perimenopause, even though you still feel too young for that or you start a morning routine because surely all the tiktokers can’t be wrong. And for a while, doing something (anything) does feel like progress.
But these efforts can leave the underlying problem untouched: you’re trying to adapt yourself to working conditions that are exhausting you.
Design Flaws can feel like a personal failure
I’d love for you to consider, without any pressure to fix it or make it better: the current model of work was never designed with your full life in mind and it doesn't work for most women.
The current model of work does not give a hoot about your hormonal cycles, the invisible & emotional labour you carry outside of work hours. Nor does it care about the life stages you move through or how your body, mood and motivation may change weekly. The wisdom you’ve accumulated with experience doesn't translate neatly onto a performance review form and just isn’t seen as important.
Much of the self-help, wellness, productivity and coaching industry focuses on helping people endure existing working conditions, rather than questioning those conditions. Our culture can equate endurance with ambition, overriding our bodies with professionalism, and exhaustion with the price of success. It's just the way it is right?
There's a big difference between growth and grind and I see many people are now waking up on some level to the fact that what they've been doing is the latter but calling it ambition and career passion. And to what end? Hustling long term is not sustainable and will eventually run us into the ground no matter how many productivity hacks we use.
Most of us stepped onto The Path - school, college, work, the whole scripted sequence, without ever really questioning whether it was the right path for us. Whether it was Your Path.
We follow it because it appears to be the obvious route to fulfilment and success. We give enormous thought to decisions within that path—which job, what location, which role—but rarely question the path itself.
And so when The Path stops working, the only available or plausible explanation we have is that we must be failing it.
I know how exhausting it can be to do a different approach to professional success that asks you to act against your values. During my years in a government agency supporting families, I became increasingly troubled and frustrated by practices that placed responsibility disproportionately on mothers. The work and the impact really mattered to me, but the gap between my commitment to justice and what the role required became harder to live with. By the time I left, I was completely burnt out.
Working harder or finding more productive or efficient solutions couldn’t resolve that particular conflict. It was an inner and outer mismatch. And while your circumstances may be different, you may recognise the strain of being committed to your work while also questioning the practices you are expected to uphold.
What this says about the way we lead
The current model of work was built on a set of values: consistency, output, linear growth, endurance. There is nothing inherently bad about these - they are important, but they're incomplete.
And when they become the only values - the only show in town, and when everything else gets classified as soft, optional, emotional or unprofessional that’s when we end up with workplaces and systems that are unconsciously extracting from people rather than sustaining them. When organisations recognise only a narrow range of strengths and ways of working, they miss what people could otherwise contribute.
I'm not interested in berating structure or rejecting accountability. We still need momentum, results, and the ability to deliver. But we also need something the current model consistently undervalues: humanity, reflection, repair skills and the kind of intelligence that doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. The capacity to work with our nature rather than in constant opposition to it.
This requires a different relationship with work, a type of inner leadership. That’s not soft, ineffective or a rejection of ambition. But more of a reorientation of what ambition is actually for, and what it costs when the pursuit of it requires you to constantly override yourself along the way.
What I've seen happen when the women I coach start to make that reorientation, is that they become more themselves and less of an actor playing a role. And as a result the work they do starts to land differently in a way that is more grounded, more sustainable, more genuinely impactful because it's coming from a place that's actually resourced rather than running on empty.
This is why my coaching takes account of the systems women are working within. We explore how workplace culture, patriarchal expectations and care responsibilities shape your experience, alongside how those pressures show up in your body, energy and capacity. Together, we distinguish what you have come to believe about yourself from what your circumstances are asking of you, and identify where you have agency, where you need support, and what requires change beyond you.
Inner leadership begins with that understanding. It can influence how you make decisions, share responsibility, lead others and respond to expectations of endless availability. When those changes affect your relationships and working practices, they can create more room for others too. You don’t have to carry responsibility for changing the whole system to participate in changing it. I’ve seen this understanding translate into different choices: changing how you lead, planning a move, or finding work where your values have room to breathe.
Tracey manages a large team in a multinational organisation. She has stepped back from being constantly available and giving 120%, while continuing to lead her team. She is now receiving more recognition for her contribution—a powerful shift in her experience of what effective leadership requires.
Ashley had a job that looked great on paper, but the bureaucracy left little room for the creativity that mattered to her. She developed an exit strategy and moved into the creative arts, where she now feels genuinely excited to go to work.
Kate often found herself the only woman in a male-dominated financial environment where the sole focus on money left her questioning whether there was room for her commitment to ethics and people. After redundancy knocked her confidence, she clarified what she needed from her next role and found one aligned with her values—allowing her to continue in finance without leaving those values at the door.
The outcomes were all very different, but the work behind them shared a common thread: recognising which pressures came from their working environments, questioning what they had taken on as personal responsibility, and getting clearer about what they wanted. From there, we worked on the practical skills and capacity to act—making decisions, having difficult conversations, and learning to steady themselves through the discomfort that change can bring. Clearly seeing their options; support and practice helped them take the action that was needed.
The Beginning of the Third Way
I am not going to give you a 10 point bullet list to follow, partly because I've seen what happens when women who are already over-functioning encounter another list of things they should be doing differently. But mostly, because the kind of shift I'm talking about isn't really a productivity intervention. It's more fundamental than that. If work isn’t working for women, what's required is a change in how work is organised, alongside support for women to question inherited expectations and explore what is possible within their own circumstances. I ask you to consider one basic (but not easy) question, and it's not "how do I keep up with this?"
It's more: what would it look like to work in a way that actually works for me?
Ask this as a genuine, serious inquiry into what becomes possible when you stop trying to fit the mould and start asking whether the mould itself is the problem. We're not trying to create a fantasy here or to opt out entirely. Quite the opposite. The question is how to participate in work and leadership in ways that sustain people and distribute the benefits more fairly.
This means getting to know yourself again (or maybe for the first time) outside of what you're useful for, which can be very confronting! It can feel uncomfortable initially to unhook from who you are perceived to be- who even are you without your job title. What would you even do?
It means letting your values be your compass rather than a nice annual concept revisited at performance reviews.
It means starting to notice your own rhythms as to when you have energy for deep thinking, when you're suited to action, when you need to integrate before you can move forward again.
And it means beginning, in whatever small ways your circumstances allow, to work with them rather than bulldozing over them.
It will require developing a tolerance for the discomfort that comes with going against the grain of the overculture. Questioning expectations you have lived by for years can feel uncomfortable, even when the change is right for you. Systems don't like to be questioned from within, even by the people who would stand to most benefit from it changing. Even changes we want can unsettle familiar routines, relationships and sources of approval. The people who benefit from your over-functioning don't love it when you stop. The good girl archetype is well-rewarded for a reason and stepping away from its rewards asks something different and uncomfortable of you - but ultimately satisfying in a different way.
This is not a path you walk because it's easy. It's a path you walk because the alternative of continuing to shape-shift, continuing to override, continuing to reach for supplements and protocols and morning routines to endure a system that was never designed to sustain you eventually stops being a choice. The mental exhaustion is really important data and not to be ignored for another day. It doesn’t indicate that you need to fix yourself or go on endless protocols. But once the veil has lifted you can see clearly what you've been enduring, and what you actually want instead.
As a coach and thought partner to women going through these shifts, my role lies in supporting some women to leave their current work and create something new and others to change how they work within their current roles. Whether that's leading others or leading from within.
I help you understand your strengths, values, energy and capacity, then explore how your work could better reflect them. If continuing as you are is costing you more than you want to keep giving, I’d love to chat. Book a free orientation session to explore a more sustainable way forward that's right for you.
